David G. Miranda and Marla Freire in front of the ABI.
| © ABIDuring the first three weeks of March 2026, the Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict project hosted David G. Miranda and Marla Freire – scholars, artists, and artivists from the Universidad de Playa Ancha (Chile) – for a visiting fellowship at the Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut (ABI) in Freiburg.
More than a conventional academic visit, the fellowship unfolded as a space of encounter – between artistic practice and social science, academic debate and community-based dialogue. The fellowship was conceived to unsettle dominant academic formats and North–South hierarchies in knowledge production, while opening up ways for rethinking how to do social science in a context marked by authoritarian turns and post-truth politics.
The interactions with the team of the Postcolonial Hierarchies team at ABI foregrounded collective practices of care, research, reflection, and mobilization that actively seek to understand, resist and ideally reconfigure these dynamics. Rather than centering abstract theorization or empirical research as apolitical issues, the collaboration foregrounded situated, embodied, and collective forms of knowing, interrogating how colonial and patriarchal structures continue to shape knowledge production, while also attending to the practices that resist and challenge them.
David G. Miranda works on contemporary political issues from social, educational, and cultural perspectives, with an interdisciplinary focus on Latin America. David is a Professor at the Universidad de Playa Ancha, coordinates the Joint Doctorate in Education (Universidad de Los Lagos / Universidad de Playa Ancha / Universidad de Antofagasta), and leads the Latin American Network on Education, Politics, and Interculturality (FOVI 240274).
Marla Freire is a feminist visual artist and Professor in contemporary art and visual culture at the Universidad de Playa Ancha. Her work bridges memory, identity, territory, and the politics of the body through performance, intervention, and visual practice. Marla Freire directs the project “Feminist Artivism in Chile and its contributions to contemporary arts”, funded by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID) through the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (Fondecyt 11240583), which runs from 2024 to 2027.
Addressing Violence through Feminist Artivism and Critical Social Inquiry
A central moment of the fellowship was the workshop “Reimagining Social Research: Feminist Artivism in Chile” co-conducted by Marla Freire and David G. Miranda. Their work – rooted in ethically grounded and politically committed research – contextualized the role and strategic meaning of Latin American feminism in the current context of rising authoritarianism(s), anti-science movements, and enduring systems of patriarchal violence. They traced the emergence of feminist artivism in Chile from the 2017 public mobilizations against sexual violence – via social media and on the streets, through the 2018 feminist wave of artistic and viral expressions of protest and demand, to the social revolt of 2019 in Chile. Here, performance and collective artistic practices emerged as powerful political languages, capable of mobilizing people and communities, disrupting prevalent narratives and challenging the status quo. Precisely because of their efficacy, these practices often provoke repression.
David Miranda and Marla Freire’s joint and individual methodological approaches – combining interviews, semiotic analysis, autoethnography, and audiovisual means – center the bodily experience, narrative sensing, and introspection combined with socio-political analysis. In doing so, it challenges epistemic hierarchies that separate “valid” academic knowledge from embodied, affective, and collective forms of knowing. Importantly, the workshop also opened a reflection on temporality: the impossibility of fixing a clear “beginning” in processes that emerge from long trajectories of intuition, struggle, and shared practice and memory, particularly those rooted in long histories of coloniality, as is the case with Latin America – and its ties to Europe.
These questions resonated throughout project discussions, where Viviana García Pinzón and Fabricio Rodríguez presented and reflected on their approaches to urban dynamics of violence, memory, and care in Santiago de Cali and Santiago de Chile. These exchanges foregrounded different practices of urban protest – such as collective street cooking as networks of care and the enactment of popular memory in public space, situating them within local and global struggles for political change.
Fabricio Rodríguez, Viviana García Pinzón, David G. Miranda and Marla Freire (l. to r.)
| © ABIWorkshop on Feminist Artivism and Research
One of the most powerful moments of the fellowship unfolded through the collective activation of the “Sábanas Revueltas” during the workshop “Resistances and Artivism”. Conceived as a soft, mobile wall, a sábana (sheet/canvas) operates simultaneously as method, artwork, and political gesture. It gathers testimonies, inscriptions, and affects across territories, enabling participants to read and respond to one another beyond the temporalities imposed by digital platforms.
Participants during the workshop.
| © ABIGrounded in feminist thought and practice, “Sábanas Revueltas” rejects extractive research logics and instead fosters relational, dialogical, and embodied knowledge production. Its preparation in Freiburg – together with collectives such as Eine Welt Forum, Brasilicum, La Olla, and the project team – generated a space of co-creation that transcended the boundaries of academic research. The activation incorporated sensory elements, including sounds from protests in Santiago de Chile, enabling participants – many with migrant and transnational trajectories – to connect their experiences across contexts and generate a collective theme for reflection and action.
While the exchanges and reflections during the workshop are difficult to summarize in a single sentence, the “Sábanas Revueltas” method enabled participants to develop a shared theme for dialogue and reflection. This took the form of a slogan designed to evolve over time and to include additional participants in different locations. The results are presented below and can also be seen in the image: "enlazar la(s) rabia(s), cuidar la(s) vida(s)" / "weaving our rage(s), caring for live(s)."
These slogans alongside the German text “würdevolle Wut" express the collective urgency for acknowledging persisting dynamics of violence and the will to continue the struggle for life in all its forms. According to Ana Cristina Arenas, ABI intern and student at UCF:
"To me, participating in the feminist artivism workshop was a unique ocassion to experiencing how academic research can be enriched by challenging and playing with its boundaries, instead of taking scientific methods as a static blueprint. The workshop opened space for creative and interactive methods, centering participants' agency, and deconstructing hierarchies of knowledge production. It also opened pathways for imagining new forms of co-existence (-resistance) rooted in care and community. This experience has provided me with a better understanding of how to link artivist practices and research, hence reinforcing my motivation to explore the synergies between my academic path and my commitment to engage in sociopolitical change.”
#8M International Women’s Day – Taking artivist practices to the street
This articulation between knowledge, body, and social involvement gained momentum and extended into the streets during the International Women’s Day march (8 March 2026). Marching alongside Latin American communities, German antifascist groups, and internationalist networks, participants enacted a shared feminist and antifascist politics grounded in the refusal to step back and the urgency to raise a voice against patriarchy in all its forms. Within this space, the method of “Sábanas Revueltas” became a collective surface of inscription, where children, families, and activists contributed demands, memories, and visions—transforming protest into a living archive in motion. The idea was to take feminist knowledge (back to) the streets and to provide a space for documenting a polilogue of claims and demands as elements of embodied knowledge.
Dialogue with university students
The fellowship also extended beyond the Postcolonial Hierarchies project. David G. Miranda led a focus group with students from the programs on Political Science, Environmental Governance, and from the University College Freiburg (UCF). Under the title of “Youth, Political Socialization and Social Rights in the Post-Truth Era”, the activity opened a space to reflect on how younger generations navigate a political landscape shaped by far-right resurgence, digital mediation, and post-truth dynamics, in a transnational comparative perspective.
Contributions to Contested Governance Cluster
David G. Miranda also gave a talk titled “Far-right Shift in Chile: New challenges for counter-hegemony in an accelerated global context” within the Contested Governance cluster of ABI, headed by ABI senior researcher Alke Jenss. This space provided a timely opportunity for colleagues from ABI and from the University of Freiburg to discuss Chile’s recent changes in government as part of a broader authoritarian reconfiguration, raising critical questions about counter-hegemonic possibilities under conditions of global acceleration.
Learning by doing, reflecting while doing
The fellowship helped all participants to build relations for long-term collaboration and exchange. It demonstrated that research on postcolonial hierarchies cannot remain at the level of critique alone, but must engage with the practices that contest, inhabit, and reimagine these hierarchies in everyday life. The visit of David G. Miranda and Marla Freire thus strengthened an ongoing commitment within the project to build and expand a transregional, feminist, and decolonial network of scholars, practitioners, activists, and artivists—one that challenges not only North–South hierarchies, but also the divisions between theory and practice, academia and activism, individual reflection and collective experience.
Growing networks between Valparaíso and Freiburg
The activities carried out during the visit were made possible thanks to the (co-)funding of various institutions in Germany and Chile, reflecting the transnational and collaborative character of the exchange. It was supported by the Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict project, funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space of Germany (BMFTR), as well as by the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID), under the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation of Chile, through the International Cooperation Program (FOVI 240274). Likewise, the exchange was supported by the project Feminist Artivism in Chile, funded by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (Fondecyt 11240583). This articulation of funding made academic mobility possible and highlights the importance of sustaining networks that enable the development of critical, situated, and collaborative research at a transregional scale.
The fellowship unfolded in close collaboration with Adam Sandor, coordinator of the fellowship program of the Postcolonial Hierarchies network at the University of Bayreuth and colleagues at ABI, including Fabricio Rodríguez, Viviana García Pinzón, Miriam Bartelmann, and Alke Jenss, all ABI-members of the Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict network. Ana Cristina Arenas, an intern at the Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut (ABI), played a central role in organizing all activities. She had previously completed her BSc thesis on Chile under the supervision of Fabricio Rodríguez, bringing valuable expertise and perspectives to this initiative.
Together, these interactions enabled a collective learning environment grounded in dialogue and a shared commitment to exploring transformative formats of knowledge production.
