Beltrán Undurraga’s research while affiliated with Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and other places

La sección Simposio de la revista Estudios Públicos es un espacio de debate académico público en torno a ideas de alcance sustantivo. Se compone de un artículo original, sometido previamente a revisión de pares, que es críticamente analizado en contribuciones cortas por cuatro académicos desde distintos ángulos y disciplinas. El simposio cierra con una respuesta de los autores del ar-tículo original a los comentarios realizados. El Antropoceno, o la hipótesis según la cual la actividad humana se ha convertido en una fuerza capaz de alterar las dinámicas terrestres inaugurando una nueva era geológica, ha generado una serie de debates más allá de las ciencias de la Tierra. En el presente artículo revisamos tres discusiones que el concepto ha provocado en las ciencias sociales y las humanidades, y que ponen de manifiesto los equívocos que el Antropoceno trae consigo: la tensión entre simetría o irreductiblidad entre naturaleza y sociedad; la condición del agente humano al que se le imputan las transformaciones en curso, y el sentido y alcance ético-político de las acciones que comienzan a movilizarse para responder a la crisis. Sobre la base de los fértiles claroscuros y desacuerdos del Antropoceno, y atendiendo tanto a la crisis planetaria que enfrentamos como al inusual dinamismo geológico de nuestro territorio, especulamos sobre la necesidad de ‘geologizar’ la sociología chilena, incorporando elementos y fuerzas más-que-humanas en sus recuentos de la constitución de lo social. A modo de ejemplos, planteamos la importancia de crear analíticas y métodos para pensar la identidad cultural, la corporalidad y la política desde su composición e interdependencia geológica. Concluimos invitando a la sociología chilena a hacerse parte del problema y a dejarse interpelar por la pregunta con que el Antropoceno nos incomoda: qué haremos.

Respuesta de los autores Beltrán Undurraga y Manuel Tironi a los comentarios críticos sobre su leading article.

Purpose Based on the research, the authors identify how four key concepts in disaster studies—agency, local scale, memory and vulnerability—are interrupted, and how these interruptions offer new perspectives for doing disaster research from and for the South. Design/methodology/approach Meta-analysis of case studies and revision of past and current collaborations of authors with communities across Chile. Findings The findings suggest that agency, local scale, memory and vulnerability, as fundamental concepts for disaster risk reduction (DRR) theory and practice, need to allow for ambivalences, ironies, granularization and further materializations. The authors identify these characteristics as the conditions that emerge when doing disaster research from within the disaster itself, perhaps the critical condition of what is usually known as the South. Originality/value The authors contribute to a reflexive assessment of fundamental concepts for critical disaster studies. The authors offer research-based and empirically rich redefinitions of these concepts. The authors also offer a novel understanding of the political and epistemological conditions of the “South” as both a geography and a project.

This article expands Patchen Markell’s (2011) seminal problematization of The Human Condition by examining the impact that the modern developments in science and technology had on Arendt’s signature categories. Whereas Markell is interested in the systematic “architecture” of the book, I attempt to historicize Arendt’s distinctions in light of the story she tells about science and technology. From the invention of the telescope to the splitting of the atom, technoscience has provoked shifts in the hierarchies within the vita activa; spawned new varieties of “labor,” “work,” and “action”; and blurred the traditional boundaries between “nature” and the “human world.” These reconfigurations draw the contours of a new, “modern world” that is different from the world whose story and conceptual tradition Arendt set out to articulate. Largely as a result of the activities of science and technology, the experiences that informed the categories of the “Western tradition” correspond to a world that is no longer our own.

In this review, we report the main discussions and concepts debated in the workshop " Animals and Politics: Explorations for a More-Than-Human Democracy, " the first academic event on animal studies in Chile. After a brief overview of the workshop, we summarize its results by identifying three broad conversations that cut across the workshop—borders, affects, and effects.

In this paper I address an inconsistency between the national and supranational articulations of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of right. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas departs from Kant’s transcendental framework to elaborate a political grounding of rights that rests on the co-originality of human rights and popular sovereignty. In this view, human rights are basic legal rights that result from the politically autonomous elaboration of the abstract right to equal individual liberties. Human rights become concrete, enforceable, and fairly distributed rights only via democratic processes of self-legislation. In Habermas, this becoming concrete of rights confines their realization within the boundaries of discrete political communities that interpret them in light of particular national histories. This creates a tension between the universal aspiration of human rights and their local conditions of realization; a tension that returns to haunt Habermas’s cosmopolitan proposal. In particular, his project of a constitutionalization of international law entails the idea of a global regime of human rights without popular sovereignty. This not only undermines the tenets put forward in Between Facts and Norms, but also precludes the possibility of an intercultural dialogue on human rights capable of addressing the common charge of ethnocentrism. I argue that this tension stems from Habermas’s commitment to a nationally bounded notion of the demos. In response, I show how some of Habermas’s own insights actually loosen this commitment, and outline the idea of a global demos capable of restoring the co-originality thesis at the supranational level.

Abstract will be provided by author.