MA Politik

Francisco González Castro (Santiago, Chile, 1984) is an artist, researcher and writer. He holds a PhD in Arts, major in Visual Arts, from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and is part of both GCAS College Dublin and GCAS Latin America. He has exhibited his artistic work in numerous countries and presented his research in conferences, journals and books.

He is the author of Matar un Rey. Consideraciones para una práctica político-artística (2023), Fuera de lugar. Textos sobre prácticas artísticas, políticas y afectivas (2023) and Puntos en el Borde: crónica de un viaje por la frontera México-Estados Unidos (Almacén Editorial, 2022); editor of Otro lugar. Perspectivas sobre la empatía y sus potencias (Editorial Milhojas, 2022); and co-author of Performance Art en Chile (Metales Pesados, 2016), Mario Pedrosa y el CISAC (Metales Pesados, 2019) and El Arte como Revolución (Metales Pesados, 2022).

Asma Abbas is Full Professor of Politics and Philosophy, and Director of Transdisciplinary and Experimental Studies, at Bard College at Simon's Rock, where she began as an Assistant Professor in 2005, upon receiving her doctorate in political science from Pennsylvania State University. She also holds a Master's in Liberal Studies from the New School for Social Research, and Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Business Administration from the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi.

She is former Dean of Academics and Professor of Liberal Studies at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, and former Fulbright-Masaryk Distinguished Chair in Social Studies at Masaryk University in Brno. At Bard College at Simon's Rock she has held the positions of Emily H. Fisher Faculty Fellow, Division Head for Social Studies, Faculty Convenor of the Simon's Rock Study Group on Institutional Transition and Mission, and Director of Proseminar in Social, Political and Humanistic Inquiry. She is associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and teaches in the MPhil in Art and Design at the Indus Valley School. She is founding organiser of Hic Rosa and its international travelling Studio in Materialist and Anticolonial Politics and Aesthetics, the Falsework School for alternative community political education, and the ACCREW Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Her work is situated at the intersection of global politics, ethics, and aesthetics, combining historical, materialist, feminist, comparative, postcolonial, and continental perspectives. She understands herself as a historian of form and method, interested in probing historically contingent experiences in the service of anticolonial, anticapitalist, antifascist, and anti-nationalist hospitalities and imaginations. Her hope is to provoke the potency and history of these materialities as a means of revitalising the political, and to acknowledge the labour of those ordinary subjects whose possibilities call to be unlocked from the legibilities and locations granted them within dominant narratives.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi is an Italian Marxist philosopher, theorist, and activist whose work has profoundly shaped contemporary understandings of media, technology, and post-industrial capitalism. A key figure in the autonomist tradition, he has authored over two dozen books and numerous essays exploring the intersections of communication, desire, and political economy.

His political and creative engagement began early: he joined the Italian Communist Youth Federation at thirteen and was later expelled for "factionalism." A participant in the 1968 uprisings at the University of Bologna, where he earned his degree in Aesthetics, Berardi became active in the extra-parliamentary group Potere Operaio and founded the influential magazine A/traverso. He was also a co-founder of Radio Alice (1976–1978), Italy's first free pirate radio station.

Manuel A. Carrión-Lira is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, with a specialisation in Critical Gender Studies. As researcher, artist, and curator, his work is situated at the intersection of Indigenous media studies, decolonial theory, and speculative futures. He is co-founder of the Catrileo+Carrión Community, a collective of epupillan (two-spirit) Mapuche champurria (mixed) artists-researchers dedicated to the political regeneration of dissident genealogies of thought and praxis.

His doctoral research, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and the Speculative Environmental Futures Collective, theorises Abiayalan Media — a new cycle of Indigenous media that employs strategies of dissent and refusal to challenge the modern-colonial order of the nation-state. His methodology, termed mapulectics, develops an Indigenous materialist reading practice that engages the relationality of land, matter, and cosmos to envision sovereign futurities beyond extractive capitalism. His curatorial record includes co-founding the Otherwise Film Festival and producing programmes such as Chileyem: An Experimental Mapuche Film Program (2020) and Screening Pachacuti: Contributions from Transandean Decolonial Visions (2024).

• Indigenous media studies — film, video, and digital arts
• Decolonial theory and trans-Indigenous epistemologies
• Critical gender and sexuality studies — epupillan/two-spirit, Indigiqueer, and queer Indigenous perspectives
• Speculative environmental futures and anti-extractive politics
• Curatorial practice as decolonial methodology

• "Grey Materialisms: Curating Mapulectics and Ch'ixi Visions in the Ruins of the Nation-State," post(s), Vol. 13. Quito: USFQ Press (2026, under review).
• Opacidades Generativas / Generative Opacities. Compiled by Catrileo+Carrión Community (2026, forthcoming).
• "$hileyem (Chile se acabó, The End of Chile): Indigenous Media and Decolonial Futurities beyond the Settler State," in Dismantling the Nation: Contemporary Art in Chile. Amherst College Press (2023).
• "Una conversación cosmoléctica a través de Cherufe, la Bola de Fuego," in Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies. Amherst College Press (2023).

Amapola Cortés Baeza is an art historian, aesthetician, and Latin Americanist with academic training in anthropology. Her work is situated at the intersection of visual studies, the anthropology of images, and protest studies, with particular attention to theatricality, performance, and embodied practices in contexts of social mobilisation in Latin America. She has examined the political dimensions of the body in protest, focusing on the hood as a symbolic device of anonymity, stigmatisation, and the formation of collective identities.

She is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico. Her doctoral research explores the role of memory museums in shaping narratives of social struggle through a comparative study of Mexico and Chile. Adopting a critical and situated approach, she analyses how these museum spaces articulate collective memories that extend beyond trauma-centred frameworks, emphasising the relationship between artistic practices, memory, protest, and political action.

Her research interests include the anthropology of images, performance and protest, memory studies, memory museums, and social movements in Latin America.

• Arellano Rivera, D. E., López García, I. E. and Cortés Baeza, A. S. Memorias de las Guerrillas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2025).
• "Nuevo Memorial del 68 y movimientos sociales," Discurso Visual, nos. 55–56 (2025).
• "Dos Chiles que no son lo mismo, pero son igual. Movimientos en resistencia 1987–2011," in Participación ciudadana, resistencias sociales y acción colectiva en la vida contemporánea. UNAM (2021).
• "El encapuchado: rebelión y villanía," in Estigma y villanía: la construcción simbólica del enemigo. UNAM / CIALC – Bonilla Artigas Editores (2020).

Silvia Federici is a feminist scholar, historian, and activist best known for her work on gender, capitalism, and social reproduction. A co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, she is the author of influential books including Caliban and the Witch, which reshaped debates on primitive accumulation, witch hunts, and the historical foundations of capitalism.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent fifteen years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, serving as Middle East and Balkans bureau chief and reporting from more than fifty countries. He was part of the team awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism, and received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism the same year. He reported earlier for The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, and National Public Radio, covering the conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.

He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, along with American Fascists, Empire of Illusion, Death of the Liberal Class, Wages of Rebellion, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, and America: The Farewell Tour. He holds a BA in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where he also studied ancient Greek and Latin. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto, and has taught college-credit courses in the New Jersey prison system since 2013. He writes and broadcasts The Chris Hedges Report.

Alberto Pacheco Benites (Lima, 1986) is a Peruvian-born lecturer and researcher. He is the author of Mutaciones de nuestro régimen informacional (2018), as well as numerous essays published in books and academic journals across the Americas and Europe. He is currently a PhD candidate in Communication Sciences at the University of Paris 8 and holds an MA in Philosophy from the National University of San Marcos in Peru.

He has worked as a Senior Lecturer and researcher in France, where he holds the habilitation required to serve as Associate Professor, awarded by the National Council of Universities of France. Prior to this he was a Full Professor and researcher at Peruvian universities for more than a decade. He has also worked as a consultant in communication and culture for public and private organisations, founded and directed two communication start-ups, and worked in journalism in Peruvian media.

His research focuses on two main areas: the critical effects of digital technologies and the contemporary socioeconomic order on subjectivities, institutions, and mechanisms of power; and the political dynamics of Latin America and Peru, with particular attention to the consolidation of neo-reactionary movements, whose practices and discourses are deeply intertwined with the historical tensions that have shaped the continent.

Lucy Quezada Yáñez (b. 1990, Talagante, Chile) is an art historian who earned her PhD in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research centres on contemporary Latin American art, with an emphasis on the relationships between art and politics in the Southern Cone. Her doctoral research, advised by Dr Adele Nelson, explores the official field of visual arts during the military dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile between the 1960s and the 1980s. She received her BA and MA from the Universidad de Chile, and her earlier research focused on Chilean cultural institutions of the early 1970s, including the Museo de la Solidaridad and the Instituto de Arte Latinoamericano.

• "La monumentalidad de lo efímero. Notas para una mirada latinoamericana sobre 50 años/50 acciones," in 50 años/50 acciones. Imaginando el Porvenir (2025).
• "Los artistas del Brasil nos tienden la mano: artes visuales y diplomacia cultural entre las dictaduras militares de Brasil y Chile en 1974," MODOS: Revista de História da Arte, v. 8, n. 3 (2024).
• "«En las urgencias de la realidad» Perspectives about the Vicaría de la Solidaridad," Not Even Past, University of Texas at Austin (2022).
• El arte como revolución. Debates, redes y actualidad del Instituto de Arte Latinoamericano. With Claudia Cofré and Francisco González. Metales Pesados (2022).
• Mário Pedrosa y el CISAC. Configuraciones afectivas, artísticas y políticas. With Claudia Cofré and Francisco González. Metales Pesados (2019).