The paper discusses the construction of a collective research project focused on the analysis of the youth from a “marginalized” urban area. The subjects of the research are all students of a high school, created by a local university specifically for the needs of their community. We look into the processes of their construction as knowing subjects that possess their own ideas on what it means to be young, participate in personal networks, and have had a unique experience related to the human rights, which more than often are violated in the case of “marginalized” youth. In the paper we discuss the very elaboration of the research object. Based on the constructivist paradigm of the systems approach of Rolando Garcia, our research has led us to make explicit our own standing on the empirical problem we have chosen and thus the epistemological and theoretical position we adopt to construct the research problem. The “parts” and the “processes” our system is made of are the product of our standing on the issue we analyse in the research. Adherents to the “epistemology of the south” of Boaventura De Sousa Santos and the critical perspective on culture and development of Esteban Krotz, we apply “alternative” concepts to “name” the empirical referents and serve of the complex systems thinking to reveal the “other” side of the urban area known as the “south” of Mérida. Marginalized, poor and violent, according to the official and media discourse, in our research it also stands out as a context of social injustice, racism, and discrimination in which some young people have risen as subjects that have defied their life circumstances, and have constructed ideas of what the good life and happiness –a good, dignified, free, and happy life (as Krotz (2002 y 2004) puts it)– would be like. This utopian horizon which the subjects aspire to reach –its components, challenges, and strategies to make it closer– is something we try to make visible through the analysis of the three principal sub-categories that conform the three subsystems of the major system that our research delimits as its object.
Abstract. The innovative pedagogical movement that boomed in the second half of the 1980s exhausted itself relatively early on and never became a sustainable factor of institutional development in Russia. In this article, we investigate the reasons behind this phenomenon using interviews with participants and narrative analysis of periodicals and archival materials. By doing so, we justify the point that the goal of promoting subjective emancipation and adopting the culture of freedom dominated the goals of organizational project management. We show that the pedagogical movement was dependent on the institutional patterns ingrained in the social order of the late Soviet era. Innovations developed within the framework of a specific situation: individual communities emerging around individual authors were capable of establishing the "new" as a subjective legacy, but they were unable to develop or even retain it in existing institutionalized forms. Keywords: history of education, innovation pedagogical movement, subjective emancipation, subjectification of innovations. 10.17323/1814-9545-2016-3-224-237 In this article, we try to explain why the powerful innovation movement in pedagogy that boomed in the second half of the 1980s exhausted itself relativelyearly and had virtually no effect on the institutional development of the Russian higher education system. We believe that the specific features of the late Soviet society, which gave rise to the pedagogical movement, require a special theoretical perspective to analyze the innovation processes. The most widespread approaches to the study of innovations [Christensen, 1997;Fenn, Raskino, 2008;Rogers, 2003] are based on the linear-time model. In this case, the distribution of innovations is plotted on the axis of time as a series of consecutive stages. Thereby, innovations are objectified and regarded as a product or technology distanced from its creator. DOI:
The paper presents an applied research project that looks into whether the Yucatec Maya language can become an identity factor for the urban youth of Maya descent inhabitants of a marginal urban area in southeastern Mexico, against the entropic tendency towards the Yucatec Maya language loss in the urban environment. Our starting point is Maturana’s idea that through languaging and emotioning human worlds are built and maintained; our lives are intertwined in interactional networks, therefore we only exist as human beings through conversations we hold with other human beings. We go on to explore the types of connection to the Maya culture and language in the case of the young men and women who took part in a workshop “My life and the Maya culture: roots and relations”, and how this connection is constructed through languaging and emotioning whithin their families, personal networks, and the workshop itself. The conversations –that emerge through languaging and emotioning– are seen as potential triggers of changes in representations and attitudes towards the minorized language and culture. We also maintain that for the changes to be sustainable, the rest of the local society, viewed as a cultural multiverse (Krotz, 2004), is to recognize Maya speakers as legitimate others (Maturana & Nisis, 2014), so that the non-Maya groups are also to engage to ensure the structural coupling between the diverse parts that conform the multiverse. Our role as researchers, then, is not that of external observers; we assume our part in the cultural multiverse as participants in its construction who by languaging, emotioning, and subsequent acting, seek to contribute to a broader acceptance and respect towards the minorized language and its speakers.
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