Medha Asthana’s project was born out of her desire to conduct international ethnographic research. She talked to Professor Murphy, and they designed a project she could carry out during a six-month study abroad program in Chile. Through her immersion in her fieldwork, Medha gained wide exposure to grassroots political movements and youth engagement with university politics, larger community politics, and national politics. After graduation, Medha embarked on a career path towards political advocacy and community organizing. Medha was awarded the 2016 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research from the School of Social Sciences in recognition of her passionate dedication to her project.

In 2011, Chilean university students continued a history of radical student organizing in massive nation-wide marches with aims to achieve public, free, and high quality higher education given the country’s neoliberal legacy. But the academic discussion surrounding these mobilizations not only assumes homogeneity of participating students’ political ideologies, but also lacks nuanced understandings of the dynamic university climates in Santiago, Chile from which these students have mobilized. During August–December 2015, I investigated how politically engaged students create and perform university politics and navigate institutional constraints. My results analyze how the university’s clashing political factions create forms of violence between students and manifest opposing demands on the institution itself. I also focus on how the insurgent Left creates meaning in a university space rife with the wounds of its nation’s history, aiming to reconcile the university’s past, disrupt the present, and reclaim the university for the future. A rich understanding of university political climates demystifies a seemingly apathetic, homogeneously conservative university in the context of Chile’s recent legacy of student mobilization. This work illuminates the Left’s acts of resistance as a means to use the university as a platform of direct influence on national politics and larger populist social change.

Keith Murphy School of Social Sciences

Medha’s project is centered on an ethnographic exploration of how the social and institutional environments at a Chilean University contribute to students’ ideas about political participation and help shape why individual students choose or do not choose to join up with emergent political causes—and when they do join up, how they “become political” in their college lives. Medha conducted fieldwork at the levels we expect of our doctoral students in Anthropology, and she fully committed herself to the research process in ways that I have never seen from undergraduates at UCI. Working with her was a wonderful experience for me, because it was one of the only opportunities I’ve had at UCI to work with an undergraduate on such a rigorous and important project.