Fighting racism in monocultural university systems and institutions. Advances, tensions, challenges, and the work of regional networks (original) (raw)
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Racism, as both the founding ideology and regime of power constitutive of the Modern World, is a crucial cause of pervasive inequalities in all ‘Latin American’ societies. As an ideology, it rests on the assumption that human beings would be classifiable into ‘races’ and that some of them would be ‘superior’ to others. In Latin America, this ideology and regime of power date back to the colonial period. They are constitutive of the establishment of postcolonial republican States, continue in force, and their consequences primarily affect persons and communities of African descent and indigenous peoples. Higher Education systems and institutions have not been alien to the reproduction and naturalization of racism in Latin American societies and, in fact, worldwide. They have historically played several significant roles in this regard. Historically, they excluded the Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples' world visions, histories, languages, and knowledge and learning systems from the curricula, or even presented them as backward or openly invalid. In practice, most of them have jeopardized these peoples´ access to Higher Education and the quality and success of the trajectories of those who managed to gain access. This chapter seeks to contribute to the debate on eradicating racism in Higher Education systems and institutions in Latin America by contextualizing and disaggregating the idea of ‘structural racism’, to study the specific ways it operates in this particular social field. Thus, it hopes to facilitate the construction of concrete ways of intervention to eradicate it.
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In Latin America, racism has been a problem since colonial times and is still found in higher education discriminatory practices. Contemporary racism in teacher training institutions and in foreign language career proposals is characterized by the lack of diversity in many aspects such as institutional human landscape, bibliography, language, and cultural uses. All this maintains a higher education that has traditionally produced and still produces a social reality that is non-plural, inequitable, unjust, and in need of revision. This omission of plurality needs to include strategies that link the field of higher education and excluded social groups. To this end, we suggest that service-learning could contribute to an inclusive training of foreign language teachers in an Ecology of Knowledge with other possible and necessary knowledges, ways, voices of diverse groups, so necessary for a non-racist higher education. We believe that overcoming the idea of the individual and alluding to the community, going beyond the doors of the institutions in an exchange of knowledge through practical interventions in the community beyond academicism is a practice that deserves to be further developed in higher education institutions. We propose lines of work to carry out a process of change in our teacher training programs and spaces for the construction of a better society. Service-learning is a feasible path that implies an anti-racist stance and we, the higher education community, have the imagination and qualifications required to generate and undertake this transgressive task of a collaborative and plural construction for a diverse, equitable, and just social reality.
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This Commentary is based on four areas of concern identified in a recently published large-scale survey of efforts to decolonize the curriculum and pedagogies by multiple disciplines and universities worldwide (Shahjahan et al. 2022). In particular, the piece calls for a focus on connecting international programming with global/local communities and sociopolitical movements. (https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20220603104000323).
Higher Education's Role in the Dialogue on Race
International Journal of Value-based Management, 2000
The university is a logical locus for discussionof the role race has played in our society. Perhaps noAmerican institution is more committed to free andopen dialogue than the university. Higher educationcan thus provide a context for the recognition ofissues as well as a forum for the resolution ofinitiatives. To date, however, university attempts atdiversity training have often imbued recipients withself-consciousness, usurping the unity implicit in theword `university' and evoking an even greater tendencytoward separatism. The university's traditional questfor truth has been subverted by a subtle and pervasivesense that some views are more correct than others,that openness is dangerous, and that some issues mighteven be taboo. At best, such an approach to diversityleads to a fragile stalemate among self-containedenclaves. By championing President Clinton's call fora dialogue on race, the university can restore itselfas an institution that puts honesty above all else...
education policy analysis archives, 2021
Since 2003, the Mexican government has opened 11 intercultural universities serving a total of 15,000 students, a majority of whom are members of Mexico´s Indigenous minority. While there is a growing body of work analyzing the intercultural model from public policy and theoretical perspectives, few studies focus on the experiences of the students and graduates of these institutions. In this article, I share the findings of one such study of the Intercultural University of Mexico State, the pioneer of the intercultural universities. Through interviews with graduates, students, and deans of three undergraduate intercultural programs, I seek to answer a central question, which is rooted in critical and decolonial theory: To what degree does the intercultural model achieve its stated mission of empowering Indigenous students and to what degree does it contribute to the reproduction of inequality? In general, the findings are mixed. While many students share experiences of discriminatio...
Racism in the Academy: Toward a Multi-Methodological Agenda for Anthropological Engagement
Racism in the Academy: The New Millennium. Audrey Smedley & Janis Hutchinson, eds. 2012. American Anthropological Association Commission on Race & Racism in Anthropology report #2., 2012
Introduction: Facing Racism in Contexts of Higher Learning and Academic Freedom It is unfortunate that racism in academia remains a timely topic worthy of critical reflection, both personally and collectively. It is not only deserving of reflection, it needs to be subjected to further investigation. Despite the history of Boasianism (Baker 1998) and Du Boisian (Harrison and Nonini 1992) and other antiracist legacies (e.g., Medicine 2001; Pollock 2008), racism's academic sites include the institutions, activities, practices, and discourses that comprise anthropology as a discipline and profession. This is often acknowledged from time to time without undergoing the thorough self-criticism and antiracist actions required to improve the situation and solve the problem. Antiracism has to be more than intermittent intellectual abstraction. We need to ground it in real life and be willing to clean up our own yards. There is some serious homework that anthropologists need to do (Williams 1995). Part of the difficulty of interrogating racism is that so many people do not recognize it as a problem, as something that still exists and demands corrective action. After all, we are in the throes of an era of "colorblindness" and a "postracial" moment marked by ideological and legal assaults against policies such as affirmative action. In view of the rates, waves, and patterns of new immigration, we live in an era that is recognized in terms of increasing levels of diversity. However, as it is frequently invoked today, diversity and the practices to promote and manage it are too often deployed in ways that belie the severity of structural racism and the severe need for substantive redress and justice.