Local responses to globalizing trends: student-produced materials at a Colombian public university

Abstract

Globalizing trends—underscored by neoliberalism, privatization and imperial legacies—are changing the nature and purpose of education across the world. 'With these rules of the capitalist game,' a Colombian student argues, 'the public university in Latin America has been played.' Manifestations of these trends, however, vary in different locales, as do responses to them. Indeed, globalizing trends are continuously shaped and reshaped by local practices in diverse contexts. This article examines Colombian public university student-produced materials, including graffiti, campaign flyers and political cartoons as local practices in response to globalizing trends. Such cultural productions openly contest and reshape globalizing trends. These student materials offer counter-discourses that reconstitute globalizing trends as 'US imperialism' and as shared public, not private, concerns. Complicating the decolonizing effects produced by their counter-discourses, some student-produced materials ignore or reify gender and other hierarchies in order to resist imperial-global domination.