Keywords
Neoliberal globalization, access to quality education, intersectionality, subjectivity, collectivity, inexperienced cheap labor, post-Fordist work, maquiladoras
Abstract
The aim of this study is to apply a content analysis to both ‘Keeping Kids in School’ (KKIS) and ‘The Youth Connection’ (TYC), grass-roots charities that fundraise educational resources and encourage Mexican students to stay in school, in order to identify recurring themes and collectivities of the Mexican education system. This study poses the question, “How has neoliberal globalization played a role in devaluing and minimizing citizenry access to a quality education in Mexico”? The two charities were chosen because their specific coordinating efforts—on behalf of shared interests to improve education in Mexico—reveals discursive constructions grounded on experiential knowledge from volunteering in Mexican schools. This study argues that Mexico’s insufficiencies in education cannot be analyzed in isolation from superior political and economic transformations within the state and, in turn, are a result of neoliberal globalization. Nonetheless, this approach goes beyond Marxian analysis. Instead it takes a modernist skeptical approach and utilizes post-structural feminist analysis to understand how intersectional subjective identities are constituted and produce collectivities. These collectivities formed specifically by KKIS and TYC, but also the communities they aid, and scholarship focused around them, reveal collective opinions regarding perceived classed, gendered and racialized subjective identities, institutionalizations and standpoints in the Mexican education system. This research paper argues that the normalization of inexperienced cheap labor is a main reason young Mexicans choose employment over school, a finding that is corroborated from an analysis of the media accounts of the KKIS and the TYC.
Primary Advisor
Dr. Stephen Brooks
Program Reader
Dr. Elena Maltseva
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Political Science
Document Type
Major Research Paper
Convocation Year
2021