PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DE CHILE

Facultad de Historia, Geografía y Ciencia Política

Santiago, Chile

2011 - 2017

UNIVERSIDAD ADOLFO IBANEZ

Facultad de Artes Liberales

Santiago, Chile

2017 - A la fecha

PNUD

Buenos Aires, Argentina

2000 - 2001

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires, Chile

2000 - 2003

American Bar Foundation

Chicago, Estados Unidos

2009 - 2011

FONDECYT

Chile, 2013

My research project seeks to provide an answer to the following questions: Why does the discourse of human rights construe human dignity by isolating a part of “man” that is dignified from a part that is not? Why has the animality of the human being been excluded from dignitas? Can concepts conceived to protect human dignity from abuses become themselves abusive? This research seeks to engage critically with the project of human rights so as to reorient its productive aspects and to reconfigure their potentially hostile or violent ones. Finally, this project wants to make an original contribution to the literature on human dignity and human rights from the perspective of critical political theory.

FONDECYT

Chile, 2017

There is a “political turn” in recent animal rights theory (ART) (Milligan, 2015; Cochrane, Garner, O’Sullivan, 2016). The first wave of ART was mostly concerned with whether animals were subjects of inalienable rights (Regan, [1983] 2004) or pain sufferers to be liberated (Singer, [1975] 1995). Mostly framed from the perspective of moral philosophy, ART replicated the classic philosophical debate between deontology and consequentialism. In the last few years, however, ART scholarship shifted from moral philosophy to the vocabulary of political theory (Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011; O’Sullivan, 2011; Cochrane, 2012; Garner, 2013). Authors such as Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka (2011) gradually changed the kind of questions posed by ART from whether animals have rights to whether animals can be conceived as sovereign communities, denizens and co-citizens in a zoopolis. This project engages with the political turn in ART, and suggests that such turn is fraught with a limited understanding of the political: the so-called political turn simply extends notions such as sovereignty and citizenship to non-human animals, instead of substantially rethinking such notions in the light of the animal question. Thus, this project draws on critical animal studies (Derrida, 2008; Calarco, 2008; Haraway, 2008; Oliver, 2009; Wolfe, 2012; Massumi, 2014) to question assimilationist tendencies in ART’s political turn, and on theories of agonistic politics (Connolly, 1993; Honig, 1993; Mouffe, 2011) to reorient such turn towards a more contentious understanding of the political.

UNIVERSIDAD ADOLFO IBANEZ

Chile, 2019

Premio al mejor profesor de la Facultad de Artes Liberales, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez.