Why Chile? 

Chile offers an unusually apt setting for interrogating these questions of uncertainty, control, and expertise, because it condenses within a single territory the very crises the conference seeks to address. Sitting on the Pacific Ring of Fire, it has recorded the strongest earthquake in history, faces recurrent tsunamis along its coastline, and hosts two of the most active volcanoes on the planet, a geological exposure matched by few other countries. This seismic vulnerability is compounded by a climatic one: Chile is widely recognized as one of the territories most affected by climate change, marked by a megadrought now in its second decade and by wildfires of increasing scale and intensity. Layered onto these pressures, an evolving landscape of emerging infectious disease continues to strain health systems and reconfigure everyday life.

Chile is not simply a site where multiple risks happen to coexist, but a laboratory in which the modern promise of mastery has repeatedly confronted its own limits, forcing institutions, experts, and communities to improvise forms of knowledge and action beyond calculation and control. Holding this conference in Chile, then, is not incidental: it is an invitation to think about risk and uncertainty from a Global South perspective long accustomed to precarity, and to ask whether the paradigm of control that shaped modernity can, or should, be rethought altogether.