We are a research center of excellence founded in 2012, just after obtaining the Fondo de Financiamiento de Centros de Investigación en Áreas Prioritarias (FONDAP) depending on the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo, ANID. Since its beginnings, CIIR has sought to contribute to the country with high-level studies on the problem of intercultural relationships, along with an interdisciplinary, comparative, collaborative perspective and a unique respect for cultural diversity.

Our research seeks to contribute to the development of public policies on intercultural issues. At the CIIR many and varied disciplinary perspectives with a unique intercultural perspective converge, a vantage periodically applied to a variety of research fields, as well as theoretical and methodological frameworks. Hence, the Center takes a multidisciplinary and comparative approach, integrating researchers from various academic fields, such as Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Psychology, History, Education, Literature, Economics, Agronomy and Ecology. Undoubtedly, the interdisciplinary wealth cited in CIIR is one of its great strengths, allowing ground-breaking disciplinary exchange.
Specifically, we have delved into projects that develop unique encounters between areas of knowledge, such as working with indigenous communities in various areas of the country, the development of Summer Schools for the training of PhD students as well as the “Dialogos de Reconocimiento” initiative that reflects on interculturality through the encounter between social sciences, art and humanities.
All of this experience has allowed the development of qualitative and ethnographic, audiovisual and quantitative methodologies of excellence, as well as mixed methodologies. In actual fact, we have extensive experience in the realization of ethnography throughout the country, with a diversity of social groups and realities, as well as research that favors techniques such as the interview, Non-Participatory Observation, photographic production, audiovisual records, among many others. In the quantitative field, we have led high-complexity longitudinal projects such as Desarrollo de Amistad Intergrupales en Contextos Escolares Indígenas y no Indígenas in Chile as well as the Estudio Longitudinal de lasterculturales (ELRI).
In addition, we have developed various topics addressing mainly intercultural education, indigenous peoples, children and interculturality, migration, heritage, rurality, ecology and environment, economy, citizenship, discrimination, memory and Human Rights. We also have addressed this line of applied and transfer research in the Explora projects, which have allowed us to disseminate the social and natural sciences in local learning contexts.