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Editorial

Social movements and neoliberalisation in Latin American and Caribbean education: subjectivities, spaces and histories

Issue rationale

This special issue centres on social movement practices and the policies and practices of neoliberalisation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Neoliberal practices and policies, which wage war (Giroux Citation2014) and terrorise (Giroux Citation2015), have put public education in crisis. With wealth so concentrated and unregulated, some call ours a new dark age (Robinson Citation2014), where our basic humanity is at risk, or a new gilded age (Krugman Citation2014), with extreme socio-economic stratification. Private interests like textbook companies dictate teachable content and teacher assessment (Madeloni and Gorlewski Citation2013); however, privatisation can prove challenging to locate or redirect, with endogenous privatisation (Ball and Youdell Citation2007, 13) inserting the spirit of the marketplace into schooling, including through non-market practices. For instance, through responsibilisation (Done and Murphy Citation2018, 146), where greater accountability in times of fiscal austerity falls upon teachers, and through devolution (Brown Citation2015, 131), where solving problems falls less on centralised state and more upon individuals, participation in neoliberalism is based on individuals’ thoughts and actions (2015, 133) as much as on economic activity. Further, with innovation (Sydow and Alfred Citation2012, 56) presented as a moral imperative for disrupting the status quo of schooling, with choice (Friedman Citation1955) assumed necessary to stimulate low-performing public schools through market competition and with the financial backing of corporate foundations in public education (Lipman Citation2011, 100), potential sites of social movement intervention within neoliberalisation are multiple and entangled. To locate social movements, which enact localised, emotional and cultural performances and practices, alongside neoliberalisation, which dominates and acts upon our moral and behavioural input, may seem a misrecognition of the scale and scope of the problem of what critical education should include. This issue, however, does just that.

In juxtaposing Caribbean and Latin American social movements and neoliberalisation, the articles showcase social movements, education and neoliberalisation in actual terms. First, the grounded examples of neoliberalisation and social movements provided add to the research on actually existing neoliberalisms (Brenner and Theodore Citation2002), showcasing actual responses of critical social actors and avoiding the tendency to reify neoliberalism. Policies and practices of neoliberalisation are often studied and analysed as things that eliminate criticality and democratically engaged schooling. In the cases presented in this issue, engaged educational actors have struggled within neoliberal educational systems for nearly 50 years. Such work breaks down neoliberalisation into concrete contexts, which in turn sheds light on what alternative hegemonies (Gramsci Citation1971) are possible for actors on the ground as well as for researchers of social movements in other contexts. Surely, another hegemony may not be possible while neoliberal economic relations continue to plague schooling with ‘termitelike’ rationalities of the marketplace (Brown Citation2015, 35), conditions that endure even when state policies go directly against the neoliberalism of prior decades. However, Latin American and Caribbean neoliberalisation – and its contestation – remain multiple. As the articles in this special issue show, critical action thrives even if the shapes of the responses remain entangled with neoliberalisation. What is more, the crises of neoliberalisation, following Argentine activist and scholar Verónica Gago (Citation2017, 3–4), may provide guidance on appreciating how people organise, make meaning and shape politics, as seen in the articles in this issue.

As free-market policies have more than a half-century of intersection with education in Latin America and the Caribbean, this region provides local context for our articles. For sure, new social movements gather force translocally (Alvarez et al. Citation2014), translate from other struggles (Tsing Citation2011) and maintain transborder networks (Stephen Citation2007). However, as responses to neoliberalisation are often entangled with national policies and culturally specific modes of protest, and since Milton Friedman’s 1975 visit to Chile presaged economic policy and constitutional shifts towards marketisation, understanding neoliberalism in education calls for local specificity. Faced with pressures to make social relations more entrepreneurial (Burchell Citation1996), where non-state agencies monitor and evaluate state spaces like schooling (Rose Citation1996, 56), Latin American and Caribbean social actors have decades of experience conducting themselves faced with overtly neoliberal sets of policies or ‘post neoliberal’ (Fernandes Citation2010, 24) attempts to correct the legacy of unfettered marketisation.

These articles on subjectivities, spaces and histories represent a range of critical engagements with neoliberalisation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Chile figures prominently in these articles. In the articles by de la Maza and Bolomey, by Hernández and by Inzunza, Assael, Cornejo and Redondo, we see a dictatorial Chile privatising education through the 1980 constitution and later reforms. Student and Mapuche activists develop more nuanced demands to their movements, university students joining parliament and Mapuche activists turning from inclusion to rights. Language becomes salient in many of the pieces. Jean-Pierre illustrates how local and nation-state mediation in language of instruction matters in Haiti where state policy maintains colonial French-only language polices instead of teaching in the Haitian Creole spoken by nearly all schoolchildren. Similarly, Gellman relates how language rights activism in El Salvador and Mexico helps people in the pueblos originarios to bolster their presence in nation-states that position them as second-class citizens and within neoliberal policies that assume a monocultural citizen. Rural and urban communities are featured, too. Mariano and Tarlau explore how land rights in Brazil encompass communal living and alternative forms of education within the state system, while Grinberg describes teachers and administrators outside Buenos Aires reshaping the everyday life of a school local facing violent episodes.

Three major themes surface: contested terrains; concretisation of struggle; and (trans)localised lines of contagion. We see contested terrains through quality education. The articles by de la Maza and Bolomey, by Hernández and by Inzunza, Assael, Cornejo and Redondo present educational social movements deriving from historical progression and emerging as foundational in shaping educational quality. de la Maza and Bolomey note that the Mapuche movement responded to the 2006 secondary school movement with a question on what bilingual/intercultural education should be vis-á-vis Chile’s Ley Orgánica Constitucional de Enseñanza, where Mapuche activists also demanded quality. The article by Hernández and that by Inzunza, Assael, Cornejo and Redondo both discuss the demands made for quality education.

Contested terrains furthermore centre on concrete practices like speaking a familiar language and finding safety. Schools, which often promote assimilation and language loss (Jean-Pierre; de la Maza and Bolomey; and Gellman), become contestable. Amidst violence in an Argentine slum (Grinberg), teachers redo the school interior to welcome neighbours during shootouts. Chile’s Pingüino student activists created a movement that learned from prior mistakes, using horizontal solidarity (Hernández). The Pingüinos faced repression and their activism became criminalised (Inzunza, Assael, Cornejo and Redondo), although they were invited to meet with the president and influenced the Universitarios in 2011. Finding solidarity, the Argentine educators fortifying the school in the middle of gun battles also met with administrators who were, sadly, unable to respond aptly to the needs of the educators who struggled so hard to reshape the everyday life of the slum schools.

Contested terrains and the concretisation of the struggle extend to educational movements developing movement-specific relationships with the state and wider civil society. Here, it is important to look locally. In Haiti, the nation-state has the power to make Creole the language of instruction and promote development through culturally relevant schooling (Jean-Pierre), while the way El Salvador recognises pueblo originarios may differ from the way recognition is negotiated in Chiapas, Mexico. In rural Brazil, the Landless Peasant Movement (MST) (Mariano and Tarlau) creates a communalist and anti-capitalist schooling system within, rather than autonomous of, the public education system. There needs to be a deep look into the specific historical conditions that make a movement come to life. Key Mapuche movement actors came to the fore at the end of the Chilean dictatorship and beginning the period of the Concertación (de la Maza and Bolomey), and responded to the 2006 movement. Still, in approaching neoliberalisation and education in Latin America, it is just as important to look at the non-local. There is also long history of occupation of lands across borders. To understand the importance of Creole language, for instance, it is imperative to understand the coloniality of power between France and Haiti (Jean-Pierre).

The local tells part of the story of what is appropriated and rejected in a movement. The Mapuche Movement (de la Maza and Bolomey) and the pueblos originarios [first peoples] (Gellman) each drew upon the United Nations 2007 declarations of rights, and the Pingüinos occupied the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization office as a protest point (Inzunza, Assael, Cornejo and Redondo). Brazil’s MST depended on Soviet, Cuban and Italian approaches for manual labour and intellectual formation (Mariano and Tarlau). Chilean neoliberalism, once a model across the region and the world, met with Chilean university student activism that formed part of the wider 2011 movements like the Arab Spring (Inzunza, Assael, Cornejo and Redondo). Contagion in social movements means looking across spaces and practices (Alvarez et al. Citation2014; Stephen Citation2007; Tsing Citation2011). The articles in this special issue reveal subjectivities, spaces and histories in Latin America and Caribbean Social Movements. In providing actual, instantiated responses of social actors working within entrenched neoliberal and post-neoliberal systems, they stimulate thought on the impact of critical social practices in neoliberalisation and education, in this region and beyond.

Stephen T. Sadlier
Independent Researcher
[email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

References

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