Winds of the South: Intercultural university models for the 21st century

Introduction

Winds of change are whistling through social, political, and cultural institutions, all over the world, and universities in particular. It may well be said that in the 21st century these have been in the eye of the hurricane since they had unquestionably become the locus of knowledge par excellence of modern Nation-States and, therefore, where the national elite of rulers was formed, the national scientific and cultural references of the past, present, and the future were devised, refined, delivered, and finally where national identity was energized. In sum, in global times, the University is reflecting the crisis of the Nation-State.

Europe started this century with the launching of the Bologna process, which aimed “to create a coherent and cohesive European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by 2010,” and it seemed that, once completed, the scene would have been set up and would remain stable for quite some time. In fact, it fulfilled, within the deadline, its main objectives:

adopt a system of easily readable and comparable degrees; adopt a system with two main cycles (undergraduate/graduate); establish a system of credits (ECTS); promote mobility by overcoming legal recognition and administrative obstacles; promote European co-operation in quality assurance; promote a European dimension in higher education. (http://www.eua.be/eua-work-and-policy-area/building-the-european-higher-education-area/bologna-basics.aspx)

The universities which started in the Americas in colonial times were often organizations which transplanted the models from their mother institutions in Europe, formerly under the umbrella of the Church and later of the Nation-State. Despite its national symbolism and identity, the University has been described by several authors as a “colonial” institution per se both in its essence and history (e.g. Magalhães, 2001) and, in fact, university models expanded from the North to the South, both within Europe and from Europe to overseas. However, it should not be ignored the a posteriori reverse influence from North America to Europe (North–North) and nonetheless the currently starting influence from South America to Europe (South–North). This justifies the interest that this special issue on “Winds from the South: Intercultural university models for the 21st century” is thought to raise among the AHHE readers. Furthermore, globalization has had an impact in the role, life, and image of universities worldwide, which has been described as a loss of their identity, more specifically of their cultural and national ethnic identity, in some cases, their tradition. This is why the experience of the intercultural/indigenous universities is worth considering today because they are adequately considered to be ethnically grounded. Readers of this journal are here considered as particularly suited to interestingly appreciate the theorization and reporting of experiences in the following chapters since “the Humanities are good at living with and working with complexity -… at acknowledging and not seeking to rise above the situatedness of its material, and at conceptualizing non-systemic orders of knowledge (or knowledges)” (Parker, 2008: 90).

In fact, the following chapters require a conceptual break with the epistemic “grand narrative” of modernity (Lyotard, 1986), which has impregnated the university conceptual paradigm and knowledge canon. The field of Arts and Humanities “deal[s] with, offer[s] narratives and intelligible accounts of, that which is other, unintelligible, conceptions of the human and cosmic condition that are incomprehensible to ours” (Lyotard, 1986) and therefore is entitled to provide support to every other scientific field to establish intercultural channels of communication between universities undertaking international networking. In addition, the so-called indigenous or intercultural universities in Latin America provide a different epistemic model which confronts European scientists with other modes of knowing, learning, and questioning. More than other contents or research methodologies, they are intrinsically put face to face with other definitions of knowledge.

With their internationalization, the national hegemony lost, universities worldwide have been translating an Anglo-Saxon pragmatism into an oversimplified model of knowledge production and creating a functional model that responds directly to the market, as it appears to be today, that is, with no contextual vision for the future. This is also the reason why the crisis of the university identity is understood to have coincided with the crisis of the paradigm of modernity. However, it seems that the large “metadiscourse” of modernity has been replaced by another “grand narrative” (Lyotard, 1986), that of hegemonic globalization in the form of the “mercantile globalization of the university” (Santos, 2005: 6). This results from and in some “thinness in our contemporary thinking about the university” and, therefore, again according to Barnett, we must acknowledge that “the imaginary landscape of the idea of higher education is rather empty at the present time” (2013: 13–14). However, what has been presented as the epitome of modernity, with regard to higher education and its contribution to society, is lagging behind the challenges of the 21st century. In the first place, taken-for-granted truths telling us that “the sociocultural paradigm of modernity ‘science’ became the celebrated knowledge, ‘the knowledge’” and that “scientific community is the supreme judge of scientific axioms,” as we are critically reminded by Magalhães, have become too tight for a world where knowledge, information, and education have become massive and accessible through democracy and technology (Magalhães, 2001: 182–183). Moreover, the author also acknowledges that “scientific truth is a cosmopolitan construction,” a tenet which is too often forgotten and contradicted by those, too many, who perceive scientific truth as ethnocentrically based and constrained as such.

With wisdom, Barnett and Maxwell call for “wisdom” to be again brought about into academic inquiry, which Maxwell expands into “global wisdom” and defines as “the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others (and this including knowledge, know-how and understanding” (2008: 2). This idea is not so far away from the idea of “buen vivir” which the indigenous peoples from Latin America (the Aymara/Quechua, the Mapuche, the Kolla, the Maya, etc.) offer as a contribution for the change the peoples of this world, the mother Earth, need to undertake in order to save the planet (Mamani, 2010). Both ideas, “wisdom” and “buen vivir,” albeit referring to different types of rationality, are not contradictory in essence and may well converse with each other through “new forms of conviviality among epistemologies, paradigms and approaches” since “in a globalized world we are all forced to look for working commensurabilities that open communication channels among different semantic universes” (Ribeiro, 2011: 286–287).

However, another Brazilian author, Viveiros de Castro believes that “it is only worth comparing the incommensurable” since “the real world is the abstract space of divergence” (2004: 11). This author proposes the “method of controlled equivocation” which he describes as “the mode of communication par excellence between different perspectival positions” (2004: 5) as it reconceptualizes the notions of comparability and translatability. He further asks: “what happens to our comparisons when we compare them with indigenous comparisons?” (2004: 4) and explains that “a good translation is one that allows the alien concepts to deform and subvert the translator’s [original] conceptual toolbox…” (2004: 5). In addition, Souza uses Castro’s concepts of “perspectivism” and “equivocal translation” to discuss the understanding and hosting of targeted federal educational policies by indigenous communities in Brazil with regard to public school system and the misunderstandings of policy-makers when, with good intentions, intent to provide indigenous communities to “preserve” their languages and cultures through the state school system (Souza, 2014). He warns about the difficulties of mutual intelligibility across cultures and states that “one should be aware of the equality in difference between one’s own knowledge and that of the other at the same time as one is fully aware that one is not the other and is therefore different” (Souza, 2014: 55).

The question that may be posed about indigenous/intercultural universities at a time when universities, in general, are internationalizing is whether the former are missing this element in their daily academic life. However, Munck “would argue that universities are glocal organizations on the whole, that is, they have both local roots and a global reach or context” (2010: 32), and this also applies to indigenous/intercultural universities as they are contributing with “a new generation bearing both academic and community, both indigenous and western knowledge” (Dietz, 2009: 3). Moreover, they are not only deeply rooted in community life but also in transnational social movements committed to saving endangered knowledges and to maintaining an ecology of knowledges in the world. Therefore, indigenous/intercultural universities provide various possibilities for intercultural, interepistemic, and interacademic dialog as much as they move into “post-indigenismo educational projects,” that is, move beyond “programmes specifically designed by non-indigenous social scientists in order to integrate indigenous communities into their respective nation-states” (2009: 2).

The concept of “interculturalidad,” which in English is generally translated into “interculturalism,” although they are not synonymous, may undertake different meanings as it is now commonly used in documents officially issued by transnational organizations and, more emphatically, by Latin-American states, side by side with academic outputs both of intercultural/indigenous universities and traditional public universities. The concept of “intercultural” therefore embodies different intentions as policies are concerned, epistemological and social implications with regard to knowledge and agency patterns, therefore, it does not imply any ideas which can be described as universal (Guilherme and Dietz, 2015). To be more precise, intercultural/indigenous universities represent a general attempt to let knowledge, which is “other” and for that reason previously not considered as such, breathe, grow and dialog, on an equity basis, with previously established knowledge. This is acknowledged as cognitive justice.

“Epistemic interculturality” introduces the possibility for a negotiation, which does not necessarily mean an “all the way” hybridization, between Latin-American indigenous knowledge and Eurocentric colonial knowledge in Latin America (Walsh, 2007). “Epistemic interculturality” is not an undertaking of one side but a reciprocal and overriding attempt of conversing and learning together ways of meeting and living with the unknown. According to Santos, “learning from the South is therefore the process of intercultural translation by means of which the anti-imperial South is constructed both in the global North and in the global South” (2014: 224). Therefore, epistemological interculturality, that is critical, involves unlearning the processes of epistemological supremacy and unilateral visibility both by and within the South and the North, since they have come to be transterritorial and internalized. Universities, in the process of internationalization, and respectively academics, are in a privileged position to undertake this challenge.

This issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education accordingly focuses on innovative initiatives which are emerging in different Latin-American university contexts. Sometimes these initiatives are newly created higher education institutions that are rooted inside indigenous regions, in other cases conventional universities start to “interculturalize” its student population, its teaching staff, or even its curricular contents and methods. In general, the policy of diversifying ethnocultural profiles and curricular contents of intercultural universities is not isolated, but coincides with a broader tendency to urge institutions of higher education to become more “efficient,” locally “adapted,” and “outcome oriented.” Despite certain criticisms, community leaders frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering ethnic actors of indigenous or afro-descendant origin.

These efforts to culturally transform and diversify universities react to two different, still existing gaps in the educational coverage for Latin America’s indigenous peoples and afro-descendant communities: an institutional coverage gap, on the one hand, and an interculturality gap, on the other hand (Dietz, 2012). With regard to institutional coverage, Latin-American universities reflect the conventional bias of any western, European-inspired university system: colleges and universities are concentrated in urban, not rural regions, and they target mestizo (nonindigenous), not indigenous students. Only very few agricultural universities and some teacher training institutions have developed and maintained decentralized campi which shorten geographical distance for indigenous or afro-descendant students. Apart from these exceptions and from some macro-universities which are trying to decentralize their teaching and research activities, Latin American contemporary higher education remains highly centralized, urban, and focused on conventional, western notions of university careers and study programs. As access to higher education is thus extremely difficult for indigenous students, their enrollment percentage is very low (estimations vary between countries from 1 to 2% of all students). Even those indigenous students who due to rural–urban migration processes finally succeed in entering an urban BA program face huge academic difficulties, as they have very frequently evolved through a precarious and badly qualifying elementary and postelementary school system.

On the other hand, this institutional coverage gap is closely linked to an interculturality gap which results from the above-mentioned Latin-American policy tradition of indigenismo. As part of this long-lasting governmental policy of integrating indigenous peoples into Latin-American mainstream settler societies, so-called bilingual indigenous education systems have been created since the end of the 1970s in different Latin-American countries. These systems partly respond to indigenous leaders’ claims for a bilingual and bicultural education, and partly reflect new efforts of indirect hispanization through the use of the indigenous languages. After decades of struggles between governmental indigenismo institutions and indigenous organizations, these systems, currently called “intercultural and bilingual education,” provide nursery, primary, and increasingly also postprimary education for rural indigenous communities through schools in several countries start complementing the national unified and centralized curriculum with some classes in the region’s indigenous language (Cortina, 2014). The mentioned gap, however, arises as this parallel public school system for indigenous communities does not include preuniversity college nor university educational levels. Accordingly, for several years indigenous organizations have been demanding an expansion of the “intercultural and bilingual” approach toward higher education, as until now their students are being forced to either abandon their educational careers or transit toward urban, monocultural, and monolingual school and high school alternatives.

Due to their innovative characteristics and their rather recent nature, intercultural universities are encountering a range of bureaucratic, financial, academic, and political problems. During long processes of decision-making and political negotiation and consultation on the choice of regions and communities in which to establish the new university programs, political obstacles, rivalries, and factional tensions have been frequent. Besides, the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity which characterizes the indigenous and afro-descendant regions of the continent still poses an important challenge for curricular development and diversification, but also for the official accreditation and recognition of these novel programs and their alumni by interest groups such as employers, professional associations, unions, and conventional universities.

This topic issue starts with an interview to Boaventura de Sousa Santos by its editors, Manuela Guilherme and Gunther Dietz in which he talks about the transformations occurring inside the university of the 21st century and how we have to get prepared for “a refoundation of the university” as we know it. In this line of thought, Boaventura highlights the role of the university extension and communitarian programs as part of a movement of resistance and argues that “the reconstruction or reinvention of confrontational politics requires an epistemological transformation” and that “we don’t need alternatives; we need an alternative thinking of alternatives.” In this interview, Boaventura de Sousa Santos summarizes the main ideas of his thought, as it has widely been published lately, mainly on his vision for a polyphonic pluriversity/university model, an ecology of knowledges and cognitive justice. He finalizes his interview by unveiling some of the general conclusions of his large project ALICE (ERC Advanced grant) whose founding principle is that “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice” given that the knowledges of the world by far exceed the Eurocentric knowledge that has dominated and ignored other epistemologies.

The following article, by Laura Selene Mateos Cortés and Gunther Dietz, analyzes the different ways in which the Mexican intercultural education subsystem conceives “interculturalidad,” more specifically, the authors carry out an ethnography of intercultural discourses, based at Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural, which are critical toward exogenous interculturality and focused on empowering local subaltern subjects. The article starts by comparing/contrasting different approaches to intercultural education as they have been described by English-speaking publications and implemented in Europe, mainly in the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as in continental Europe, and the same concept and experiments in Latin America. They also refer to the increasing “transnationalization” of the educational policies and their technocratic tools and its impact and pressure put on intercultural education programs of all models and at all levels. They report a field study with teachers of this “intercultural university” in Mexico who define their own understanding of the concept “interculturality” and find out that, on the one hand, “the globalized intercultural discourse migrates transnationally,” focusing here on the perspective of the local actors who participate “from the bottom” in what they call “the discourse migration process” and, on the other hand, that the participants are receptors as well as producers of their own discourse.

The next article, by Guillermo Williamson, also “expresses interculturality polyphonically from the Latin-American perspective” and reports “the nature and condition of the academic reflection on interculturality carried out in universities, in supposedly intercultural contexts.” This article is all the most relevant in this collection as intercultural education is minimally represented in Chile’s educational system, more particularly in higher education institutions, both the more traditional and the newer ones, either private and public, which have been more concerned about developing technological and vocational courses, following the dominant trend of Latin American, and worldwide, universities, despite the debate promoted by some academics engaged with plural and fairer epistemological citizenship. This article gives an overview of this debate from the particular point of view of universities in Chile which is enlightening to the discussion of this topic from other perspectives, mainly those that attempt to struggle the neoliberal marketization of university masked by glittering buzzwords such as internationalization and globalization. Despite the increasing inclusion of intercultural rights in most Latin-American Constitutions, the path for real production of new knowledge and cognitive justice has still been very slow.

Then, Carlos Octavio Sandoval brings the focus back to Mexico and the Intercultural University of Veracruz. He gives an historical account of the presence and development of the Nahuatl-speaking group in that region and follows by reporting how endangered it currently is due to its absence in the educational system, low status and, in consequence, unsuccessful competition with Spanish, the dominant colonial language. The author then gives an impressive account of the strategies being implemented at the Intercultural University of Veracruz in order to revitalize this endangered language, namely: (a) promoting writing and reading in Nahuatl; (b) adopting an adequate writing system; (c) publishing a regular local bilingual magazine; (d) showing fragments of Nahuatl poetry, written by students and teachers, in public walls in the different municipalities of the region; (e) using Nahuatl as an academic language at the university (guidelines for academic writing; theses writing; colloquia; curriculum design; interdialectical dialog; language teaching to nonspeakers; diploma program in mediation, translation, and interpretation).

In the article that follows, Isabel Dulfano explores the relationship between antiglobalization, counterhegemonic discourse, and indigenous feminist alternative knowledge production. She bases her article on the autoethnographic writing of some Indigenous feminists from Latin America that questions the assumptions and presuppositions of Western development models and globalization, while asserting an identity as contemporary Indigenous activist academic women.

Finally, Catherine Manathunga focuses on the issue of intercultural doctoral supervision and deals with the questions involved with the recognition of the validity of a diversity of ways of knowing, and of gathering knowledge, and bring them into play in doctoral supervision. She argues that there is a need for serious commitment to understanding how place, time, and knowledge play out in supervision across and between cultures.