Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The present article states the importance of reforming the Chilean university system, evaluating  qualitative and equity components in universities. This article summarizes the history of relations between society and university, and establishes analogies between the crisis between 1900 and 1910, the first anniversary of Independence, and that which begins to hatch in 1997; and then analyzes the role of student movements on changes in society and politics in college, especially the university reform of Cordoba (1918), and Chile (1967). Finally it reviews the mission of the university today.

This article presents some considerations about how the Chilean university system has changed from 1981. In particular, how the current financial strategy of the universities institutions challenges the understanding of what the university. Simultaneously it produces contradictory effects with respect to the ideal of social modernization in which the Chilean and Latin-American universities were built up, such as social segmentation, infantilization and undermining of democracy.

 The author develops the strategic guidelines of the Bolivarian University, affirming the importance of defining identity and the computerization of the educational process, as components of competitiveness. From there derives some proposals such as the moral, epistemological and practical dimensions and content items. He then completes the proposal with a profile of the Bolivarian student and teacher.

The author seeks to print a traveling style to the idea of university education, from the discursive bifurcation of genealogy and place. He claims that questioning about pedagogy amounts to questioning the place of the question, and that thus means interrogating the place of power. He claims that in the highest point of an epoch when State and urban installation of power emerge, modern education is born; and from this, college institution will be built based upon the new state practices, derived in turn from the ancient religious and military models.

The text outlines the first known attempt to study -not guinea pigs, but- scientific activity in the wild. Latour wanted to study the "tribes of scientists and their production: science." Un the study they recognize that what defined primarily researchers of those biology laboratories was the reading and writing of texts, and not experimenting with guinea pigs. The lab was a tribe of readers and writers who considered that the main objective of their activity is producing papers; in short, that the key to scientific practice is the production of speeches, an then that it is not true that the scientific method is "objective" and finally a tribe of biologists in a lab is not intrinsically different from a Jivaro tribe in the Amazon.

The article suggests the enormity of this challenge, having history known loyalties to tribes, cultures, classes and nations; but today -he notes- could begin the history of humanity as one people. For this he suggests the importance of generating an appropriate language, which among other things should enable us to understand unity in diversity. An adds that we require a third expansion of consciousness that can lead to planetization of human consciousness. After that, the text leads us to questions about truth and the meaning of human inquiry, making a counterpoint between science and religion. It concludes by postulating the need for a cultural revolution.

The author peaks up the topic of social justice, from the proposals of John Rawls, to ask homself about the consequences of globalization on the issue of justice. He thus refers to the fundamental question of Rawls on the possibility of finding universally binding principles of justice, but highligts that it sticks to modern Western democratic societies, and that other social orders do not fit, so Rawls does not offer a universal theory. Then he analyzes other authors, notably Sen, to explore new grounds for universal social justice within the global context.

Starting from the idea that counter-hegemonic territorialities in rural areas are the result of a dual process of learning and/or adaptation: one internal to the own territory resulting from the coevolution between ecosystems and community, and the other external between territories -which involves the processes of territorialization of capital over traditional territories. These adaptive dynamics of traditional and alternative territories are expressed in hybridisms of practices and social representations, modern and traditional, about reproductive attributes of nature: nature’s fertility in the traditional territories subsumes the complex socio-environmental reproducibility, while the imaginary of nature in modern scientific culture subsumes objectified productivity of ecosystems. In other words, it is about interpreting narratives and politics of nature. Indeed, understanding the complexity of socioterritorial reproduction of agriculture and traditional fishing, and alternatives (such as those of family farming with ecological bases), subsumes, therefore, the inseparability between the objective and subjective aspects of reprodutibility of the productive system lato sensu, this is, of local geo-ecological conditions, traditional values and symbols, which are synthesized in adaptation strategies and resilience of rural communities against the project of (re)territorialization of capital over those counter-hegemonic territories.

The Decentralization of the Cultural Program of the Secretary of Culture of the Municipality in Porto Alegre, is the result of a struggle carried out by civil society groups in the ‘80s and ‘90s, which aimed to qualify the participation in municipal management and to change the path of municipal cultural policies. This article sought to rescue the experience of the Program of Cultural Decentralization of Porto Alegre and its contribution to the democratic radicalization and the adoption of new values and social practices, guided by colective ethics.