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.