Runas. Journal of Education and Culture

Transspecies: Transition from humans to non-humans

Jorge Alberto López-Guzmán — 2022-05-17

The transspecies can be defined as men and women who do not identify themselves as human beings, feel that they are trapped in bodies that do not belong to them, and reconfigure their sex, gender, and identity in favor of fighting in social, political, and legal spaces. In this way, this article aims to investigate the discussions that have been taking place for a few decades in different academic disciplines and forms of artistic and cultural representation on the definition of transspecies. It is important to state that this article is the result of a documentary investigation through a bibliographic review on the subject where seven hegemonic typologies were found that speak and understand the transspecies in different ways. Likewise, the writing adds one more typology on the transspecies, —in the understanding that in the documentary review it was the one on which the least information was found—. This does not mean that there is no bibliography on the subject, rather it means that it is scarce and that in the investigation for this article the positions on transspecies were limited to being synonyms of cyborgs, hybrids, posthumanists, transhumanists, or zoosexuals. In conclusion, seven hegemonic typologies could be identified: the literary, technological, artistic, legal, ethological, sociological, and psychoanalytical conception, and finally, the conception about which the least information was found, which is the transition from the human to the non-human animal, in this trans-species conception, men and women do not identify themselves as human beings, but as an animal species.

Field, habitus and capital. An analytical proposal from the comparative perspective

Ana Karen Colin Márquez — 2022-05-16

The theoretical-conceptual foundation is one of the references to approach a research problem and although an analysis of the object of study is carried out from the same theoretical perspective, different works generate reasoning and unique results, oriented to different social dimensions about their practical implications, for this it is important to consider the use that various scientific productions have given to the same theory. The present work has the objective to describe and analyze the theoretical and empirical approach that has been given to the study of social trajectories and that has used the theory of Pierre Bourdieu as a reflective, analytical and explanatory reference for the subject in question; for this purpose, different scientific productions were used, which make up a state of knowledge, distinguishing as categories of analysis its main characteristics such as objective, temporality, method, context, and scope; this was done using the methodology of comparative studies proposed by Bereday, which consists of four phases: description, interpretation, juxtaposition, and comparison. Once the comparison analysis has been carried out, some final reflections of what is found are presented, such as the tendency to apply qualitative methodologies such as life and biographical histories, the analytical similarity of the authors in positioning the subjects in specific fields according to the type of capital they possess and habitus acquired, as well as interpreting their trajectories in conditions of reproduction or mobility according to the permanence or transformation in a time and conditions certain.

Dossier presentation: Education and learning experiences from grassroots-community movements in the Global South

Alberto Colin Huizar — 2022-06-30

Dossier presentation: Education and learning experiences from grassroots-community movements in the Global South

Children’s participation and collective lessons in defense of territories and rights in pandemic times

Eliud Torres Velázquez — 2022-05-12

In Mexico, March 2020 saw the start of the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus, halting most face-to-face activities under the banner of staying home, although in working-class sectors this was not possible, as informal and everyday work are the main source of income. Children stopped attending school and habitual socialization spaces to seclude at home, even though working-class children, such as the ones from blue-collar families and those who live in organized communities, still held interactions with peers and adults. Knowing how they lived this period, the difficulties they encountered and the organizational actions they took part in, will make it possible to recognize the lessons learned in their territories for the exercise of their rights. In the present postdoctoral research report, a review is provided for the initiatives launched by the Mexican organizations Melel Xojobal in Chiapas and Organización Popular Francisco Villa de Izquierda Independiente in Mexico City with children during the lockdown period due to the pandemic, with the goal of reflecting on collective and children’s lessons, as well as sketching the educative and collaborative challenges in the medium-term. Facing the suspension of all face-to-face meetings in their territories, the methodology used consisted of remote tools, such as phone interviews, email communication, discussion groups and virtual ethnologies, psychosocial support through videocalls, and the exchange of documents. Some of the results obtained show that adults had little interest in the ways children lived and understood the unprecedented events, and that children were concerned about having food and being healthy, as well as informed and able to contribute to the family welfare through mutual care, while the organizations were focused on attending to the health emergencies in the community and sought to know about children’s perceptions. As a conclusion, some lessons are identified, regarding the necessity to establish a better communication and horizontal, loving, and reciprocal relationships with children; to promote collective care and listening, as well as the exercise of rights, critical thinking, and community participation.

Emancipatory pedagogies: epistemic and emotional resistance in the initiatives of the Zapatista movement in Mexico

Carolina Elizabeth Díaz Iñigo — 2022-06-28

This article addresses the relationship between Zapatista critical pedagogy and the epistemic and emotional resistance that make it possible. In this sense, in the first part, we develop the relevance of emotions as a concomitant part of the coloniality of affectivity in the framework of the coloniality of power. Subsequently, we will analyze three examples of the epistemic and emotional resistance of Zapatista communities: 1) Zapatista autonomous education; 2) the participation of women bases of support; and finally, 3) the public events organized by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN in Spanish). All of this, as part of the construction of other meanings around education, not only within the Zapatista movement but also outside the communities.

Afro-Mexico: some bets to build an educational project of its own

María Concepción Patraca Rueda — 2022-06-29

The idea of thinking an own educational project that questions and vindicates the position that the Afro-descendant population has in Mexico, has been a path that bets for social and epistemic justice. For this construction, some implications of the constitutional recognition process occurring in 2019 are reviewed, and the self-recognition movements of the population, now called Afro-Mexican, are taken into account. In order to advance towards the design and consolidation of an educational project of their own and taking into account the challenges that this represents, both the epistemic matrices and the daily experiences of the African diaspora in Mexico, have been fundamental. Thus, this article focuses on proposing a series of reflections on the challenges and opportunities involved in building an educational project based on the dignity, justice and hope of the Afro people. This exercise is part of the advances of a doctoral thesis in Educational Research and involves the educational work that occurs inside and outside the school. What is reflected here is based on an approach to two Afro-descendant communities in Veracruz, Mexico. The contributions derived from the experiences of Afro-Veracruzian women, whose voices do not have a predominant place in the academy, nor in the power structures that name and legitimize them, are especially taken up. From that space, from the margins, their knowledge constitutes diverse responses to common challenges that respond to diverse concerns and demands, according to each context.

Construction of community resistance for territorial defense: repertoires of political action at the Preparatoria José Martí in Oaxaca, México

María Edith Escalón Portilla — 2022-06-28

This article is an approaching to pedagogical matrices and action repertoires which, within the Mexican educational system, have allowed a group of social actors to create a dissident project focused on territorial defense. Through school ethnography as a methodological perspective and the case study in two simultaneous planes -diachronic and synchronic-, interviews, observation and documentary analysis were carried out to recognize some elements of the atypical configuration of the Preparatoria Comunitaria José Martí, a school that trains young people between 14 and 20 years of age from the original Ikoots and Binnizá peoples in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in Oaxaca, Mexico. Considering that the environmental education offered by the State -far from questioning- justifies and legitimizes the dispossession promoted by ‘green capitalism’ neo-extractivist, with discourses associated with ‘sustainable development’, the case study shows how the routinization of repertoires of anti-extractivist collective action, the articulation of the school to the regional socio-environmental movement, as well as the discourses and specific practices of the protest force, integrate new ‘cognitive frameworks’ to the experience of struggle and resistance, as a form of socialization, which has been gradually internalized by young people with mechanisms of identity affirmation. From this analysis, which is part of a broader doctoral research, it is inferred that historical consciousness seems to displace environmental consciousness as a pedagogical resource, expanding the range of alternatives for young people to build their own agendas for social transformation and their own rebellions.

La Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca: interculturality and community outreach

José Leonel Vargas Hernández — 2022-06-27

In the last three decades, various social projects have emerged that have interculturality and intercultural education as their axis. Researchers, social movements, civil society organizations, and different governments have assumed interculturality as a space from which to articulate differences. This text seeks to know how interculturality and community bonding are worked at the Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca, Mexico (Unitierra, Oaxaca). The analysis is done through semi-structured interviews with 5 specialists in the community and intercultural education and 11 key actors from the Universidad de la Tierra, in addition to document review and direct observation from two brief stays at Unitierra, Oaxaca. In this space, a critical interculturality of cultural homogenization is practiced and the knowledge of the communities and their ways of life is recovered to produce an exchange of knowledge and a "diálogo de vivires" reflected in concrete practices within the community.

From protest to proposal, territorial creativity as a metacognitive device in a popular environmental education proposal from the Biobío Region, Chile

Débora Ramírez-Rojas — 2022-06-30

This publication shares conclusions drawn from the systematization of experiences from a training proposal based on a diagnosis of socio-environmental organizations located in an environmental sacrifice zone in five areas. The extractive proposal in the territory advances on different fronts, among them territorial planning with deficient participation and environmental education for capital in a public-private alliance that is expressed in corporate marketing and public environmental and educational policies. This neoliberal project keeps organizations in rection. The article condenses a proposal for popular environmental education built with the feedback of socio-territorial organizations that puts at the center territorial creativity based on the idea of continuity, pre-extractivist territorial memory, the ecological reality of the territory, and social creativity, sharing and building scientific and community knowledge in multisensory languages. Territorial creativity works as a metacognitive device of the training process, betting on co-designs that denote a transformation in the subject-nature relationship, allow a creative response to extractive threats and strengthen the organizational framework with the ultimate goal of advancing autonomy and resilient responses to the effects of extractivism in the territory.

The Cherán K’eri Community: Intercultural Education, Wisdom and Memory

Juan Jerónimo Lemus — 2022-06-30

This essay reflects on how intercultural education manifests itself in Cherán K'eri after the movement in defense of the forests that took place in 2011. Eleven years after that event that transformed the social and political conditions in the community that opened the opportunity for the exercise of political autonomy, it shows how a new consideration was made on the elements that led the Purhépecha community to retake the local cultural knowledge through the exercise of memory and oral tradition as pillars of an educational practice inserted in the community level but with its impact on state schooling in the face of the limitations of intercultural education.

Education as an antidote to subordination. For a pedagogical conception in an intercultural key in Argentine

Cintia Daniela Rodríguez Garat — 2022-06-28

This article aims to conceptually delimit the term "epistemic subalternization", from the approach offered by postcolonial theories. For this, it is oriented to examine the situation that occurs when the educational system does not contemplate the diverse epistemic-cultural knowledge belonging to the student body. In particular, it focuses on analyzing what happens with access to the right to education of the indigenous communities of Argentina, when the school naturalizes epistemic injustices. Finally, it is proposed to reflect on intercultural education as a proposal of intrinsic relevance to think about cultural and epistemic co-construction. In the conclusion, it was considered that, from the approach of epistemic injustices, there is a form of subalternization that generally coexists with other factors (social, political, economic, cultural and territorial) that complicate the approach to the problem and installed as social determinants of education and the pedagogical situation of these communities. For this reason, it was proposed to think about the need to build intercultural, that is, decolonizing, pedagogies. Indeed, the centrality of the proposal lies in the relevance of local, geo-situated narratives, typical of indigenous communities to performatively transform, from the foundations of common sense and in an intercultural key, pedagogical praxis.