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On Monday, June 23, the First Biannual Territorial Workshop of the Data Justa Millennium Nucleus was held, titled “International Human Rights Standards: Application and Challenges in Three Contemporary Cases.” The event took place in the Plenary Room of the Faculty of Legal and Social Sciences at Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh), on the Isla Teja campus in Valdivia, and was livestreamed through the Derecho UACh YouTube channel.

As part of two recent academic activities, Oriana Bernasconi and Andrés Tello, researchers at the Data Justa Millennium Nucleus, shared reflections on the ethical challenges that arise from the use of data in contexts of human rights violations. Their presentations opened up key questions about the production, circulation, and state management of data, as well as the social, political, and human effects of their use.

On Monday, June 23, Universidad Austral de Chile will host the first of six Territorial Workshops organized by the Data Justa Millennium Nucleus. The event, open to the public and held in a hybrid format, will bring together human rights specialists to discuss contemporary challenges in the use of international standards in response to serious human rights violations.

Entre el 23 y 26 de mayo se desarrolló una nueva edición del Congreso LASA2025. En este contexto, Oriana Bernasconi, directora del Núcleo Milenio Data Justa, junto a destacadas académicas y expertas, presentó el panel «Making Science, Making Truth: Human Rights Infrastructures Beyond the State», un espacio para explorar cómo la ciencia y la tecnología han sido movilizadas para construir la verdad sobre las violaciones de derechos humanos.

On April 29, the international workshop Interdisciplinary and Multisectoral Human Rights Accountability Research was held at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. The hybrid event brought together scholars from Europe and Latin America to collectively reflect on the challenges of conducting research in contexts of violence, impunity, and democratic backsliding.

In preparation for the fieldwork, the Data Justa research team organized a workshop to strengthen the skills needed to handle critical situations involving the emotional impact that may arise during interviews with people who work with victims.

The DATA JUSTA Millennium Nucleus will carry out an in-depth examination of the knowledge infrastructures currently used by the Chilean state in its management of victims of gross human rights violations. Using critical theories and ethnographic methods, the project will analyze the knowledge the state produces about these events and how that knowledge shapes the responses it offers to ‘victimized’ citizens.

Oriana Bernasconi, PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics, researcher and academic at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, is leading the project “Millennium Nucleus for Research on Human Rights Violations Data Production and Use by the State (DATA JUSTA),” which received funding from the Millennium Nucleus of Social Sciences of the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID). The project also includes academic Elizabeth Lira, National Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences 2017, and director of the UAH Human Rights Center. 

On August 20, the results of the 2024 Millennium Nucleus Competition for Social Sciences were announced. Three projects submitted by researchers from the Department of Sociology at Alberto Hurtado University were awarded from a total of nine.