Projects
Emergent Citizenships
Emergent Citizenships names the practices through which people secure recognition and belonging on their own terms, illuminating how diverse communities sustain collective life under conditions of structural precarity, government neglect, and state violence. Based on more than thirty months of ethnographic and archival research, this book examines how Mapuche and Chilean neighbors cultivate forms of lived democracy grounded in care, conviviality, and everyday decision-making.
Gendered Archives
This project examines the political aesthetics of democracy through the practice of arpilleras—embroidered tapestries produced by predominantly Mapuche and Chilean women in Santiago’s poblaciones from the Pinochet dictatorship to the present. While earlier scholarship interprets arpilleras as visual testimonies of repression and human rights violations, this research proposes a different reading: arpilleras as a pedagogical practice that cultivates new sensorial and embodied aesthetics of democracy.
Indigenous Energy Futures
Indigenous Energy Futures is a multi-sited ethnographic research project examining infrastructure planning and energy transitions in rural Mapuche territories in La Araucanía, Chile. The project explores what processes of energy planning, governance, and use reveal about indigeneity, citizenship, and democracy in the context of contemporary energy transitions.
Nikola Garcia Johnson 