Browsing by Author "Ragas, Jose"

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    How to Design a (Cybernetic) Revolution: Chileans Remember Salvador Allende's Techno-Utopian Project
    (2024) Ragas, Jose
    The recent commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet offered an opportunity to explore unknown aspects of daily life before and during the dictatorship. This essay focuses on one particular exhibition ( How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design ), which featured a complete reconstruction of the Cybersyn operation room. Based on participant observation, the essay argues that the interaction between visitors and the re-creation in such a particular moment is an invitation to reflect on how technology, socialism, and democracy sought to reinforce each other during the Cold War. The Cybersyn project, one of the most globally recognizable pieces of technology designed in the Global South, still resonates five decades after its implementation (and further destruction by the military), prompting new questions in an era of artificial intelligence and new threats to democracy.
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    Revisiting global health from the periphery: The zika virus
    (Fundacao Oswaldo Cruz, 2018) Ragas, Jose
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    Workers and the Local Response to the Third Plague Pandemic in Iquique (Chile, 1900-1903)
    (2023) Palma, Patricia; Ragas, Jose
    By studying the Third Plague Pandemic in Iquique, Chile, this article aims to contribute to the recent trends of scholarship that emphasize the global scope and impact of historical pandemics in local contexts. It examines how the local population and especially saltpeter workers understood, contested, and even neglected the epidemic due to local tensions. Methodologically, this paper relies on an ample array of sources, with an emphasis on sociocultural artifacts produced by local residents, such as poetry, newspapers of the working class, and cartoons. We conclude that in Chile the epidemic that affected Iquique in May 1903 revealed the government's inability to respond to epidemic outbreaks manifesting in areas far from Santiago, the capital city. In Iquique, the workers and lower classes responded massively, denying the epidemic. The popular sources reveal an anti-central government and anti-big capital sentiment that ultimately led Iquiquenos to perceive the plague as a hoax.