Hybrid
A Zoom-link will be shared with the participants closer to the event & Room A302 (DPU, Emdrup)

Speaker
Alexander Cordoves, Marie Curie Postdoc Fellow 2023-2025, Department of Educational Anthropology and Psychology, DPU Aarhus University

Chair
Professor Susan Wright, Co-Director of CHEF, DPU, Aarhus University, Denmark

Abstract
Cuban higher education has caught the international community's attention because of its achievements. Likewise, it has been one of the flagships of the Cuban Revolution. Education played an important role in the social project following the 1959 Cuban Revolution and a subsequent, social-oriented reform of 1962 also had an important role in shaping Cuban society.

Cuban higher education policy making has a centralised, hierarchical and authoritative character that assumes implementation is a mechanical process of realising pre-set outcomes. Taking an anthropology of policy approach (Shore & Wright, 1997a, 1997b; Wright & Reinhold, 2011; Wright, 2019), and having the University of Holguin as a case study, my main objective was to describe ethnographically how Cuba’s centralised higher education policy documents are actually translated on the ground at the University of Holguin. I ask, how are policy documents interpreted and translated on the ground? How is higher education enacted by teachers, administrative staff, students, university leaders and councils?  I conducted three-months of fieldwork primarily at the Faculty of Social Sciences and carried out participant observation, interviews and gathered documents. I also interviewed graduate students from the period of the so-called universalisation of higher education (2001-2010) and managed to interview a vice minister of higher education.

Based on this data, I sketch out for this seminar some findings related with

• The Cuban higher education background (reforms and access policies)
• Effects of the universalisation of higher education policy (2001-2010)
• The current Cuban higher education 

My study is the first piece of ethnographically based research aiming to understand how Cuban higher education works on the ground. My preliminary findings show how people have created new relationships, meanings and practices, including by contesting the path of reform set out in policy documents.

Bionote
Awarded the Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship (call 2022) to carry out research on Cuban higher education reforms, I am currently appointed at the Department of Educational Anthropology and Psychology, DPU Aarhus University. As a Cuban psychologist and anthropologist, I have been involved in education studies in the Latin American context. My background also includes teaching experience in higher education in Cuba (13 years mainly in educational psychology), Brazil, and Mexico (online). While conducting my PhD research, I came closer to the anthropology of policy approach in order to understand Cuban secondary teachers’ trajectories. At that moment, I conducted fieldwork at a secondary school in Holguin, Cuba using narrative interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis. Related to my current project, I recently conducted fieldwork at the University of Holguin where I interviewed teachers, leaders, administrative staff and former students, gathered documents and led participant observation.