The purpose of the Center for Indigenous and Intercultural Research, CIIR, is to develop interdisciplinary and collaborative research into matters relating to indigenous peoples and intercultural relations in Chile. CIIR presents a multidisciplinary and comparative approach, integrating researchers of different academic disciplines, such as Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Psychology, Public Health, History, Education, Linguistics and Musicology. Every discipline that constitutes the CIIR represents both its riches and its complexity. A wide variety of perspectives meet within an ample space of intercultural relations and indigenous communities, appealing to various areas of research as well as theoretical and methodological frameworks. The interdisciplinary richness of the CIIR is one of its strong points and, at the same time, pins the fundamental challenge of developing a center for research of high standards.
Based on the evidence of failure of the recognition of a multicultural acknowledgement in our country, we have identified four areas to address this problem and they have become the foundation for the four courses of action of the Center, which are: Public Policies, Development and Environment, Cultural Heritage, and Subjectivities and Conflicts.
The team of CIIR researchers is made up of faculty members of different disciplines from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad Diego Portales and the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. Additionally, the CIIR receives the collaboration of researchers from prestigious international institutions such as the University of Columbia, the Centre for Amerindian, Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CAS), the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), the Universidad Veracruzana, the University of Copenhagen and the University of California, San Diego.
The CIIR has the support of the Financing Fund for Research Centers in Priority Areas (FONDAP), division of the National Commission of Technological and Scientific Research (CONICYT), organization that is under the purview of the Ministry of Education of Chile.