The geographies of collective identity in the Chilean student movement

This article is about collective identity, learning processes and political agency in the Chilean student movement. The geographies of collective identity are constituted through engaging with emotions interwoven with the political learning process by making mistakes that enabled student activists' agency to undergo transformation between 2006 and 2011. Space articulates an identity politics as the bio-politics of existence through which life itself becomes a political action and animates a radical imaginary of politics as being-in-common. This meaning of politics is interwoven with the production of territorial assemblies in 2011 through which the Chilean student movement reasserted the space-time of the political demand for free education in spatial rather than temporal terms by reimagining a collective vision with others. This represents the main legacy of the movement and becomes a condition of possibility for envisioning free education as an alternative project that seeks to contest neoliberal common sense.