Indigenous Movement, Higher Education, and Equitable Interculturality

DANIEL MATO

Fairfax, Virginia

Conferencia; Invited Lecture; 2010

Cultural Studies Program, George Mason University

The idea of social movements is usually associated, in a reductionist manner, with the carrying out of protests in public spaces and with negotiations in institutional political spaces. Social movements develop their practices in those as well as in other social spaces, as for example in education. Their most visible educational initiatives are short-term courses and workshops geared toward training the political and technical resource persons required by their associated organizations, as well as other social agents relevant to their agenda. Sectors of some social movements, though, have gone beyond these efforts, and have promoted, or even developed by themselves, higher education initiatives. They advance higher education initiatives in order to be able to count on the political, professional and technical resource individuals necessary to successfully advance their projects of economic, political, and institutional and legal reforms, ensure their implementation, defend rights, implement projects suitable to their agenda, etc. In this presentation I briefly discuss the experiences of some significant institutions of higher education that have been created by indigenous organizations in Latin America.