Pamela Zapata-Sepúlveda

Breaking My Academic Silence to Start Again Making Sense of Why I Am Here, Moving From the Thin to Thick. Thinking About Trauma and Loss . . .

This essay seeks to reflect upon, rescue, make sense of, incorporate my “I” in my research experiences with Chilean survivors of political imprisonment. In an attempt to free and recover my “I”—quiet until today—to re-think, remember, and to build while I am standing in the middle of the process, I will tell some “moments” and situations I experienced during my research with some of the members of this Chilean group. I will use storytelling, counter-story-telling, performance texts, and short stories associated with the concepts of “victim,” “trauma,” “study subject,” “ethical aspects,” and “initial researcher background.” This is an attempt to move me past my “thin”—previous form to making research—to “thick description-as-inscription.” I am thinking about, and developing the Framing the research question. Finally, I will develop some recommendations that might be useful for researchers who are interested in working and addressing these issues.

One Continent, Three Words, and a Dream Making Interpretive [Auto]ethnography in a Particular Place in Northern Chile

Through a three words poem, I share my constructed color voice developed from looking for and sensing my ‘I’ through the lens of worldwide international students in my learning experiences in different international “white” universities. At the same time, my ‘I’ is embodied from my fieldwork with Colombian women refugees or seeking for refuge, and as a Latin American woman living in northern Chile. In this way, interpretive [auto] ethnography is a path to situate my ‘I’ in a context where silences, forgetfulness, and “whiteness” behind our voices are consequences of social, political, and historical forces that have erased our indigenous and multicultural heritage in Chile. Today, the tendency in education is teaching, learning, and acting as if we are White people. This piece is an invitation to think-reflect-look-feel-remember and ask ourselves about what the color of our voice is and what the consequences of this standpoint in the academia are.

From the Struggle for Education to the Transformation of Society: Challenges and Hopes in the Chile of the 21st Century

We are three voices at a public university in northern Chile. This essay is about how social science take into account or ignore the current political tension produced by social movements against neoliberalism . We have three stories (student activist, student federation leader, and scholar in motion) that reveal the current state of public education in Chile, which has been determined by marketplace logic and neoliberalism. We discuss the relationship between the global crisis of capitalism and the fundamental role of education as an arena of critical thinking for the training of students and scholars committed to democracy and social justice. We believe that the current historical movement policy opens a possibility of achieving real democracy by confronting the commodification of life and fundamental rights.

Violencia de género en mujeres con ascendencia étnica aymara en el extremo norte de Chile

INTRODUCTION We analyze the gender-based violence against women considering the Aymara ethnic ascendance as a casual factor. MATERIAL AND METHODS We applied the spanish version of the Index of Spouse Abuse Scales (ISA) and Woman Abuse Screening Tool (WAST) on 400 women, which currently live in the region of Arica and Parinacota, Chile. RESULTS The individuals show that non-physical violence is the predominant behavior in couples and higher rate of violence is present in women with Aymara ancestry than others. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that social constructions of gender may be a risk factor in violence against women because of its influence in social inequalities and abuses of power against women.

Past and Present Time in Qualitative Inquiry Looking and Dreaming On the Future in a Particular Place in Northern Chile

This essay concerns my reflection, thoughts, and feelings from the foundations and movements between my heartfelt autobiographical experiences and the fieldwork with Colombian women refugees or asking for refugee status in the current Chilean society. Inspired from the Three Words Workshop, as Performative Writing of Healing and Resistance, I wish to connect my I from a humanity way with the international audience to talk about “Otherness” racism, gender, and social injustice in a border place in Northern Chile. Thus, to connect and provoke audiences, wondering about WHERE WE ARE in the fieldwork with people suffering seen as other people far from us vs. close people as us. At the same time, I ask about WHAT IS our position from the academia to the street. To finish, I reflect about HOW Interpretive Autoethnography could be a way to promote social transformation for a better world.

It all depends on the beholder: decolonizing the concept of gender-based violence against Aymara women in Northern Chile

This article arose out of the interests and concerns of a group of Chilean social science researchers (psychology, social work, and philosophy) who wanted to reflect upon and analyze the phenomenon of gender-based domestic violence among urban Aymara women residents in northern Chile in a critical and interdisciplinary manner. After working on two research projects funded by a Spanish state agency, whose objective was the diagnosis of indexes and forms of domestic violence among these women, the authors begin to reflect after recognizing their initial Westernized and colonized vision of the concept of violence and how this view changed during the course of the research. At the same time, we focused our thinking on clarifying ethical issues that emerged after we conducted the research, mainly concerning the question of whether “the act of investigation” could have been a way of perpetuating patterns of violence among local Andean communities, due to the Westernized approach we used as researchers.

Interpretive Autoethnography as a Way of Social Transformation in Academic Teaching and Learning Spaces in Chile

This article arose from our interest in investigating our own teaching practices at three universities in Northern Chile. The aim was to generate a deeper understanding of our roles as models for our students, and by using the methodology of the heart, we have joined our three voices of Latin American women researchers to describe the interpretative autoethnography and performative text as ways of researching in education, health, and psychology and its power as a tool for breaking the traditional academic discourse to connect with international audiences from our own biographies. We seek to show how social transformation can occur from the classroom and at the same time challenge the public higher education system that follows free market policies in this neoliberal world. Why use autoethnography? Because reflecting on our own practices through autoethnography allows us to get to know ourselves and at the same time appreciate our voices. Trends in educational research in Latin America have been strongly marked by colonization and dramatically influenced by the knowledge developed in the global north. We propose to put the south in our research by exploring our realities told through social stories of the heart.

The Power of Saying the Normally “Unsaid” as an Act of Empowering a Woman’s Voice in the Academia and the Fictional Parallel Side Behind This Power in a Global Era

In this text, I want to reflect about the impact of the process of my Autoethnography performance training from 2011 in my work/research/life with . . . as a teacher, a researcher, and as a woman standing from a contemporary QI conducting research and teaching about the unsaid topics of the new movements of migration of people in the border of northern Chile from/in and outside the academia. Color, violence, historical influence and Andean migration process, forgetfulness, borders, and the “normal” attitude turned into action as “not to see”/not to feel/not to believe the big problematic realities in foreign lives. All of these are part of this performative text in which I reflect and confront daily life experiences; my academic role and the risks and threats that my latte color woman’s voice mean to the academia in these times.

The traveling researchers’ sisterhood

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a collaborative (auto)ethnography that has emerged from the meeting of four academic researchers working with and from the heart in various Latin American contexts. Design/methodology/approach – Our “I’s” have mingled with our very varied participations in different themes, latitudes, and disciplines – health, education and psychosocial approaches. We have worked, variously, in both English and Spanish. At the core of this piece are our own biographies, motivations, senses, academic dreams, international contexts, and the injustices and suffering felt in our bodies. Findings – We seek to reflect from our experience of traveling as young researchers and as women with Latin souls. Through our stories, we show how crossing cultures as part of our research and work gives us both a privileged position but also the constant stress and questioning that goes beyond the intellectual and appears in our embodied experiences of interculturality. Research limitations/i...

At the End of the Tunnel, We Must See the Light Moving From a Dark Place in the Past (Trauma and Loss) to a Bright, Shiny and Hopeful Time (Memory and Redress)

This essay represents my process of thinking, rethinking, and assessing trauma and loss from my “I” as a woman who grew up during a dictatorship, as a scholar today in a Chilean public university. Feeling and listening is a form of creating knowledge in the process of studying trauma in Chilean former political prisoners of Pinochet’s regime. I start this essay by thinking about past and static concepts of trauma and loss that were developed in a present and living “thing” that I cannot separate to Memory and Redress. Story telling, dreams, and short stories in a performative text shape this essay to seek shared feelings, experiences, and ideas about trauma and loss, today, and to encourage readers to action. My feelings are identified as part of this “thing” popularly called trauma, which is understood as my own personal construction about some aspects of these events during Pinochet’s regime.