UDP Internacional

29 August 2023

Between the end of June and the beginning of August, five UDP students and 14 international students participated in the Princeton-UDP Global Seminar, a program developed under the theme “Art and politics in the transition to democracy in Chile” and led by Javier Guerrero, writer and academic at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS).

The meeting was held at the UDP premises with the purpose of generating a cultural exchange between the students, based on the analysis and reflection of topics related to the arts, politics and Chilean history. This, within the framework of the commemoration of the 50 years of the Coup d’état.

In this way, the people who participated in the program faced various readings in English and interesting conversations that were led by renowned thinkers from the region such as the writers Rita Segato and Diamela Eltit. Likewise, the student body was part of a film cycle in which films such as Los perros, 1976 and Postmortem, among other films, were shown. The youth also had the opportunity to go on a field trip to Valparaíso and San Pedro de Atacama.

Regarding the cycle, Javier Guerrero commented that the theme of the 50 years of the Coup d’état was taken to rethink the relations between art and politics to “produce a deep reflection on the Chilean case.”

For his part, Alejandro Virué, a doctoral student at Princeton University, who participated as an assistant professor in the program, stated: “We focus on the relationship between art and politics in the transition to Chilean democracy, in a very broad sense. We started during the Popular Unity government and how was the relationship at that time with political movements and artistic productions and how that changed drastically during the dictatorship”.

This is the second time that the Princeton-UDP Global Seminar program is held in Chile and at the Diego Portales University. The themes of this cycle vary every year and, during its development, the students not only have the opportunity to learn more about the culture and history of the countries that participate, but they can also put their English and/or Spanish, generating complex reflections of the cases analyzed.