Universidad Veracruzana Research Articles

Reflexividad y diálogo en etnografía colaborativa: el acompañamiento etnográfico de una institución educativa “intercultural” mexicana

Starting from an ethnographic-dialogical case study on the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI) in Mexico, in which I pretend to combine principles of “activist anthropology” with a “doubly reflexive ethnography”, this paper analyzes how in the process of interculturalizing educational institutions new methodological options arise and how these may contribute to nurture, refresh and decolonize classical anthropological ethnography. Strongly influenced by discourses and models of intercultural education, the so called “intercultural higher education” in Mexico is emerging as a new university sub-system, aimed at providing a culturally pertinent university training to ethically, linguistically and/or culturally diverse students. The ethnographic analysis starts with the official intercultural discourse and contrasts it with the praxis of educational diversity management, as offered in a non-conventional B.A. program. From the “glocal” dialogue between different academic and peasant, external and internal ways of knowledge we develop a series of proposals to modify the curriculum of this B.A. program. Accordingly, a “dialogue of knowledge”, which implies “inter-cultural”, “inter-lingual” and “inter-actor” dimensions, obliges academic anthropology to revise its methodological practice. This paper therefore concludes with a proposal to redefine ethnographic practice in terms of dialogues and shared reflexivity among diverse actors.

Diversity Regimes Beyond Multiculturalism? A Reflexive Ethnography of Intercultural Higher Education in Veracruz, Mexico

As part of the Mexican educational system, the subsystem of intercultural higher education seeks to provide a culturally sensitive academic formation for students defined as ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse. In practice, it focuses on students from indigenous areas, who have been historically excluded from formal education. Today's ‘intercultural universities’ represent a new kind of educational diversity regime. Examining the case of the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), this paper shows that these new institutions, while still rooted in traditional indigenista orientations, are beginning to transcend them by targeting diversity in a more complex way that involves strategies to mainstream diversity, recognize difference and counter historically rooted inequalities and asymmetries. This study presents preliminary results of InterSaberes, an ethnographic research project that collects, compares and systematizes the diversity of knowledges and skills being generated in the teaching and non-teaching contexts of the UVI programs. Fieldwork materials are used to analyze how knowledge diversity and diverse ways of knowing are being constructed, managed, intertwined, exchanged and perceived, in the process of ‘interculturalizing’ higher education.

Estilos musicales de los estudiantes universitarios: ¿Oportunidad para el diálogo intercultural?

This paper questions if the university as a space of interaction can be considered as promoter of intercultural relations among the young students, who have different cultural capital and social condition. This article inquires if university experience provides a shared identity's sense of acceptance and appropriation of diversity. The previous expressed throughout the musical styles the students listen and share in this educational space. The analysis is based upon the data collected in the 2008 survey: Leisure and cultural consumption of the Universidad Veracruzana students, which was carried out in 2008 and collects information of the 10% of the student population from all the areas of the state where the university is present.

Problemas internalizados y externalizados en una muestra de niños de Educación Básica

Betancourt (2007) señala que los problemas internalizados son más difíciles de detectar, ya que el comportamientode los sujetos no afecta de manera directa a los padres y maestros, subestimándose la gravedad de dichos problemas. Etienne (2005), Mazadiego (2005) y Pelish (2006) afirman que una baja autoestimapuede llevar a una persona a tener estos problemas, mientras que una buena autoestima puede hacer que tenga confianza en las propias capacidades, no se deje manipular, sea más sensible a las necesidades del otro y esté dispuesto a defender sus principios y valores. El objetivo de investigación fue disminuir los problemas que presentaba una muestra de niños reportados por sus profesores y canalizados a la Facultad de Psicología, Campus Poza Rica, de la Universidad Veracruzana. Participaron 100 niños de una escuelabásica pública, en los grados de 4°, 5° y 6° de primaria que presentaban conducta agresiva con sus condiscípulos, bajas calificaciones, minusvalía, conducta desafiante con sus profesores, desobediencia, bajo autoconcepto y baja autoimagen. El criterio de la muestra fue en base a lo reportado por los profesores de grupo de los tres grados. El instrumento utilizado fue la Escala de Autoestima de Fernández y Andrade(2007), la cual presentó una fiabilidad de 0.640. Los resultados indicaron que el programa de autoestima trabajado fue efectivo para todos los participantes, siendo el incremento más alto el de la autoestima en losvarones, mejorando principalmente la autoestima con los amigos (área social), en la familia y en la escuela; en las tres áreas trabajadas hubo cambios sustanciales, por lo que se considera que el Programa de Autoestimautilizado fue eficaz en la disminución de los problemas que presentaban los participantes, aunque se recomienda un seguimiento para medir el impacto del programa.

'Indigenising' or 'interculturalising' universities in Mexico?: Towards an ethnography of diversity discourses and practices inside the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural

Multicultural discourse has reached Latin American higher education in the form of a set of policies targeting indigenous peoples. These policies are strongly influenced by the transfer of European notions of 'interculturality', which, in the Mexican context, are understood as positive interactions between members of minority and majority cultures. In Mexico, innovative and often polemical 'intercultural universities or colleges' are being created by governments, by NGOs or by pre-existing universities. This trend towards 'diversifying' the ethnocultural profiles of students and curricular contents coincides with a broader tendency to force institutions of higher education to become more 'efficient', 'corporate' and 'outcome-oriented'. Accordingly, these still very recently established 'intercultural universities' are often criticised as being part of a common policy of 'privatisation' and 'neoliberalisation' and of developing curricula particular to specific groups which weakens the universalist and comprehensive nature of Latin American public universities. Indigenous leaders, on the contrary, frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering actors of indigenous origin or African descent.Going beyond this polemic, this paper presents the first findings of an activist anthropological and ethnographically-based case study of the actors participating in the configuration of one of these new institutions of higher education, the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), located on the Mexican gulf coast. This article examines the way UVI has appropriated the discourse of interculturality on the basis of fieldwork conducted in the four indigenous regions where the UVI offers a B.A. in Intercultural Management for Development. The study focuses on the actors' teaching and learning practices, which are strongly shaped by an innovative and hybrid mixture of conventional university teaching, community-oriented research and 'employability'-driven development projects.

Sustainability and Spirituality: a Transdisciplinary Perspective

This paper addresses some issues that describe the experience of a transdisciplinary process and the place of spirituality within the aim of sustainability at the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico. Spirituality as a dimension of human beings and natural systems, sustainability through the consciousness of general ecology and transdisciplinary as a transformative experience that allows the inclusion of spiritual dimension in our aim for creating sustainable futures. Our dialogue with the popular traditions and cosmology of ancient Mesoamerican Philosophy is a core in the relationship between spirituality and transdisciplinary.

Responses of a translocated howler monkey Alouatta palliata group to new environmental conditions

ESR Endangered Species Research Contact the journal Facebook Twitter RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsSpecials ESR 12:25-30 (2010) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00287 Contribution to the Theme Section 'Responses of animals to habitat alteration' Responses of a translocated howler monkey Alouatta palliata group to new environmental conditions Aralisa Shedden-González*, Ernesto Rodríguez-Luna Centro de Investigaciones Tropicales, Universidad Veracruzana, Exhacienda Lucas Martín, Calle Araucarias s/n, Col. Periodistas C.P. 91019 Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico *Email: rod_araz@yahoo.com ABSTRACT: Considering the drastic changes in primate habitats, we must search for management strategies to maintain primate populations in the wild. In the present study, a group of howler monkeys Alouatta palliata was followed after being translocated to a 90 ha tropical forest used for understory palm Chamaedorea elegans cultivation. The group’s behavior was recorded in the new environment. There was no evidence of behavioral alterations due to the different habitat conditions, the translocation process or the palm cultivation activities at the release site. These results indicate that reintroduction, even to fragments used for cultivation purposes, is a viable conservation approach for howler monkey conservation in the Los Tuxtlas region of Mexico. KEY WORDS: Adaptive responses · Alouatta palliata · Conservation · Mexico · Reintroduction Full text in pdf format PreviousNextCite this article as: Shedden-González A, Rodríguez-Luna E (2010) Responses of a translocated howler monkey Alouatta palliata group to new environmental conditions. Endang Species Res 12:25-30. https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00287Export citation Mail this link - Contents Mailing Lists - RSS Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in ESR Vol. 12, No. 1. Online publication date: June 04, 2010 Print ISSN: 1863-5407; Online ISSN: 1613-4796 Copyright © 2010 Inter-Research.

Building hybrid knowledge at the Intercultural University of Veracruz, Mexico: an anthropological study of indigenous contexts

The ‘interculturalization’ of educational institutions designed for, and sometimes by, indigenous peoples has reached the realm of higher education. In Mexico, ‘intercultural universities or colleges’ are being created either by state governments, NGOs and community organizations or by academic institutions. In this paper, one of these ‘intercultural university’, pilot projects – the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI) – which offers a BA in Intercultural Management for Development in four indigenous regions in the State of Veracruz, is ethnographically studied and comparatively analysed. With the UVI as the research subject, the main interest consists of examining the potential for inter‐ or cross‐cultural dialogue, which resides in these emerging and hybrid institutions, which have started to construct new bridges between conventional, ‘western’, academic knowledge, on the one hand, and local, community‐rooted, ‘indigenous knowledge’, on the other. Three dimensions are analysed in this anthropological study: the intercultural dimension (the dialogue between different cultures and world views), the interlingual dimension (the relation between linguistic systems which have historically coexisted in the four regions where the fieldwork is conducted), and the dimension that is focused on the interaction between academic, community and organizational actors.

The discourse of interculturality and its transnational migration: towards a comparative analysis of its appropriation by academic and political actors in the state of Veracruz

This paper analyses the ways in which social and educational networks are being configured around the actors participating in the increasingly transnational field of intercultural education both at the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural and the Veracruz State Ministry of Education. It starts by defining the notion of discursive migration as conceptual transformations that occur when particular discourses cross certain national as well as disciplinary frontiers, such as the constant exchange of the heterogeneous notions of multi‐ and interculturality in the case of the field of ‘intercultural studies’, which stem from different Anglo‐Saxon as well as continental European and Latin American origins, but which are currently applied to the post‐indigenista situation of ‘indigenous education’ in Mexico. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two different institutions in the state of Veracruz, the appropriation and reinterpretation of, as well as the resistance against, the discourse of interculturality are studied by comparing the training of ‘intercultural and bilingual’ teachers through the state educational authorities and the notion of intercultural education, as applied within the so‐called ‘Intercultural University of Veracruz’. En este trabajo se analiza la forma en que se compone y transforma la noción de interculturalidad, lo cual es analizado a través del trabajo etnográfico realizado en dos instituciones educativas del estado mexicano de Veracruz: en la Secretaría de Educación estatal, por un lado, y en la Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural, por otro. El estudio cobra importancia debido a que en la actualidad la interculturalidad se ha convertido en el eje central de diversos procesos formativos. Las interrogantes que guían el trabajo son: ¿Cuál es el significado que adquiere en los diferentes contextos la interculturalidad? ¿Cómo se significa o resignifica la interculturalidad en los actores académicos y políticos? ¿Y qué sucede con el discurso sobre la interculturalidad cuando ‘migra’? Para responder a lo anterior, en un primer momento mostramos la problemática a estudiar, la forma en la que los discursos cambian de sentido. Posteriormente, presentamos la manera en que el discurso intercultural es transferido a través de la adaptación de categorías relacionadas con el análisis de transferencia de conocimientos. Finalmente, distinguimos el carácter ‘migratorio’ de este.

La perspectiva académica en las políticas públicas educativas en México. El caso de la Universidad Veracruzana

Here we are able to see troubles of public politics in the High Educational System of Mexico. Public politics are focused to direct and govern authorities in a given sector and their executions. We will see how educational politics are observed in a high education institution. The objective of this work is to know the Veracruzana University academics’ perception, Veracruz locality, specifically in the economic-management areas with respect of the educational politics. In the first part, you will see the organizational perspective from Simon and Lindblom, Cohen, March and Olsen; it gives theoretical support to the public politic concept from Caballero and Pardo. Later it comments about a Latin America example –Chile specifically– on which citizen participation has helped in definition, regulation and execution of the educational politics. In the second part, you will find an educational sector program objectives 2007-2012 summary and the emphasis on educational quality as a main line of the educational politics in Mexico, based on Crozier theoretical support. In the third part, youwill find results from academics’ interview from the Veracruzana University in order to know their participation in educational public politics.

Intercultural University of Veracruz: a holistic project promoting intercultural education

This paper describes the Intercultural University of Veracruz (UVI), an institutional Programme at the University of Veracruz in Mexico (Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural), as a product of the analysis and research carried out over a 10‐year period on cultural diversity and education. There were several institutions and over 20 people involved in the project. In November 2004, the UVI was formally created and, within a record time, it was operating. By December 2005, four centres were established in four different intercultural regions of Veracruz: Selvas, Grandes Montañas, Huasteca and Totonacapan. A web site, partially written in several indigenous languages, was created to disseminate its activities. UVI is working closely with the Laboratory of Intercultural Studies at the University of Granada and INTER Group of UNED, both in Spain. We present its rationale, the process that led to its creation, and its current status.

The Drift Chambers Handbook, introductory laboratory course (based on, and adapted from, A H Walenta's course notes)

This handbook was written for the Drift Chambers introductory laboratory course to be held at 11th Mexican School of Particles and Fields that will be held at the Universidad Veracruzana on the campus of the University at Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico. This course intends to introduce drift chambers, which play an important role in particle physics experiments as tracking detectors. We start such laboratory course with a brief review of the physics theoretical background. The experimental setup consists of a single-sided, single-cell drift chamber, a plastic scintillator detector, the standard P-10 gas mixture (90% Ar, 10% CH4) and a collimated 90Sr source. The measurements on the drift velocity of electrons, its change as a function of a drift field, gas gain and diffusion are performed at this laboratory course.

The Novels of Sergio Galindo: Planes of Human Relationship

S ERGIO GALINDO'S four novels have established him firmly in the panorama of present-day Mexican letters, yet his chronological age allows us to expect worthy additions to what he has already accomplished. His literary age places him in a group that is older than the stridently innovative novelists who have appeared in the last three years. At the same time, we must not overlook the fact that he is strongly revisionist with regard to generally accepted values. His work is not a vociferous protest, nor does it deny the relevance of the past. Rather, it shows a deep and calm concern for man's ability to recognize and cope with the total reality in which he exists. Galindo was born in Xalapa, Veracruz, in 1926. Some of the best moments of his fiction are based in that region, but his concern for the region is only the artist's concern for what he has experienced. The broader implications of his work are not limited by any geographical boundaries. His own experience has been wide. He studied in Mexico and in France. He held a fellowship at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores. Later he directed the publishing activities of the Universidad Veracruzana, and is now Jefe del Departamento de Coordinaci6n of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. After a silence of several years which followed a volume of short stories, Galindo published his first work of consequence in 1958, a short novel entitled Polvos de arroz. The scene is both his native region and Mexico City. His second novel, La justicia de enero (1959), takes place largely in the capital and is based on the author's experience as an immigration official. El Bordo (1960) is set in the Xalapa area, and the scene of La comparsa (1964) is specifically the city of Xalapa. These novels show the author's knowledge of the region, the city, and the university community. Galindo is currently working on a fifth novel, and we may expect that it too will be a work born of its creator's experience. But it should be quite clear that this experience serves only to suggest the work. The artist takes over, and reality is seen, explored, and created. The most striking quality of Galindo's novels is the exactness of his insight into human reactions and relationships. We become aware of this precision first through recognizing his accuracy in choosing just the right detail to communicate the feeling of a circumstance or of a reaction to a circumstance. Then our immediate impulse is to share the moment with someone else.