María Esperanza Rock-Núñez
Dr. María Esperanza Rock Núñez is an ethnohistorian, her research explores memory, ethnography and the cultural transformation prompted by industrial shutdown, with a critical and decolonial perspective. Integrating visual and creative ethnographic methods with oral history, she co-designs heritage projects with communities to visualize diverse social perspectives. Through a “FONDECYT Initiation”, she begins an oral archive of the Chilean coal basin at the University of Concepción. Currently, as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for Social Movements at RUB, to analyze how communities across the global North and South experience and respond to industrial transitions.
See her profile at Haus der Geschichte des Ruhrgebiets
Research interests
My research explores how post-industrial communities in Latin America, particularly in Chile’s Biobío region, reclaim industrial ruins through memory, artistic practices, and grassroots mobilization. Drawing on epistemological decolonial turn and critical heritage studies, I examine how the transformation of abandoned infrastructures becomes a site of knowledge production and socio-ecological negotiation.
This approach aligns with ReForm’s goals of fostering interdisciplinary debate and applying multi-perspective analyses to local case studies. I aim to contribute to the development of mid-range theories on the appropriation and resignification of material legacies in territories shaped by extractivist economies. My project connects particularly with the Resources and Identity, Resources and Practices, and Resources and Social Transformation fields, emphasizing how symbolic and material struggles are embedded in resource use and re-use. ReForm provides a stimulating platform to engage with comparative methodologies and to reflect critically on the ways resources shape life worlds, governance, and collective memory.
