Call for papers: Dossier "Latin American Student Activism in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Dialogues between Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico"
Latin American historiography and social sciences have in recent years questioned the geographical reductionism in the study of social and student movements. This approach, centered on capital cities and large universities, limits our understanding of the diversity of these movements by overlooking temporal and organizational particularities, politicization dynamics, horizontal structures, symbolic repertoires of action, and actors related to student activism at various educational levels. This preference for focusing analyses on large university cities as Bogotá, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, and Ciudad de México has limited our understanding of student movements by ignoring regional particularities. Such an approach tends to homogenize historical and contemporary processes, disregarding the great heterogeneity of the continent's political, social, and cultural geographies. Historiography, sociology, and political science have tended to privilege certain key dates in the history of student movements, thereby defining the most significant time periods and experiences, as well as the most relevant demands and achievements. The question, then, is not to disregard the research of recent decades but to promote ways of articulating past, present, and future research on 20th and 21st century student protests. The objective of this dossier is to foster a new discussion on student activism in Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico. By comparing these realities, we aim to identify both the commonalities that characterize the region and the national particularities that enrich the analysis. In this way, we hope to uncover new research questions, establish transnational connections, analyze the influences of similar processes with different temporalities, and examine the convergences in student protests against policies of global and neoliberal governance. Moreover, we seek to highlight the importance of dialogues between the local, the regional, the national, and the hemispheric in the study of student activism.
This dossier aims to foster a more decentralized approaches to understanding Latin American student movements, enriching these analyses with the sociopolitical contexts of the five regions under consideration. In Mexico, it proposes analyzing the protests of the student movement for democratization throughout the 20th century. In the Caribbean, the challenge of organizing in one of the regions with the most restricted access to higher education and the greatest invisibility in relation to the continent. In Central America, the regeneration of student movements in the face of constant political conflicts and authoritarian drifts. In Venezuela, the complexities of the activation and relationship of student activism with the Bolivarian experience. Finally, in Colombia, the tension between student movements, political violence, armed conflict, and peacebuilding.