I made contact with my institutional affiliations. The professor I’m working under, Lidia Casas at Universidad Diego Portales, has linked me with graduate students studying sexual harassment from a procedural and legal perspective. I’ve met with these students and discussed potential future collaborations. I started auditing Professor Casas’ course on gender and the law two weeks ago to familiarize myself with more technical aspects of gender law in the country and its corresponding history. I was invited to give a talk at St. George School and participated on a panel on the state of feminism in honor of International Woman’s Day. I spoke mainly about students’ rights to spaces free from discrimination and harassment as a matter of equal access to education.

The brunt of my work so far has been in going through the institutional review board process–called «comité de ética» at UDP to have permission to do human subject research. Although Chile is a country that does not federally require IRB permission to conduct such research, I was advised to formally go through the process to (broadly) achieve more clarity with my research materials and (specifically) because it might be requested to publish the research in a US-based peer-reviewed journal. I submitted all my materials (15 documents) yesterday and will have to wait about a week for approval since the committee only meets once a month. In the interim, I am doing informal interviews with «experts» of sexual harassment to familiarize myself as much as I can with the landscape (e.g. professors, lawyers, high-up administrators).

I have also made contact with another professor I will be working with at Pontificia Universidad Católica university. She has been instrumental in connecting me with useful literature for theorizing my research questions in new feminist materialism and epistemology that is based in Latin America. ( ). A development I’m excited about on the policy side is that I have managed to get myself invited to a meeting with the vicerrectores of universities in mid-May to discuss the development of sexual harassment protocols.

I also, participated in the Feminist March (attended by nearly 400,000 fellow feminists) was a dream come true on the personal and research front. ( see photo where I am holding the Ni Una Menos banner at the Marcha Feminista in March… Hundreds of thousands of self-identified feminists gathered to demand an end to patriarchal violence and many other forms of gendered injustice from carceral practices to street harassment. March 2019.

Two photos with dozens of students: Talk I gave at St George’s on International Woman’s Day to discuss the right to study free of discrimination and harassment and how I inspired I was by the clear-eyed visions of activist students. March 2019.