Kelly Bauer, Ph.D.
kbauer@nebrwesleyan.edu
Nebraska Wesleyan University
About Me:
Kelly Bauer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Her research is on the governance of identity politics in South America, exploring how Latin American states govern to recenter themselves and extend state power in the midst of global trends that destabilize state sovereignty. Recent work focuses on Indigenous rights, irregular migration, and human security regimes. Her book, Negotiating Autonomy (2021), explores how the Chilean government translates Mapuche Indigenous demands for territory into land policy, drawing on 16 months of field work funded by Fulbright and Inter-American Foundation fellowships. Other work has been published in Journal of Agrarian Change, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d'études du développement, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.Her second line of research studies teaching and learning pedagogy, examining how to make the classroom and university spaces for place-based student learning and empowerment. This work appears in New Political Science and Journal of Political Science Education. Kelly has been recognized for her excellence in teaching, and was awarded NWU's highest teaching award in 2020.
Research Interests
Latin American And Caribbean Politics
Human Rights
Race, Ethnicity and Politics
Immigration & Citizenship
Indigenous Politics
State-society Relations
Territorial Rights
Identity Politics
Development
Technocratic Politics
Pedagogy
Research Methods Pedagogy
POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE
Countries of Interest
Chile
Publications:
Journal Articles:
This article develops the concept indigenous human security to highlight consequential contestation over the meaning and deployment of the concept of human security towards indigenous populations. Using the case illustrations of Peru and Chile, we show how state policies may at times work in congruence with the human security of the general population, but create distinct and often overlooked insecurities for indigenous populations. We find states selectively implement human security to preserve existing governance and development patterns by utilising laws, policies, and state institutions that were not completely dismantled as part of the country’s democratisation efforts.
This article explores how South American politicians rhetorically justify extending and restricting irregular migrants’ right to regularisation. Since 2002, the region has gradually established the right to regularisation before expulsion, creating norms and frameworks through which the opportunity for regularisation is the expected state response to irregular migration, rather than exception. Despite these innovations, many South American politicians have worked to undo some of these protections, particularly as migrants fleeing the political crisis in Venezuela overwhelm state capacities to administer these rights to mobility and regularisation. The result is an uneven and fluctuating patchwork of migrants’ rights to mobility in South America. How do politicians justify their work to extend and restrict this right to regularisation? Analysis of South American politicians’ justifications of these shifts reveal that, when extending the right, politicians prioritise the rights of the individual migrant, and claim credit for the capacity of the state to manage and extend those rights; when retracting the right to regularisation, politicians demand that migration policy serve state interests. In the South American context, regularisation programmes are a flexible and powerful policy tool, offering politicians problematic power to make and unmake this right to mobility.
This article analyzes the Chilean state’s response to the territorial demands of Mapuche indigenous communities. Throughout Latin America, governments recognized Afro-descendant and indigenous communities’ communal property rights as part of a broader territorial turn that offered to reshape territoriality and indigenous–state relations; more often, however, the resulting reforms became a means of extending neoliberal governance. Given the strength of Chile’s neoliberal project and reputation of good governance, why are there inconsistencies in the state’s response to Mapuche territorial demands? I argue that neoliberal governance is a means of pursuing the demobilization and disarticulation of Mapuche demands, rather than an end. The state employs a combination of formal and informal governance strategies to further these motivations, highlighting that many assumptions about Chilean politics do not necessarily apply to indigenous policy. The interaction between these governing motivations create space, albeit extremely limited and costly, for some Mapuche communities to access land by working around and through both formal policy procedures and informal economic interests, while simultaneously undercutting broader territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, the hidden patterns of policy implemented that are highlighted in this article reveal the diversity of ways in which governance strategies threaten the recognition of indigenous territorial rights.
At our predominantly white university, students often shy away from controversial conversations. How can the classroom encourage students to value and engage in potentially explosive conversations? We develop a concept of “empathic scaffolding” to articulate an approach that integrates diversity and inclusion into the classroom. Empathic scaffolding structures content and pedagogy in a way that strategically expands students’ zones of comfort, starting with very personal experiences with the material and expanding to include broader groups of people and course concepts. Understanding and engaging with these concentric circles of students’ relationships to the course material is crucial if students are to hear and engage with voices to which they may have limited exposure. This article documents the best practices of implementing empathic scaffolding in the realms of content and pedagogy, offering a toolkit for professors to critically engage conversations about race and social justice.
This article advocates the use of discourse instruction as a means of integrating issues of social justice into the classroom and transcending the debate over politicization in academia. The field of political science is at an uncomfortable juncture; it is faced with an obligation to ourselves and our communities to critically engage and push back against the more toxic components of the political moment, staying relevant and accurate and providing students with the tools they need to process the political world; while, also resisting the dual pressures to either stay apolitical/non-partisan, or to become a current events class, ceding class time to deciphering the day’s political events. We argue that discourse instruction can be used to teach the skills of social justice in political science classrooms. In addition, the infusion of diversity into the classroom through discourse instruction is both a means of enhancing student learning by engaging in high-impact practices of teaching and learning and political activism.
What are the challenges associated with translating indigenous territorial demands into land policy? While most land policy prioritizes the economic utility of land, indigenous territorial demands call for governments to more broadly conceptualize the definition and utility of land. Since the 1990s, most Latin American countries have formally recognized a range of indigenous territorial rights and worked to translate these rights into practice. Drawing on the Chilean experience, this paper argues that these alternative conceptualizations of land and territory complicate the implementation of government efforts to recognize indigenous demands. Specifically, the insufficiently defined scope of the policy exacerbates tension between communities' territorial rights demands and the government's capacity to return land. This tension is gradually and bureaucratically resolved, hindering both the policy's ability to meaningfully respond to indigenous territorial demands and the government's objective of promoting rural development. Future discussions and research must consider how these competing conceptualizations of land affect indigenous and land policy.
Books Written:
The 1980s and ‘90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights. In Negotiating Autonomy, Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to Indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy.