María Esperanza Rock Núñez is an independent researcher currently directing the Culture and Territory OTEC as well as the Artistic and Crafts Cultural Center Casa Taller in the Biobío’s Eighth Region. Since 2008, she has actively collaborated on heritage projects of the southern Chilean coal worker community, both female and male. These have had an impact on education, co-creating knowledge for new generations, lifting archives and data to give voice to those who never had it. Recovering archives and creating new ones. Her research focuses on ethnohistory, memory, identities, cultural diversity, and cultural transformations of deindustrialization in the southern hemisphere. With a decolonial approach, she seeks to give voice to the least heard communities and generate community-based heritage projects with social impact. She has done research internships in the United States and South Africa, where she discovered the importance of visual and creative ethnographic methodologies, as well as orality and the possibilities of representation and interpretation. In addition, she has been invited as a visiting professor in Mexico and Germany to share decolonial methodologies and theories applied to the interpretation of memory and their usefulness in heritage projects. Her main objective is to share the public responsibility that we have as intellectuals, encouraging the social contribution that we can promote from our research. She is an art theorist and historian, and a doctor of ethnohistory from the University of Chile. Since her undergraduate studies, she has cultivated critical and reflective thinking regarding descriptions of human behavior in historical discourses. She was struck by the coexistence of indigenous and modern elements in company towns in southern Chile. In her doctorate, she understood the importance of interpreting events from the perceptions of the diverse actors who became worker communities, Mapuches, immigrants from other pre colonial South American communities, northerners, Europeans, Orientals, women, men, girls, and boys. They had no voice in classical historiography. Recently, she obtained a FONDECYT Iniciación to continue her studies on deindustrialization, now from a comparative perspective between the global north and south. Her interest is focused on understanding how industrial and deindustrial processes were perceived and the diverse responses that different communities had, who in turn have their own historical experiences. She is intrigued by how cosmogonies behave in diverse social systems, what of those worldviews transcend into human values, and how we can understand each other beyond objects and memory.
Email: esperanzarock@u.uchile.cl / esperanzarock@culturayterritorio.cl
Website: www.culturayterritorio.cl
