Emergent Educational Policies in Argentina: A Right-Wing Populism?

• In Event: 77.013 - The Threat to Public Education From the Political Right in the Americas: Trump, Bolsonaro, Pinera, and Macri

Abstract

Large parts of South America are going through a new cycle of conservative reorientation. In this context, educational policies are a privileged space for transformation, substantially modifying the discursive articulation of education as a right, built over the previous years. In this paper, I intend to analyze this re-orientation process and the discursive constructions that are making this all possible. For this, I deal with a political analysis of discourse (the perspective initiated by Ernesto Laclau and the Essex school, in particular) and, within it, the conceptualization of populism (taking the contributions of Laclau and Mouffe, among others). I do so in order to investigate how a new right-wing populism is being built as well as to analyze its interpellatory capacity. As well, I examine how such processes manage to generate the conditions of possibility to dismantle the discourse of education as a right, and to replace it with a meritocratic logic linked to the functioning of the market and individual self-management.

Laclau (2008) puts together a set of elements to try to understand what he would call a reductionism on the notion of populism. In recent years, in Latin America, the recomposition of a certain centrality of the State in the allocation of resources and the definition of a different model of development were at the basis of new political polarized experiences. Converging with that position, Mouffe (2018) highlights that the right-wing populism is not the return of an anachronism, of archaic and irrational forces, but the result of a post-political consensus. Those presuppositions open up some questions that I will use here as a conceptual framework. Are the debates about populism a productive tool for the analysis of these recent educational policies? Is there, in the unfolding speeches, an innovative populist articulation with conservative elements? What about the meaning of popular in that construction?

My analyses will focus on official documents enacted by the Argentinean government, as well as on the debates surrounding these political issues as they are expressed in the periodical press. All politics, from their discursivities, are an instrument of regulation and a model of referentiality of the social, and therefore also an attempt at articulating temporal systems of signification, with a structuring that has fissures, and that will allow the incorporation of meanings from the margins.

Author

• Myriam Southwell, Universidad Nacional de La Plata