Claudia Briones (Ph. D. University of Texas at Austin) is a Senior Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Conicet) and Professor at the National University of Río Negro’s Research Institute on Cultural Diversity and Processes of Change. Her articles and book chapters focus on indigenous rights and indigenous policies in Argentina, particularly involving the cultural production and organization of the Mapuche-Tewelche peoples. 

Currently she is researching the expression and recognition of socioculturally diverse civic subjectification in northern Patagonia. She holds the position of Academic Project Head of the operations unit “Intercultural demands and policies in northern Patagonia: Expression and recognition of socio-culturally diverse civic subjectifications” (Demandas y Políticas interculturales en la Patagonia norte: Expresión y reconocimiento de subjetivaciones cívicas socioculturalmente diversas) and is Director of PIP CONICET Collective Access to land among subaltern sectors in the Río Negro and Chubut (Acceso colectivo a la tierra entre sectores subalternos en Río Negro y Chubut).

 

Publications:

2019. Conflictividades interculturales. Demandas indígenas como crisis fructíferas. Guadalajara / Bielefeld / San José CR / Quito / Buenos Aires: CALAS.

2019. “Luchas del pueblo mapuche-tewelche en la Patagonia Norte de Argentina y aprendizajes antropológicos en perspectiva.” In: Hammerschmidt, Claudia (coords.): Literary Patagonia V. Representations of Mapuche cultural identity. Potsdam / London: INOLAS. 393-430.

 

Research project as CALAS fellow:

Title: Demands of interculturality as fruitful crises

Abstract: Demands of interculturality are often seen as a problem, as a moment of staging conflicts that unleash a crisis of coexistence to be resolved through the recognition of rights and public policies that address needs and particular interests. Other views emerge when these demands are seen as diagnoses that highlight disparate issues. They show, first, the existence of different types of conflicts (ideological, ontological, and epistemological) that generate exclusions of different kinds. Then, to what extent the ideas of "crisis" and "needs and interests" are not transparent but socioculturally constructed and, therefore, disputed and changing, reformulable and negotiable, according to specific contexts regarding their ways of nesting and sustaining "inequalities".

In different Latin American countries, the demands for interculturality and the effects of inequality that they denounce are evident challenges to contemporary state designs that enable such demands. I, therefore, propose to examine disagreements in certain situations defined as expressions of "environmental crises" and "identity crises" in and through which confrontations between social groups and within them are verified, to rethink and problematize the ideas of "crisis", "needs and interests "and" inequalities ". When comparatively analyzing "crises" on which I have been working and occurrences to be defined in another country of the continent, I will seek not only to identify their specificities but also fundamentally to systematize reflections that stimulate debates aimed at exploring alternative ways of thinking about intercultural coexistence and processing those crises, in order to these become fruitful inflections to forge more just, plural, inclusive and emancipatory inter-existences.