Associate Professor, School Anthropology Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Director Millennium Institute for Research on Violence and Democracy
Principal researcher Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies CIIR
Currently, Dr. Risor is visiting research fellow at Copenhagen University
Her research questions revolve around the intersections of social and political life. She’s interested in exploring how subjects become political actors and in analyzing the effects and affects produced by social and state violence in people’s everyday lives and in society at large. Parting from these interests she seeks to contribute to the anthropological theory on violence, state formation and human rights, particularly in relation to revolutionary practices and democratic processes in the global context of neoliberalism.
She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in South America and the Andean Area, in particular Bolivia and Chile. In Bolivia she has worked on vernacular and urban notions of citizenship in relation to issues of security and people’s safety-seeking practices and she has studied inter-generational relations in the context of the revolutionary transformations. In Chile her research has mainly focused on experiences of in/security and the production of differentiated citizenship during the democratic transition and in contexts of urban poverty.
Dr. Helene Risor will guide the Democracy and the problem of public authority workshop together with Dr. Thomas Hansen professor of Anthropology, Stanford University.
