ABSTRACT
As part of the Mexican educational system, the subsystem of intercultural higher education seeks to provide a culturally sensitive academic formation for students defined as ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse. In practice, it focuses on students from indigenous areas, who have been historically excluded from formal education. Today’s ‘intercultural universities’ represent a new kind of educational diversity regime. Examining the case of the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), this paper shows that these new institutions, while still rooted in traditional indigenista orientations, are beginning to transcend them by targeting diversity in a more complex way that involves strategies to mainstream diversity, recognize difference and counter historically rooted inequalities and asymmetries. This study presents preliminary results of InterSaberes, an ethnographic research project that collects, compares and systematizes the diversity of knowledges and skills being generated in the teaching and non-teaching contexts of the UVI programs. Fieldwork materials are used to analyze how knowledge diversity and diverse ways of knowing are being constructed, managed, intertwined, exchanged and perceived, in the process of ‘interculturalizing’ higher education.
