Continuities & Disruptions: Exploring Historical Legacies in Latin American Education Today

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The question of how to envision new futures through and in education remains fundamental for those interested in confronting and understanding power relations. In Latin America, a place with high levels of inequality and characterised by high levels of segregation, exclusion of minoritised groups, conflictive labour relations, and public/private enclosures, much has been attributed to the rise of neoliberalism as the main force shaping these inequalities. However, the region's unique historical configurations influence contemporary educational trends in ways that may not appear entirely visible through the lenses of theories on neoliberalism. These influences have manifested in distinct forms of capitalist formations and education systems across Latin America.

Towards imagining new possibilities for education and societies, this panel will explore how structural and cultural forces manifest in ongoing educational formations and vary across different geographical locations and scales in Latin America. The papers will focus on colonialism, race, class, gender, sexuality, and state crafting through education to understand the challenges and potential of envisioning future educational landscapes regionally and globally. The authors aim to uncover historical traces to comprehend educational trajectories and cycles, highlighting commonalities and connections within the region and beyond. In addition, the panel seeks to reflect on the possibilities of disrupting, challenging, and/or continuing historical legacies as well as the amnesia of the cycles, patterns and struggles that build on each other through history (Hart, 2018).

The panel examines these possibilities and challenges through the concepts of conjunctures and articulations as theoretical tools for tracing social configurations over time. These concepts are crucial for exploring the relationship between structures, culture, and power dynamics in education by focusing on how change occurs. An articulation is defined as ‘the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions, (...) a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute, and essential for all time’ (Hall in Grossberg, 1996, p. 141), while a conjuncture involves converging rhythms and trajectories within a specific temporal context (Massey, 2011) and serves as a mode of historicised critical practice (Peck, 2023). These frameworks help us question neoliberalism and understand broader co-formations.

Moreover, this panel brings together intersectional conversations and exchanges from five Latin American scholars. Sharing diasporic spaces and experiences of everyday bordering (Brah, 2022) as Latina women researching within privileged academic institutions, our encounters in these hegemonic spaces allowed us to envision new possibilities for attachment and togetherness, fostering our own politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011)—a sentiment reflected in this very panel. As Latin American women scholars, historically positioned in the borderlands of academia, we have long sought to carve out spaces for our voices. As Steedman says, 'the other side of waiting is wanting' (2005, p. 22), and our focus on issues affecting our communities in Chile, Peru, Brazil, and England is driven by the urgency to challenge colonial epistemic regimes and their legacies in education across Latin America, while imagining more inclusive futures.

The first paper focuses on the interaction between structural and cultural resources shaping teachers’ work. By combining Process Tracing and a critical approach to discourse to analyze policy documents and media sources, it uncovers two main ideational threads through which teacher policies have been possible. The second paper explores generational inequalities between mothers and daughters, focusing on how access to higher education has disrupted or sustained generational cycles among first-generation women students. It examines their lived experiences and sense of (un)belonging at university since the introduction of affirmative action policies in Brazil and Access Agreements in England, aiming to increase representation of underrepresented groups in the twenty-first century. The third paper, traces different manifestations of privatization of education in specific conjunctural moments throughout history in Peru, and their links to demographic changes, immigration, and political, social and cultural developments. Specifically, it focuses on the changing narratives over ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ in education, and who they include or exclude. Finally, the fourth paper delves into the legacy of neoliberal and conservative policies being rearticulated in the educational field of Brazil and Chile, focusing on how anti-gender discourses and militaristic values are gaining traction in response to progressive social advances.

Overall, envisioning a different future for education, as the conference theme evokes, requires a critical reflection on the historical and present contexts that shape education policies and practices, focusing on how these forces intersect with issues of power, inequality, and exclusion. This is also crucial for the current and imminent digital era, as the impacts of digitalisation in education are intimately linked to broader trajectories that shape our present and future. The authors in this panel argue on the academic and political relevance of theoretically and methodologically engaging with historical lineages to understand and unsettle contemporary educational configurations in Latin America. In that sense, they examine different phenomena and configurations - surveillance of subaltern bodies, 'discredit' of public education, ideational threads and policy trajectories, and (un)belonging in higher education- to trace the perpetuation of culture and ideas and contemplate the possibilities of their disruption.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Chair

• María Fernanda Rodríguez, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• Historical Debts and Digital Inequalities: Experiences of First-Generation Women in Public Higher Education in Brazil and England in the Twenty-First Century - Anna Maria Del Fiorentino, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Anti-Gender Discourses and Militaristic Values in Brazil and Chile: The Rearticulation of Neoliberalism and Conservatism in Education - Bruna Dalmaso-Junqueira, Universidade Estadual de Santa Catarina; Mariateresa Rojas, Universidad Alberto Hurtado

• In the Company of Others: Tracing Historic Public/Private Enclosures through Education in Peru - María Fernanda Rodríguez, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Ideational Sediments, Articulations and State projects: The multiple Layers of Teacher Policies in Chile - Rocio Fernandez Ugalde, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

Discussant

• Maria Balarin, GRADE