THESIS PRESENTATION: Dahiana Gamboa

In contexts of social unrest, protest emerges as a form of collective action in which the body plays a central role. However, the body has often been approached from a performative perspective or reduced to a functional instrument within the repertoire of mobilization. In much of the literature—including local academic production on the 2019 Chilean Social Uprising—it has rarely been examined as an embodied experience that shapes the lived dimension of conflict.

This study seeks to address that gap from a phenomenological and feminist perspective, exploring how bodies inhabit protest through spatial, visual, subjective, and affective logics. Using a qualitative methodology with an interpretive design, this thesis takes the form of a case study centered on the city of Valparaíso and its role during the uprising.

The research is based on the experiences of 21 young participants, gathered through life histories, walking interviews, cartographies, focus groups, photographic records, and autoethnographic practices. I argue that examining embodied experience allows us to understand not only how meanings are constructed around the uprising, but also how it can be interpreted from perspectives that go beyond traditional political analysis.

This thesis proposes a situated reading of the body as a living territory: a body that connects with otherness, remembers protest through evocation, weaves together individual and collective histories, and endures the violence and pain of the social.

• Date: December 19, 2025
• Time: 2:30 p.m.
• Location: Lecture Hall, Faculty of Political Science and Sociology