Higher Education State Repression And Neoliberal Reform In Nicaragua

This innovative volume makes a key contribution to debates around the role of the university as a space of resistance by highlighting the liberatory practices undertaken to oppose dual pressures of state repression and neoliberal reform at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in Nicaragua. Using a critical ethnographic approach to frame the experiences of faculty and students through vignettes, chapters present contextualized, analytical contributions from students, scholars, and university leaders to draw attention to the activism present within teaching, research, and administration while simultaneously calling attention to critical higher education and international solidarity as crucial means of maintaining academic freedom, university autonomy, oppositional knowledge production, and social outreach in higher education globally. This text will benefit researchers, students, and academics in the fields of higher education, educational policy and politics, and international and comparative education. Those interested in equality and human rights, Central America, and the themes of revolution and protest more broadly will also benefit from this volume.

This edited volume contributes a novel understanding of the past, present and future of higher education across the six countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Against the backdrop of intense political, ideological and epistemological disruptions across the Arabian Gulf Region over the last two decades, this volume adopts critical comparative perspectives in order to chart the history, present-day and future realities of higher education in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. By focusing on dynamics relating to neoliberalism, and using the notions of ‘tensionality’ and ‘locality’ to situate topics such as curricula, policies, practices, the volume engages with current discourses, controversies and themes such as the internationalization and marketization of higher education in these countries. In doing so, the book offers a theoretical framework to enable greater understanding of the contemporary functioning of higher education in the Arabian Gulf Region. This text will benefit scholars, academics and students in the fields of higher education and international and comparative education more broadly. Those involved with educational policy and politics, and Middle Eastern studies in general, will also benefit from this volume.

This book offers counternarratives from People of Color (POC) engaged in varied departments, faculties, and institutions in higher education to interrogate and challenge the construct of whiteness as an ideological form reproduced across campuses throughout the United States. Documenting individuals’ lived experiences, the text uses narratives, personal stories, and autoethnographic approaches to explore how social and racial injustices manifest themselves at both a macro- and micro-level through structures and ideologies of whiteness, as well as personal and group interactions. This book, divided into four valuable parts, offers reconceptualizations of racial diversity in higher education, and further explores identity politics within the academy to ultimately posit that a varied approach is necessary to combat the equally varied ideological forms of whiteness. This text will benefit scholars, academics, and students in the fields of higher education, race and ethnicity studies, and academic librarianship more broadly. Those involved with the multicultural education, education policy and politics, and equality and human rights in general will also benefit from this volume.

Around the world, students in higher education suffer from and deal with psychosocial problems. This phenomenon is universal and seems to be increasing. A vast number of students enter higher education with problems like stress, anxiety or depression, or develop them during their student lives, due to, for example, loneliness, family crisis, mental health or study environment issues. Battling, belonging and recognition are the focal points of this book’s analyses, showing how students faced with psychosocial problems experience high degrees of stigma and exclusion in the academic communities and society as such. The book is based on research situated in a welfare society, Denmark, where students have relatively easy access to higher education and to public support for education as well as special support for students with psychosocial problems. Taking a student perspective, the book provides in-depth, qualitative analyses of what characterizes student life, which specific psychosocial and other problems students experience, how problems are constructed, represented and become significant in relation to studying, and, not least, how students deal with them. It will be of great interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of educational psychology, sociology of education and higher education. It will also be of interest to supervisors and administrators in higher education.

This book presents a rich case study examining physical and spatial factors of urban campus design that influence student experience and wellbeing. The text details important historical context illustrating the foundational concepts and purpose of college sites in the United States and maps economic reforms and policies which have driven the development of today’s inner-city campuses. Focusing on Bronx Community College, New York, and looking specifically at how the presence or absence of green space impacts students, the text then draws on diverse student voices to examine how students use open spaces, and how this influences their sense of belonging, stress reduction, and scholarly identities. The author’s historical and qualitative research presents original insights and relies on a rich body of textual and on-site investigation. This book will be a valuable resource for researchers and academics with an interest in urban education and higher education. It will be of particular interest to those with a focus on multicultural education and education policy.

This book builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants—the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants—as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures.

Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution (1979-1990) initiated a broad program of social transformation to improve the situation of the working class and poor, women, and other non-elite groups through agrarian reform, restructured urban employment, and wide access to health care, education, and social services. This book explores how Nicaragua's least powerful citizens have fared in the years since the Sandinista revolution, as neoliberal governments have rolled back these state-supported reforms and introduced measures to promote the development of a market-driven economy. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted throughout the 1990s, Florence Babb describes the negative consequences that have followed the return to a capitalist path, especially for women and low-income citizens. In addition, she charts the growth of women's and other social movements (neighborhood, lesbian and gay, indigenous, youth, peace, and environmental) that have taken advantage of new openings for political mobilization. Her ethnographic portraits of a low-income barrio and of women's craft cooperatives powerfully link local, cultural responses to national and global processes.