Jacinta Arthur de la Maza

Dr. Jacinta Arthur de la Maza

Jacinta Arthur-de la Maza (Chile) is Associate Adjunct Professor at Universidad Católica de Chile and Associate Researcher at the UC Center for Cultural Heritage. Her research focuses on the repatriation movement, which she examines as a cultural mode of social justice, revitalization, and reparation. Specifically, her work explores the moral economy of the appropriation, circulation, and display of Indigenous material culture, while engaging repatriation as a global Indigenous movement that effectively confronts the dehumanizing legacy of colonialism.

Interrogating research as both a colonial and decolonial apparatus, she has developed a collaborative action research agenda that consistently questions the social inequalities that are structured by academic practices.Working in Rapa Nui for over a decade, she collaborates with the Rapa Nui Repatriation Program Ka Haka Hoki Mai Te Mana Tupuna, where she serves as research coordinator. She recently edited a book on repatriation in Chile and is involved in several international repatriation research projects, among those ARC Repatriation Linkage – Return, Reconcile, Renew (Australian National University). Her work has been awarded with prestigious grants, including a Fulbright Scholarship and a Smithsonian Research Fellowship. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).