I (1980) was born into a family composed by 3 children and my father, a pastry cook, and my mother, an engineer, in a city located in central Chile. At the end of the 18th Century, this city was really a small town founded as Melipilla, which is composed by two Mapuche sounds: meli and pillañ, which in mapudungun or Mapuche language means four ancestral spirits. At the time of the Spanish invasion, this area corresponded to a part of the northern borders of Mapuche domains and consequently their inhabitants were known as pikunche or peoples of the North.
After a couple of centuries, I studied at the elementary school in my hometown, under the dictatorship of Pinochet. In 1990, with the restoration of democracy, I continued my primary and secondary education, while at the same time departments of sociology of main Chilean universities were reopened. In 1998, I was admitted in a five-year program of sociology.
Subsequently, I obtained my BA in Sociology (2004) and MA in Sociology (2006) at the Catholic University of Chile. I received my Diploma of Advanced Studies (Master) in Political Science (2010) and completed my PhD (2016) at the Complutense University of Madrid with a dissertation about Latin American populism.
I am currently a Lecturer of Latin American History and History of Education Policies in Chile at Alberto Hurtado University (Chile) and a Postdoctoral Researcher at The Centre for Social Theory, Department of Sociology, Ghent University (Belgium). I am also employed as a senior researcher at the Library of the National Congress of Chile, where I conduct some research for informing legislative debates on different topics, such as indigenous peoples, educational policies and social stratification.
I am author of several peer reviewed articles on sociological theory, party coalitions, populism, among others, and a book of local history of Melipilla (publications).
My complete CV here.
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Mario Poblete 