MILTON ALMONACID(Mapuche)
Guest Speaker 2019, 2021, 2022

Milton Almonacid is Professor of History and Geography at the Universidad de la Frontera, Temuco, Chile.
He has more than 12 years of international experience in matters related to cultural, intercultural and global studies in areas such as science and technology studies, philosophy of sciences, sociology and history of knowledge production. His fields of interest are Epistemology of Sciences, Decolonization of Knowledge, Whiteness Studies, Indigenous Epistemologies, Non-Western Global Narratives and Intercultural Translation, amongst others. Milton holds a Master's degree in Political Science (Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Rennes), Philosophy (Université Paris I, Panthéon Sorbonne) and Psychoanalysis (Université Paris VII, Denis Diderot) focused on the study of social movements in Chile, the construction of the legitimacy of scientific thought, as well as Mapuche contents excluded from the social identity of Chilean society.

Since 2012 he has been partly living in Denmark where he has completed a Master (the University of Roskilde) in 'Global Studies and Cultural Encounters', with a focus on the global dynamics of interculturality and the logic of exclusion and marginalization (of Indigenous wisdom) in the production of global knowledge. He is currently writing his Ph.D. in Cross-Border Studies at the University of Copenhagen, localizing the problems around Mapuche epistemological contributions in the production of global knowledge. Since 2020 he was also part of the 'Ecology Futures' master program at St Joost School of Art & Design in Breda (Netherlands), alongside Valley of the Possible alumni Xandra van der Eijk, Darko Lagunas and Mark IJzerman.

Milton participated in, and co-moderated, the intercultural dialogue between Comunidad de Historia Mapuche and Valley of the Possible during the first research program in 2019. He was also guest speaker during our 2022 BLACK EARTH program and has hosted several online decolonized thinking workshops with our participants in preparation of their arrival.