SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

 
MOBILIZING AT THE URBAN MARGINS: CITIZENSHIP AND PATRONAGE POLITICS IN POST-DICTATORIAL CHILE 
Cambridge University Press, 2023
In October 2019, unprecedented mobilizations in Chile took the world by surprise. An outburst of protests plunged a stable democracy into the deepest social and political crisis since its dictatorship in the 1980s. Although the protests involved a myriad of organizations, the organizational capabilities provided by underprivileged urban dwellers proved essential in sustaining collective action in an increasingly repressive environment. Based on a comparative ethnography and over six years of fieldwork, Mobilizing at the Urban Margins uses the case of Chile to study how social mobilization endures in marginalized urban contexts, allowing activists to engage in large-scale democratizing processes. The book investigates why and how some urban communities succumb to exclusion, while others react by resurrecting collective action to challenge unequal regimes of citizenship. Rich and insightful, the book develops the novel analytical framework of 'mobilizational citizenship' to explain this self-produced form of political incorporation in the urban margins.
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MOBILISATIONAL CITIZENSHIP: SUSTAINABLE COLLECTIVE ACTION IN UNDERPRIVILEGED URBAN CHILE
Citizenship Studies, 2018
While academics have addressed the interaction between mobilisation and citizenship in a myriad of ways, none of them have used citizenship to explain the sustainability of collective action. Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago de Chile’s underprivileged neighbourhoods, this paper provides an analytical framework explaining how neighbourhood activists sustain mobilisation on the basis of citizenship construction despite Chile’s transitional and post-transitional stark political exclusion. This article calls this concept ‘mobilisational citizenship’. Building on the notion of rights-claiming, mobilisational citizenship explains how durable mobilisation results from the dynamic interaction between four factors: agentic memory, mobilising belonging, mobilising boundaries and decentralised protagonism. Through mobilisational citizenship, local residents politicise their neighbourhood, build autonomous local empowerment and self-define their political incorporation.
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POLICY METAPHORS AND DEEP LOCAL DEMOCRACY: THE CASE OF THE CHILEAN NEIGHBOURHOOD RECOVERY PROGRAMME
RIEM, 2017
The  Neighbourhood  Recovery Programme is the first government urban regeneration  programme implemented in Chilean  underprivileged urban areas using deliberative processes. Through interviews with key policymakers and the revision of government documents, this article explores the cognitive metaphors by which this programme frames its local construction of sociability. In so doing, this research examines the programme’s potential to build  a deep conception of local democracy. The article contributes to debates discussing the effect of the Chilean state in enhancing or curtailing civil society empowerment in politically excluded areas. It argues that this programme’s metaphors serve efficient policy implementation.  However, they also reproduce top-down dynamics of institutional imposition that undermine accountability and have already been described by ethnographers in underprivileged neighbourhoods.
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THE RIGHT AGAINST RIGHTS IN LATIN AMERICA
Oxford University Press (co-edited with Leigh Payne and Julia Zulver), 2023

This book includes diverse, empirical case studies from around Latin America, approaching the phenomenon from different social and political contexts. It introduces the concept of 'the right-against-rights', giving readers a novel conceptual tool to distinguish between anti-rights movements in the region. It also considers strategies for reducing the power of the right-wing over social movement gains.
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