Katherine Campos, PhD at Universitat Catòlica de Xile

Her thesis investigates the daily life of women who live in informal settlements in Chile, from a micro social dimension of disasters

Katherine Campos Knothe is a sociologist and PhD Candidate in Sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Instituto de Sociología. Her PhD supervisor is Dr Manuel Tironi Rodó, Associate Professor del Instituto de Sociología and from the Instituto para el Desarrollo Sustentable at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Her PhD thesis addresses the issue of the micro-social dimension of disasters from the perspective of the everyday life of women who live in ‘campamentos’. Campamentos are a kind of informal settlement in Chile. The everyday-hazards notion is used to address the micro-social dimension of disasters. Everyday hazards are small-scale events that affect the life of people in a micro-social dimension. These events are important in that dimension but do not create a major social disruption.

Katherine has developed her fieldwork with women who live in campamentos in the city of Copiapó (north of Chile). Her doctoral research seeks to understand how women who live in campamentos manage everyday hazards. The research includes an intersectional gender perspective.

In her research internship at the UOC, Katherine will be working on their findings to discuss its scope and receive feedback with Dr Israel Rodríguez Giralt (UOC). Likewise, she will engage with other CareNet researchers to enrich the data analysis process.

About the researcher

Katherine Campos Knothe is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She was awarded a scholarship from the National Agency of Research and Development (ANID)/ Doctorado Nacional 2019-21191843. Katherine is a sociologist (Universidad de Concepción, Chile) and MA in International Social Policy (University of Nottingham, UK). She is a researcher at the Research Line “Disaster Cultures and Risk Governance” of the Research Centre for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (CIGIDEN) and also participate in the editorial team of the Policy Papers Series from CIGIDEN. Katherine was a regional director of the NGO Techo-Chile in the Atacama Region (Chile) also she has experience working with social organisations and teaching in higher education.