Paper short abstract:

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the temporalities of protest in Santiago de Chile and questions fixed categories of time by looking at how public manifestations are located within particular political imaginaries which transcend static notions of past and future.

Paper long abstract:

The observation that Chilean politics is characterized by an increasing sense of despondency within the general population seems to have become a central concern to politicians and scholars alike in recent years. However, in Santiago, popular politics is by no means obsolete. Rather, there is a tendency for people to opt out of involvement with political parties and established institutions and instead focus their energy on grassroots mobilization. During my fieldwork in Santiago from 2013 to 2014, marches and other types of political manifestations became such a prevalent part of daily life that the disruption caused by them seemed to stretch much further than the limited time when the events themselves lasted.

With these considerations as my starting point, I intend to scrutinize various instances of protest on the streets of Santiago and consider them in relation to political developments in the Chilean context from the early 1970s to the present. By doing so, I hope to be able to approach an understanding of the interplay between popular politics (as social practice) and the temporalities of the political imagination in current-day Santiago. Ultimately, I pose the following question: Might it make sense of think of both past and future as unfinished, continuously in the making, and how might a non-linear approach to popular politics challenge not only standard temporalities but lived political realities?