Higher Education as a Right: Challenges and Strategies in the Uruguayan Public University

Seminar Critical Development Studies, Fall 2024

Abstract

In Uruguay, and several other Latin American countries, a consensus has been achieved to legally define Higher Education as a Human Right for all people, instead of a marketable good. This implies not only the right to access the university, but also the right to learn and graduate, and for society as a whole, the right to enjoy and benefit from education and knowledge. This lecture presents the ways in which the Universidad de la República, Uruguay's main public university, has faced this mandate, including the strategies people have developed to address difficult challenges. From an intersectional perspective of institutional responsibility, with a focus on rights, we will explore approaches that allow non-hegemonic students to make tertiary education a reality in their life projects, becoming more of a possibility for everyone.

About the speaker

María Eugenia Bové Gimenez is an Assistant Professor at Universidad de la República and currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development. Her research work has focused on education in contexts of confinement and she is currently working in the Learning Support Program, from where she develops policies for the accompaniment of the educational trajectories of Universidad de la República’s students, with an intersectional and rights-based approach. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

About the series

The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.

Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars. 

Seminar organizers for 2024-25 are Natalia Correa Sanchez, Kyunghee Kang, Jenny Goldstein, and Mariah Doyle-Stephenson.