Abstract
The space is fascinating. In a campus of 40 hectares there are two long, warehouse-like facilities containing hundreds of classrooms divided with thousands of partition walls. This national public university, destined to train about 50,000 students in accounting, administration, law, engineering, communications, medicine, and other predominant disciplines, is located inside the premises of a former automobile factory in the large working-class district of La Matanza, Argentina. A false ceiling separates the classrooms from the impressive roof of metal sheets, iron, and glass dating from the 1950s that encases the new structure like a supra-shell. There are plenty of fluorescent lamps and low-energy bulb lights. When members of the cleaning staff, who know how resistant the old roof is, remove the false ceiling’s opaque glasses to clean the latter we can glimpse the whole reality of the setting. Reflecting on my teaching at Universidad Nacional de La Matanza, I discuss in this chapter cultural studies’ strategies to open concrete, imaginative debates on radical democracy in the context of the marea rosada, or pink tide of leftist social movements and governments in Latin America.
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Notes
- 1.
La Matanza means the place of the massacre. It is unknown whether the name refers to Spanish colonizers’ massacre of indigenous peoples, or indigenous peoples’ massacre of invaders.
- 2.
National public universities are funded by the federal state, administered by an autonomous body of public authorities elected internally by students, graduates, faculty, and staff according to specific power dynamics; and free of tuition for undergraduate students.
- 3.
It included center-left governments in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Peru, and the more radical projects of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The term also refers to the social movements that set in motion those governments.
- 4.
Argentina elected a neoliberal-conservative president, Venezuela fell into a profound socio-political crisis, a conservative parliamentary coup destituted president Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, and Ecuador took a conservative path in 2017.
- 5.
See, for example, the news on the cultural festival Rockea BA organized by Buenos Aires state, a state company holding, La Matanza municipality, the university, and various brands, “Scioli invited thousands of youth to the event of rock and sports” (El1 2015, p. 3, my translation). Scioli was Buenos Aires’ governor and the presidential candidate of Frente para la Victoria (Front for Victory), the party that controlled the national government and Peronista politics between 2003 and 2015. Scioli praised the university because it trains a mass of youths who have “the hope of getting a job” (El1 2015, p. 3, my translation).
- 6.
As is seen, for instance, in the public relevance the university gives to its job fairs.
- 7.
Werner and Aguirre (2009), for example, showed that Chrysler’s workers participated in the critical shop-floor organizations and strikes of the 1970s.
- 8.
For example, in a well-known introduction to anthropology Mauricio Boivin and other authors developed the idea of an “anthropology of inequality” based on a “Gramscian” concept of hegemony that would replace the concept of ideology. For them, the latter is not useful because it supposedly grasps cultural inequalities as exclusively originated in the economic structure (Boivin, Rosato and Arribas 2004, p. 99).
- 9.
The academic system supports this production of specialized knowledge because it organizes curricula according to a stifling system of fragmented cathedra (professorships).
- 10.
Nagual takes its name from Mayan culture, according to which nahuales are powerful (natural, human, and animal) forces.
- 11.
For example, according to the World Bank (2008), Argentina should abandon traditional education for a model destined to train youths into flexible disciplines, favoring methods that guarantee rapid graduation.
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Castagno, P.A. (2019). Into the Factory: Teaching Cultural Studies as a Critique of Global Capitalism. In: Aksikas, J., Andrews, S., Hedrick, D. (eds) Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25393-6_13
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