Addressing Mass Atrocity in Chile: Learning and Unlearning as a Function of Social Memory

In this presentation, I reference a chapter, that is taken from my newly published book, Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse: Essays on Fear and Loathing in Response to Global Educational Policy and Practice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). I argue that when schools fail to address issues of social memory or basic existential questions involved in the pursuit of meaning-making for the purposes of understanding human rights issues, popular support evolves for other institutions to fill the void. Through examining the case of Chile, efforts to memorialize victims of the Pinochet dictatorship occur in the absence of robust initiatives to address these questions as part of the formal knowledge schools transmit. The writings of Agamben and Baudrillard are noted as they offer perspectives regarding the limitations of memorialization. In Agamben’s case, he notes the power of the state to determine not only what constitutes citizenship but whose lives the state deems worthy of recognizing. In Baudrillard’s writings, he critiques the impossibility of coming to terms with the horrors of the past, viewing symbols of memorialization as insufficient attempts to comprehend their significance. Afterwards, I apply their insights to a discussion of a number of Chilean memorials, which are described and analyzed. In spite of their many limitations, I argue that their presence signifies a lack of trust in the formal schooling process to address these questions and the fear that absent their existence, there would be no attempt to address the issues of collective identity that social memory presents. The repercussions of this case study for engagement in human rights discourse are clear. On the one hand, acts of memorialization must contend with negative pressures that commodify social memory and treat efforts to evoke understandings of mass atrocity as globalized objects that are widely circulated, exchanged, and consumed in ways that can become superficial and superfluous. On the other hand, one cannot assume that public schools will naturally promote such discourse, because of their role as agencies that serve to protect the legitimacy of the state and the concerted efforts to limit their role in the service of the public good, given neo-liberal pressures that have become broadly globalized

An analytically solvable model of probabilistic network dynamics

We present a simple model of network dynamics that can be solved analytically for uniform networks. We obtain the dynamics of response of the system to perturbations. The analytical solution is an excellent approximation for random networks. A comparison with the scale-free network, though qualitatively similar, shows the effect of distinct topology.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Interaction of chemical patterns in coupled layers

We investigate the interaction between reaction-diffusion systems coupled by diffusion. The photosensitive CDIMA (chorine dioxide–iodine–malonic acid) reaction allows us to study experimentally the mutual influence of two layers of Turing patterns coupled via a diffusive interaction. By illuminating each of the layers with different intensities of homogeneous external light, the chemical conditions in each layer can be shifted, allowing us to study the result of diffusive interaction between Turing patterns with different spatial configurations. Our experiments suggest a complex scenario for the interaction between different patterns, strongly dependent on the spatial characteristics of the interacting patterns. Numerical simulations are also reported in full agreement with experimental observationsThis work has been supported by the DGI (Spain) under Project No. FIS2010-21023 and Xunta de Galicia (Spain) under Project Nos. PGIDIT05PXIC20607PN and INCITE07PXI206131ES and by the NSF (USA). D.G.M. acknowledges a Ramon y Cajal Fellowship from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain and a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant from the EU248346-NMSSBLS, as well as financial support from the CSIC-SPAIN (JAE-DOC