A Critical Ethnography of University Student Activism in Post-Coup Honduras: Collective Identities, Knowledges, and Practices of Resistance

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: Global Considerations in Education

Abstract

This working paper is based on a larger twelve-month ethnographic study which explores the ways in which university student activists in Honduras construct and situate their collective identities, knowledges, and practices within a broader neoliberal, post-coup context (Escobar, 1992, 2001; Holland & Lave, 2001; Melucci, 1989, 1996). The literature demonstrates that ethnographies of higher education are scarce while K-12 ethnographic research is extensive (Jones, Torres, & Arminio, 2014; Pabian, 2013; Wisniewski, 2000). The paucity of critical ethnographies in higher education is illustrative of educational ethnography’s averted gaze (Wisniewski, 2000). Using a decolonial perspective, I will discuss how the university student movement at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) interrupts the coloniality embedded in neoliberalism’s cultural and political economic project.

Author

• Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, Independent Researcher