Public university, multi-crisis and critical sociology in Latin American periphery: the case of Guatemala

Abstract

The multi-crisis notion –which was returned to in a convening of the XXXV Congreso de ALAS– designated the simultaneous and interdependent convergence of the political, economic, ecological and geopolitical crises that are not arithmetically accumulated, but enhanced systematically. From a world-capitalist system perspective (Wallerstein 1999), this moment of structural crisis inextricably implies a production mechanism crisis and legitimation of the knowledge that upholds the global order. The sociological crisis and, more broadly, of the public university of Guatemala does not constitute a local and autonomous phenomenon: it is the peripheral expression –historically determined– of a structural transformation whose fundamentals lie in geopolitics and in the differentiated effects of the neoliberal restructuration on south global academic fields This essay discusses the experiences accumulated within four decades of sociological investigation in Guatemala with analytical tools used on social studies of science and technology, and political economy of higher education with the purpose of offering a diagnosis for that crisis and to define horizon of growth.