Universidad Diego Portales

Department Member, Educación

Research fellow

About

I am currently working as a Research Fellow at the Centro de Políticas Comparadas en Educación at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile and as a part-time lecturer at the Escuela de Sociología of the same university and the Escuela Militar of the Chilean Army. I was raised in Austria where I did my first MA in Sociology at the University of Vienna and worked in extra university social research for several years. Before moving to Chile in January 2010, I studied and worked at the University of Warwick (UK) for five years where I did my PhD in Sociology and an MA in Comparative Labour Studies. My PhD thesis was a theoretical and empirical investigation into the self-understanding of thirty sociologists in England and their relationship with the discipline. It investigated sociologists’ aspirations and how they unfold and are compromised in sociological practice. Based on the work of Alvin Gouldner, the thesis both examines the changing shape of sociology as a body of knowledge and institution as well as sociologists’ changing relationships with their theories and practices. At the core of this study is the recognition of a close intertwining of our ontological states, epistemological outlooks and actual practices as sociologists.

Having moved to Chile, the university as a research object in increasingly neoliberal contexts has become even more central to me. As a research fellow of the Centro de Políticas Comparadas en Educación (CPCE), my work has been geared towards a critique of the neoliberal university and the impact of quality assurance instruments on academia as a place of work and study as well as on the intellectual lifeworld of disciplines. I am particularly interested in visual discourses of the university. In 2010 I carried out a visual ethnography of Higher Education advertisement in public spaces (metro) in Santiago and studied alternative visual discourses of the university, such as wall paintings and graffiti (murales) in and around universities.

I have recently started working on a three year research project (October 2011 - October 2014) where I investigate academic work and identities in neoliberal contexts of Chilean Higher Education, looking at the disciplines of sociology, education and biology (funded by the Chilean National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (Fondecyt)).

I am the current online-editor of the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective that was launched in November 2011 and closely works together with the Taylor & Francis journal Social Epistemology. Read more about us here: http://social-epistemology.com/about/

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