Fernando A. Valenzuela

Sociologist | Knowledge Infrastructures

Data & Narratives


This research project, supported by ANID Fondecyt Regular N°1121124 (2012-2014), investigated the performative role of social scientific knowledge in constructing Chilean social reality. Led by Professor Claudio Ramos Zincke at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, the project employed Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives, particularly Actor-Network Theory and Michel Callon's performativity framework, to examine how scientific data and social narratives become assembled into socio-material configurations that actively shape the phenomena they purport to describe. 
The research focused on tracing the circulation and local assemblage of epistemic objects such as "bullying", "domestic violence", and "poverty" in Chilean contexts. We examined how these categories, originating in international scientific and policy networks, underwent translation processes that reconfigured their meaning and effects in local institutional and social settings. Our analysis revealed how mass media, legal frameworks, and social interventions participated in the performative construction of these social problems. 
This foundational work introduced me to the methodological and theoretical tools of ANT, examining how human and non-human actors participate in networks that stabilize particular versions of social reality. The project's findings were published in international journals, including SAGE Open and Revista de Estudios Sociales, establishing my early engagement with questions of knowledge infrastructures and the socio-material choreography of expertise that continues to inform my current research.

Project title: Datos y relatos científico sociales que dan forma a la realidad social en Chile: Estudio de los entrelazamientos constructivos y performativos de la ciencia social
Principal Investigator: Claudio Ramoz Zincke (UAH)
Co-Researcher: Fernando A. Valenzuela (UNAB)
Funding Source: FONDECYT Regular N°1121124 (2012-2014). 

Publications

International circulation and local assemblage in Chile of bullying as epistemic object


Claudio Ramos Zincke, Fernando A. Valenzuela

SAGE Open, April-June, 2022, pp. 1-15


La paradoja del caso redondo: el proceso de armado de un caso de violencia intrafamiliar


Fernando A. Valenzela, Claudio Ramos Zincke

Alejandro Espinosa, Francisca Ortiz, Nicolás Sanhueza, Tecnopolíticas : aproximaciones al estudio de controversias, ensamblajes y producciones de lo social, Editorial Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2018, pp. 243-272


Del matonaje al bullying: El papel de los medios de masas en la constitución de la violencia escolar como realidad cotidiana en Chile


Fernando A. Valenzuela, Claudio Ramos Zincke

Eugenia Mitchelstein, Pablo Bockzkowski, Titulares, hashtags y videojuegos: La comunicación en la era digital, Editorial Manantial, 2017, pp. 83-104


Cómo los maltratos se transforman en ‘violencia intrafamiliar’. El recorrido de la performatividad


Fernando A. Valenzuela, Claudio Ramos Zincke

Revista de Estudios Sociales, vol. 1(51), 2015, pp. 213-226