The Politics of Academic Autonomy in Latin America

The Politics of Academic Autonomy in Latin America

Author: Fernanda Beigel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1317020596

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Academic autonomy has been a dominant issue among Latin American social studies, given that the production of knowledge in the region has been mostly suspected for its lack of originality and the replication of Euro-American models. Politicization within the higher education system and recurrent military interventions in universities have been considered the main structural causes for this heteronomy and, thus, the main obstacles for 'scientific' achievements. This groundbreaking book analyses the struggle for academic autonomy taking into account the relevant differences between the itinerary of social and natural sciences, the connection of institutionalization and prestige-building, professionalization and engagement. From the perspective of the periphery, academic dependence is not merely a vertical bond that ties active producers and passive reproducers. Even though knowledge produced in peripheral communities has low rates of circulation within the international academic system, this doesn't imply that their production is - or always has been - the result of a massive import of foreign concepts and resources. This book intends to show that the main differences between mainstream academies and peripheral circuits are not precisely in the lack of indigenous thinking, but in the historical structure of academic autonomy, which changes according to a set of factors -mainly the role of the state in the higher education system. This historical structure explains the particular features of the process of professionalization in Latin American scientific fields.


The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America

The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America

Author: A. Dinerstein

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-12-22

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1137316012

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The author contests older concepts of autonomy as either revolutionary or ineffective vis-à-vis the state. Looking at four prominent Latin American movements, she defines autonomy as 'the art of organising hope': a tool for indigenous and non-indigenous movements to prefigure alternative realities at a time when utopia can be no longer objected.


Pharmaceutical Autonomy and Public Health in Latin America

Pharmaceutical Autonomy and Public Health in Latin America

Author: Matthew B. Flynn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-12-05

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1317565606

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Brazil has occupied a central role in the access to medicines movement, especially with respect to drugs used to treat those with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). How and why Brazil succeeded in overcoming powerful political and economic interests, both at home and abroad, to roll-out and sustain treatment represents an intellectual puzzle. In this book, Matthew Flynn traces the numerous challenges Brazil faced in its efforts to provide essential medicines to all of its citizens. Using dependency theory, state theory, and moral underpinnings of markets, Flynn delves deeper into the salient factors contributing to Brazil’s successes and weaknesses, including control over technology, creation of political alliances, and instrumental use of normative frameworks and effectively explains the ability of countries to fulfill the prescription drug needs of its population versus the interests and operations of the global pharmaceutical industry Pharmaceutical Autonomy and Public Health in Latin America is one of the only books to provide an in-depth account of the challenges that a developing country, like Brazil, faces to fulfill public health objectives amidst increasing global economic integration and new international trade agreements. Scholars interested in public health issues, HIV/AIDS, and human rights, but also to social scientists interested in Latin America and international political economy will find this an original and thought provoking read.


Social and Political Transitions During the Left Turn in Latin America

Social and Political Transitions During the Left Turn in Latin America

Author: Karen Silva-Torres

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1000440222

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Social and Political Transitions During the Left Turn in Latin America provides fourteen contributions to understand, from a multidisciplinary perspective, processes of socio-political reconfigurations in the region from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s. The Left Turn was the regional shift to left-of-center governments and social movements that sought to replace the neoliberal policies of the 1990s. This volume aims to answer the overarching research question: how do state and societal (national and transnational) actors trigger and shape processes of political and socio-economic transitions in Latin America from the rise to the decline of the Left Turn. The book presents case studies in which transitions are moments of change and uncertainty, which one cannot predict their definitive outcomes. The various case studies presented in the book place actors and processes in specific historical and socio-political contexts, which are influenced directly or indirectly by the historical trajectory of Latin America’s Left Turn. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of Social and Political History, Latin American History, and those interested in the social and political developments in Latin America more broadly.


Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America

Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America

Author: Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 9780691023366

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In this comparative study of the guerrilla movements of Latin America, the author explores the origins and outcomes of rural insurgencies in cases since 1956. Focusing on the personal backgrounds of guerrilla leaders, the book explores why some groups acquired greater military strength than others.


Negotiating Autonomy

Negotiating Autonomy

Author: Kelly Bauer

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0822988119

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The 1980s and ‘90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights. In Negotiating Autonomy, Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy.


Latin America in Global International Relations

Latin America in Global International Relations

Author: Amitav Acharya

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1000408663

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Using decades of their own insight into teaching undergraduate International Relations (IR) courses, leading experts offer an introduction to IR thinking throughout history in Latin America, unfolding ideas, voices, concepts and approaches from the region that can contribute to the broader Global IR discussion. The book highlights and discuss the growing possibility of a Latin American agency, defined broadly to include both material and ideational elements, in regional and international relations, covering areas where Latin America’s contributions are especially visible and relevant, such as regionalism, international law, security management, and Latin America’s relations with the outside world. This is not about exclusively "Latin American solutions to Latin American problems", but rather about contributions in which Latin Americans define the terms for understanding the issues and set the terms for the nature and scope of outside involvement. Written with verve and clarity, Latin America in Global International Relations exposes readers to the relevance of redefining and broadening IR theory. It will serve as a guide for instructors in structuring their courses and in identifying the place of Latin America in the discipline.


Kuxlejal Politics

Kuxlejal Politics

Author: Mariana Mora

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-12-18

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1477314474

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Over the past two decades, Zapatista indigenous community members have asserted their autonomy and self-determination by using everyday practices as part of their struggle for lekil kuxlejal, a dignified collective life connected to a specific territory. This in-depth ethnography summarizes Mariana Mora’s more than ten years of extended research and solidarity work in Chiapas, with Tseltal and Tojolabal community members helping to design and evaluate her fieldwork. The result of that collaboration—a work of activist anthropology—reveals how Zapatista kuxlejal (or life) politics unsettle key racialized effects of the Mexican neoliberal state. Through detailed narratives, thick descriptions, and testimonies, Kuxlejal Politics focuses on central spheres of Zapatista indigenous autonomy, particularly governing practices, agrarian reform, women’s collective work, and the implementation of justice, as well as health and education projects. Mora situates the proposals, possibilities, and challenges associated with these decolonializing cultural politics in relation to the racialized restructuring that has characterized the Mexican state over the past twenty years. She demonstrates how, despite official multicultural policies designed to offset the historical exclusion of indigenous people, the Mexican state actually refueled racialized subordination through ostensibly color-blind policies, including neoliberal land reform and poverty alleviation programs. Mora’s findings allow her to critically analyze the deeply complex and often contradictory ways in which the Zapatistas have reconceptualized the political and contested the ordering of Mexican society along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.


Sociology in Argentina

Sociology in Argentina

Author: Juan Pedro Blois

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-01-11

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 3030635201

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This Palgrave Pivot offers a comprehensive portrayal of the development of sociology in Argentina from the mid-1950s to the present day. This first long-term account in English maps the discipline’s troubled trajectory and its close relation to the broader (and turbulent) Argentinian political and economic context, and provides a dramatic exemplification of the politicization and polarization of an academic field and its consequences. Divided in seven chapters, this book examines the sharply different phases that the discipline went through: from the pioneering 1950s, in which sociology was presented as a “science”, to the activist revolt in the 1960s, led by the student movement, to the traumatic experience of the 1970s, when a cruel dictatorship was established and many sociologists were persecuted, and from its progressive recovery from the 1980s to its current growing (yet unstable) presence within academia, and within state agencies, corporations and consulting agencies, and NGOs. This work will appeal to social scientists and students interested in the relations between academia and politics, and to a general readership interested in the recent history of Argentina and Latin-America.


The Impasse of the Latin American Left

The Impasse of the Latin American Left

Author: Franck Gaudichaud

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2022-04-04

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1478022825

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In The Impasse of the Latin American Left, Franck Gaudichaud, Massimo Modonesi, and Jeffery R. Webber explore the region’s Pink Tide as a political, economic, and cultural phenomenon. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Latin American politics experienced an upsurge in progressive movements, as popular uprisings for land and autonomy led to the election of left and center-left governments across Latin America. These progressive parties institutionalized social movements and established forms of state capitalism that sought to redistribute resources and challenge neoliberalism. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, these governments failed to transform the underlying class structures of their societies or challenge the imperial strategies of the United States and China. Now, as the Pink Tide has largely receded, the authors offer a portrait of this watershed period in Latin American history in order to evaluate the successes and failures of the left and to offer a clear-eyed account of the conditions that allowed for a right-wing resurgence.