Anthropology Visiting Assistant Professor Nikola Johnson was awarded the 2024 Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant to support 9 months of writing to complete a monograph based on research conducted for his dissertation, titled Emergent Citizenships: Mapuche (Indigenous) and Chilean (non-Indigenous) Politics and Belonging in peri-urban Santiago, Chile. 

Professor Johnson said of his project, “This book project explores how the politics of autogestión have led to the emergence of democratic frameworks that contrast with liberal representational democracy in a globalized, neoliberal era. Frequently translated as “self-help”, contemporary scholarship has often distorted the concept of autogestión by analyzing community care practices as responses to neoliberal restructurings or products of neoliberal governmentality. In contrast, my research found that the concept of autogestión is more accurately understood as “lived democratic practice” and traces its origins to the 1960s “People Power” movements in North America and Europe, Latin American Third Worldism, and African decolonization. It draws from my 30 months of ethnographic and archival research which found that the transnational discourse of autogestión influenced the practices of democracy during Chile’s Social Explosion (October 2019), ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic (March 2020-present) and failed process to re-write the constitution written during the Pinochet Dictatorship (October 2022-December 2023). Through situating this Chilean case study within a global assemblage of social movements from the 1960s to the present, this project contributes to the broader anthropological theory of politics by scaling down its analysis to the level of everyday life to analyze where, when, and through whom democratic practices are exercised.”

Congratulations Nikola Johnson!