My research agenda has been centered around the question of how and to what extent social and economic inequalities, manifested among individuals, social groups, institutions and countries, are (re) produced in the scientific and higher education systems.
This research question is not coincidence. Having grown up in the south limit of Atacama desert-Chile, I noticed the class structure of the Chilean society and the geographic inequality at a very early stage of my life. As a kid, I was told that I should not pronounce the “sh” to say Chile because that demonstrated a “low class status” and that Santiago was “Chile”, even when only one third of population lived there. The common understanding of how a society worked was unpacked to me in my day-to-day interactions.
This realization made me be curious about the criteria and conditions that allow certain actors (countries, people, institutions, disciplines) to monopolize and control the power, resources, attention, and prestige.
Currently, I am a lecturer at the Centre for Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (CHERTL) at Rhodes University in South Africa. This work experience in South Africa has made me more aware of my inner-colonizer and how blind my research has been to neglect the legacy of colonization in the mechanisms of reproduction of inequality across countries, higher education institutions and people. I am currently in a stage of (un)learning and acknowledging the effects of colonization in me and the questions that I ask in the research space…
