Colonial continuities under scrutiny: an institutional ethnography of intercultural education in Chile

Chile is a well-known country for its socio-economic and racial inequalities, especially in education. Despite it being prolific, research on educational inequalities has neglected the question about the persistence of colonial dynamics in the educational sphere and how the experience of colonisation has shaped contemporary social relations. Informed by the field of Decolonial Studies and by using institutional ethnography, this research sheds light onto the social (ruling) relations that sustain colonial continuities in the current Chilean school system. By starting from experiential accounts of Mapuche Indigenous educators who teach their ancestral language in the school system, this research provides evidence of an institutional apparatus sustaining forms of domination and reproduction of material and subjective inequalities.