(Re)making common futures: An Ethnographic Enquiry into Citizenship Transformation in Chile.

This project researches the critical transformations taking place in citizenship, political action and
climate activism in Latin America. Focussing on contemporary grassroots environmental movements
(CGEMs) in Chile, the research seeks to open up ways of understanding the continuities and contested
politics of transformation between grassroots activists, CGEMs, the state, and the biosocial world.
Background
In 2019, following the uprising of Chilean civil society and shared mobilisations between CGEMs,
feminist movements, and Mapuche activists, the country overwhelmingly voted to redraft the
constitution established by the Pinochet regime. Various socio-environmental activists and
indigenous leaders were elected for the constitutional convention resulting in a draft that reimagined
a society built on environmentalism, socialism, indigenous rights, and feminism. However, this
autumn saw the rejection of this constitution following longstanding criticism and misinformation
campaigns by right-wing actors. As such, Chile remains in a state of social, economic and
environmental uncertainty as the country looks to negotiate its future in the context of unsustainable
extractivist industries and global climate challenges.
Chile's decade-long drought has limited people's access to water in several regions, revealing the
structural inequalities of class and extractivism embedded in a national constitution which treats
water as a commodity and creates zonas de sacrificio (sacrifice zones) where environmental
sustainability and wider well-being is disregarded to prioritise capital accumulation. In response to
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this, CGEMs are emerging and converging out of their embodied experience of climate injustice. In
the context of the drought and decades of hoarding water shares and water theft by agricultural
corporations, the Modatima (Movement for the Defense of Access to Water, Land and Environmental
Protection) mobilised in 2010, calling for new water governance and a Chile beyond the "model of
usury, profit and exclusion" (Modatima, 2022) by organising protests and workshops and starting a
school for environmental education. As such, they engage in two fights simultaneously: one against
local extractivism; and one against the structures that sustain these activities (Valenzuela-Fuentes,
Alarcón-Barrueto and Torres-Salinas, 2021)