JS-35.3
Citizenship Projects for a Better Future: The Struggle for Education in Mexico
Key Words: alternative futures, utopia, citizenship projects, social movements, educational structural reforms
One approach to analyze possible futures from social movement perspectives is organized through the critical theory of citizenship. Social movements seek to build utopias, as alternative futures through spaces of experience, memory production and a future vision (Pleyers, Habermas, Heller, Lefebvre, Tamayo). Utopias are dialectical processes of social construction, expressed in alternative projects of citizenship, being movements seeking to establish themselves as a universal alternative for social change (Dagnino, Olvera, Panfichi, Tamayo).
Mexico is an example of an uneven and combined impact of globalization, expressed in the categorical imposition of structural reforms towards privatization, such as education, and the dismantling of workers' rights at the turn of twenty-first century (Olivier).
Teachers, Zapatista indigenous communities and Ayotzinapa young people normalistas have raised, not without difficulty, distinctive citizenship projects, which place the aspect of education as a solid foundation of social and pedagogical construction of alternative futures.
The emphasis of this paper is to reconstruct and compare these distinctive projects of citizenship. It will outline the dense and paradoxical path of citizenship building, facing the challenges of the global era. At the same time, it will show limits and opportunities to align contention discourses in the definition of viable utopias (Laclau), in the face of globalization.