Culture and public policies

This line of research focuses on the study of public policies from a cultural prism, that is, as vectors of meanings that transmit content beyond the fixation of behaviors or the behaviors that the law is intended to regulate.

The research project on culture and public policies seeks to understand the role that ideas have acquired in the production of migration policies in South America, identifying their existence and changes, with the intention of understanding their permanence, as well as their breaks. The researcher for this project is Mayra Feddersen and she has the collaboration of Maite Gambardella and the law graduate, Catalina Salas.    

The research project has two complementary approaches. A first dimension of the research aims to understand the meaning of the predominant paradigms associated with migration policies, both the paradigm of human rights and of security. A second perspective seeks to comparatively analyze the evolution of these ideas in the migration policies of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay from 1900 to 2018, in order to understand if there have been changes in these conceptions or ideas, and what factors, domestic or international would explain them.

The central questions that this line of research tries to answer are the following:

  • What is the origin and meaning of the paradigms of South American migration policies and how are they expressed?
  • How have South American migration policies semantically evolved between 1900 and 2018?
  • What domestic and international factors have influenced the identified changes, both in determining their meanings and in their perpetuation?

This project uses mixed research methodologies. For the first dimension, thematic studies were carried out on texts obtained from official sources of regional meetings and the laws of more than 19 Latin American countries. For the semantic analysis , a database is being built with all the laws and general administrative regulations on foreigners in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay between 1900 and 2018, on which text mining analyzes will be carried out. This last project has the support of ANID and is part of the Initiation Fondecyt N°11200018 of the main researcher for the period 2020-2022.