Denisa Jashari, a Latin American History and PhD student at Indiana University, Bloomington was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship that brought her to Chile. The program will last a period of nine months, from December to end of August next year. She has been to Santiago before and knows her way around the city. “I am excited to return to Santiago and finish dissertation research, she told Fulbright Executive Director, Antonio Campaña and Program Officer, Mason Taylor, during a first meeting in Santiago, on arrival.

“ I have established affiliations with the History Department at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where I will have library access and participate in their History workshops. I am also affiliated with the NGO Educación y Comunicaciones (ECO) and in the past I have worked closely with Professor Mario Garcés, of USACH, who is also the director of ECO”, she told them. Denisa is also interested “ to be in closer touch with geographers and urban planners at the Universidad de Chile… My dissertation, broadly speaking, examines the place of pobladores in Santiago both spatially and symbolically. While the project begins with the end of the nineteenth century and attempts to establish a broad historical trajectory of the place of the urban poor, the crux of the dissertation centers on the 1960s through to the 1980s.”

“I am interested in the kinds of discourses generated about the urban poor by the state, elites, politicians, the Catholic Church, and NGOs, and in how pobladores negotiated, accepted, or outright rejected such conceptions. The way in which thus far I have been thinking about “el lugar de los pobres” … From the liminal space of the “arrabales” of the nineteenth century to the precarious nature of the “campamentos” and poblaciones callampa of the mid-twentieth century, elite/state preoccupations with effectively managing space and modernizing the city have had to contend with alternative ways of structuring and utilizing space, as the struggles of the urban poor make clear.