ABSTRACT
The year 2011 was a milestone in the story of the higher education system in Chile. In that year, dozens of university student protests took place, and students were joined by several other sectors of wider society, around an agenda of free access to the university and an education of quality for everyone (Espinoza and González, 2012). These protests involved a variety of creative demonstrations in public spaces – with thousands in the street including flash-mobs, races, and dancing (Bellei et al., 2014), as well as the occupation of university premises for long periods of time. The larger protests were violently repressed by the police, resulting in a decline in the popularity of the incumbent government at the time as well as the removal of several ministers of education. These protests received considerable attention from both national and international mass media (Scorpio, 2013) and the period became known as the ‘Chilean winter’ (Sehnbruch and Donoso, 2011) since the protests mainly took place during wintertime. In order to understand why these protests flourished at that particular moment,
this chapter firstly describes the historical context of the country and the policies that led to a particularly agitated moment. Broadly, the key elements were the policies that allowed the empowerment and growth of the private sector, and a reduced role for the state, two main features of neoliberal economic policies (Peters, 2011) that had been imposed by Pinochet’s military dictatorship (from 1973 to 1990). These policies became a kind of legacy for subsequent democratic governments in Chile which, even once the dictatorship had ended, were reproduced and reinforced for more than two decades. Consequently, the implementation of neoliberal policies transformed the landscape of the country and was progressively accepted without almost any kind of resistance from citizens. A neoliberal ideology was naturalized to the extent that it permeated not only the higher education system but the ethos of the country as a whole. This chapter also analyses spaces of interaction between agents (university students)
and neoliberal structures (Archer, 1995) that have been present in Chile for the last 30 years. These structures have underpinned public policies and conditioned the social project of the country. Specifically, this chapter draws attention to the role of resistance to these ideologies by university students, who have also drawn
support from wider society. This resistance process led by students resulted, for the first time, in a public problematization of current policies and, subsequently, led to the proposal of new policies intended to change the state of society. Finally, this chapter suggests that the Chilean student movement should be analyzed as an agentic field that is helping to transform society.
