biography

“In this time of crisis, in which the legitimacy of representative institutions is rapidly eroding, choosing a path of organization and institutionalization of popular power seems the only long-term solution against oligarchic domination and ecological destruction.”
WINNER OF THE BRITAIN & IRELAND ASSOCIATION FOR POLITICAL THOUGHT 2023 EARLY-CAREER PRIZE
"Dr Vergara has demonstrated as impressive a global commitment to teaching, having delivered lectures on four different continents on a variety of topics that show the breadth of her expertise. Her international outreach is evident not only her teaching and research, but also in her prominent work in political advocacy and activism, which exemplifies a unity of theory and practice often discussed and aspired to but rarely achieved by academic political theorists."

political philosophy "from below"

I grew up in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship and worked as a journalist writing on political economy during the country’s transition to a limited democracy, in which a socially conservative, economically neoliberal worldview became constitutionally entrenched. As a reporter, I covered stock markets and wrote investigative articles on the financial sector and the healthcare and pension systems. Through interviews with CEOs, ministers of finance and labour, ombudsman officers, and Central Bank economists, I learned much about the inner workings of markets, the industries created around social services, and their interaction with laws and regulations, which greatly informs my work as a political philosopher.
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Career

Studies
As an undergraduate History student. I focused on the interaction between law and economics, and on the philosophical foundations of authority and legality. With the support of a Fulbright Scholarship, I studied at NYU the constituent revolutions in Latin America and the philosophical and legal foundations of populist politics focused on redistribution. Then, as a doctoral student, first at the New School for Social Research and then at Columbia University, I was trained in radical democratic theory, continental philosophy, republicanism, liberalism, theories of justice, and constitutional law.
Postdoctoral work
I was a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia Law School (2019-2021) within the Holder Initiative in Political and Civil Rights, and then was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at University of Cambridge to work on a longue durée analysis of the rights of the common people from antiquity to the present. My current research is focused on four interrelated areas: radical republicanism, Left populism, critical constitutionalism, and alternative ethico-political structures.

IMPACT

In addition to my academic work, I have an active role as advisor to international and grassroots organisations on civil and political rights, and on procedures and institutions for direct deliberative democracy. My book República Plebeya, written as a response to the popular uprising in Chile in October 2019, calling for the formalisation of the incipient council system that emerged in the revolt, as a means to establish a participatory democracy, was widely read among activists from the popular sectors. As a result, I became an adviser for the coalition of grassroots leaders who were elected to the Constitutional Convention, and gave expert testimony five times on rights and democratic mechanisms at the Convention. I also advise and collaborate with civil society anti-corruption institutions in Colombia and Mexico, as well as with the Community Environmental Legal Defence Fund to develop grassroots democracy in the U.S., and with the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in its assessment of free speech in the region.