Introduction

Arts & Humanities in Higher Education

2017, Vol. 16(1) 7–16
Winds of the South: ! The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:

Intercultural university sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1474022216680599

models for the journals.sagepub.com/home/ahh

21st century
Manuela Guilherme
University of Coimbra, Portugal

Gunther Dietz
Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico

Abstract
This issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education focuses on innovative initiatives
which are emerging in different Latin-American university contexts as well as a few
other experiments in traditionally established universities. Sometimes these initiatives
are newly created higher education institutions that are rooted inside indigenous
regions, in other cases conventional universities start to ‘‘interculturalize’’ their student
population, their teaching staff, or even their curricular contents and methods. Despite
certain criticisms, community leaders frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of
these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering ethnic
actors of indigenous or afro-descendant origin. After an interview to Boaventura de
Sousa Santos, Laura Selene Mateos Cortés, and Gunther Dietz, analyze the different
ways in which the Mexican intercultural education subsystem conceives ‘‘intercultura-
lidad.’’ The next article, by Guillermo Williamson, also ‘‘expresses interculturality poly-
phonically from the Latin-American perspective’’ and reports ‘‘the nature and condition
of the academic reflection on interculturality carried out in universities, in supposedly
intercultural contexts.’’ Then, Carlos Octavio Sandoval brings the focus back to Mexico
and the Intercultural University of Veracruz; in the article that follows, Isabel Dulfano
explores the relationship between antiglobalization, counterhegemonic discourse, and
indigenous feminist alternative knowledge production. She bases her article on the
autoethnographic writing of some Indigenous feminists from Latin America that ques-
tions the assumptions and presuppositions of Western development models and glo-
balization, while asserting an identity as contemporary Indigenous activist academic
women. Christine D. Beaule and Benito Quintana’s article adds to the topic of this
special issue with the argument of interdisciplinarity bringing together both an

Corresponding author:
Manuela Guilherme, Colégio de S. Jerónimo, Largo de D. Dinis, Apartado 3087, Coimbra 3000-995, Portugal.
Email: mariaguilherme@ces.uc.pt
8 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 16(1)

archaeological and anthropological perspectives of indigeneity to the higher education

classroom. And finally, Catherine Manathunga focuses on the issue of intercultural
doctoral supervision.

Keywords
Intercultural universities, ecology of knowledges, epistemologies of the South, postco-
lonialism, Latin America

Introduction
Winds of change are whistling through social, political, and cultural institutions, all
over the world, and universities in particular. It may well be said that in the 21st
century these have been in the eye of the hurricane since they had unquestionably
become the locus of knowledge par excellence of modern Nation-States and, there-
fore, where the national elite of rulers was formed, the national scientific and cul-
tural references of the past, present, and the future were devised, refined, delivered,
and finally where national identity was energized. In sum, in global times, the
University is reflecting the crisis of the Nation-State.
Europe started this century with the launching of the Bologna process, which
aimed ‘‘to create a coherent and cohesive European Higher Education Area
(EHEA) by 2010,’’ and it seemed that, once completed, the scene would have
been set up and would remain stable for quite some time. In fact, it fulfilled,
within the deadline, its main objectives:

adopt a system of easily readable and comparable degrees; adopt a system with two
main cycles (undergraduate/graduate); establish a system of credits (ECTS); promote
mobility by overcoming legal recognition and administrative obstacles; promote
European co-operation in quality assurance; promote a European dimension in
higher education. (http://www.eua.be/eua-work-and-policy-area/building-the-eur
opean-higher-education-area/bologna-basics.aspx)

These accomplishments have certainly brought innumerous benefits for higher

education in the name of its internationalization and in the form of networking.
Furthermore, it broke down innumerous frontiers and if, on the one hand, it
homogenized often carelessly of national epistemological traditions, cultural
uses, and local relevance, on the other hand, it opened up a wide horizon that
started to long for farther and away from Europe. In addition, the design and
implementation of an EHEA and the development of the idea of a ‘‘knowledge
economy’’ has carefully been observed by the governments of other regions in the
world and inspired the creation of some governmental and nongovernmental poli-
cies, e.g. in Latin America (Tiana-Ferrer, 2014). The mirror-like reflecting images
between universities in Europe and in the Americas offer an interesting field for
colonial and postcolonial analysis (Teodoro and Guilherme, 2014).
Guilherme and Dietz 9

The universities which started in the Americas in colonial times were often
organizations which transplanted the models from their mother institutions in
Europe, formerly under the umbrella of the Church and later of the Nation-
State. Despite its national symbolism and identity, the University has been
described by several authors as a ‘‘colonial’’ institution per se both in its essence
and history (e.g. Magalhães, 2001) and, in fact, university models expanded from
the North to the South, both within Europe and from Europe to overseas.
However, it should not be ignored the a posteriori reverse influence from North
America to Europe (North–North) and nonetheless the currently starting influence
from South America to Europe (South–North). This justifies the interest that this
special issue on ‘‘Winds from the South: Intercultural university models for the 21st
century’’ is thought to raise among the AHHE readers. Furthermore, globalization
has had an impact in the role, life, and image of universities worldwide, which has
been described as a loss of their identity, more specifically of their cultural and
national ethnic identity, in some cases, their tradition. This is why the experience of
the intercultural/indigenous universities is worth considering today because they
are adequately considered to be ethnically grounded. Readers of this journal are
here considered as particularly suited to interestingly appreciate the theorization
and reporting of experiences in the following chapters since ‘‘the Humanities are
good at living with and working with complexity -. . . at acknowledging and not
seeking to rise above the situatedness of its material, and at conceptualizing non-
systemic orders of knowledge (or knowledges)’’ (Parker, 2008: 90).
In fact, the following chapters require a conceptual break with the epistemic
‘‘grand narrative’’ of modernity (Lyotard, 1986), which has impregnated the uni-
versity conceptual paradigm and knowledge canon. The field of Arts and
Humanities ‘‘deal[s] with, offer[s] narratives and intelligible accounts of, that
which is other, unintelligible, conceptions of the human and cosmic condition
that are incomprehensible to ours’’ (Lyotard, 1986) and therefore is entitled to
provide support to every other scientific field to establish intercultural channels
of communication between universities undertaking international networking. In
addition, the so-called indigenous or intercultural universities in Latin America
provide a different epistemic model which confronts European scientists with
other modes of knowing, learning, and questioning. More than other contents or
research methodologies, they are intrinsically put face to face with other definitions
of knowledge.
With their internationalization, the national hegemony lost, universities world-
wide have been translating an Anglo-Saxon pragmatism into an oversimplified
model of knowledge production and creating a functional model that responds
directly to the market, as it appears to be today, that is, with no contextual
vision for the future. This is also the reason why the crisis of the university identity
is understood to have coincided with the crisis of the paradigm of modernity.
However, it seems that the large ‘‘metadiscourse’’ of modernity has been replaced
by another ‘‘grand narrative’’ (Lyotard, 1986), that of hegemonic globalization in
the form of the ‘‘mercantile globalization of the university’’ (Santos, 2005: 6).
10 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 16(1)

This results from and in some ‘‘thinness in our contemporary thinking about the
university’’ and, therefore, again according to Barnett, we must acknowledge that
‘‘the imaginary landscape of the idea of higher education is rather empty at the
present time’’ (2013: 13–14). However, what has been presented as the epitome of
modernity, with regard to higher education and its contribution to society, is
lagging behind the challenges of the 21st century. In the first place, taken-for-
granted truths telling us that ‘‘the sociocultural paradigm of modernity ‘science’
became the celebrated knowledge, ‘the knowledge’’’ and that ‘‘scientific community
is the supreme judge of scientific axioms,’’ as we are critically reminded by
Magalhães, have become too tight for a world where knowledge, information,
and education have become massive and accessible through democracy and tech-
nology (Magalhães, 2001: 182–183). Moreover, the author also acknowledges that
‘‘scientific truth is a cosmopolitan construction,’’ a tenet which is too often forgot-
ten and contradicted by those, too many, who perceive scientific truth as ethno-
centrically based and constrained as such.
With wisdom, Barnett and Maxwell call for ‘‘wisdom’’ to be again brought
about into academic inquiry, which Maxwell expands into ‘‘global wisdom’’ and
defines as ‘‘the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others (and
this including knowledge, know-how and understanding’’ (2008: 2). This idea is not
so far away from the idea of ‘‘buen vivir’’ which the indigenous peoples from Latin
America (the Aymara/Quechua, the Mapuche, the Kolla, the Maya, etc.) offer as a
contribution for the change the peoples of this world, the mother Earth, need to
undertake in order to save the planet (Mamani, 2010). Both ideas, ‘‘wisdom’’ and
‘‘buen vivir,’’ albeit referring to different types of rationality, are not contradictory
in essence and may well converse with each other through ‘‘new forms of convivi-
ality among epistemologies, paradigms and approaches’’ since ‘‘in a globalized
world we are all forced to look for working commensurabilities that open commu-
nication channels among different semantic universes’’ (Ribeiro, 2011: 286–287).
However, another Brazilian author, Viveiros de Castro believes that ‘‘it is only
worth comparing the incommensurable’’ since ‘‘the real world is the abstract space
of divergence’’ (2004: 11). This author proposes the ‘‘method of controlled equivo-
cation’’ which he describes as ‘‘the mode of communication par excellence between
different perspectival positions’’ (2004: 5) as it reconceptualizes the notions of
comparability and translatability. He further asks: ‘‘what happens to our compari-
sons when we compare them with indigenous comparisons?’’ (2004: 4) and explains
that ‘‘a good translation is one that allows the alien concepts to deform and subvert
the translator’s [original] conceptual toolbox. . .’’ (2004: 5). In addition, Souza uses
Castro’s concepts of ‘‘perspectivism’’ and ‘‘equivocal translation’’ to discuss the
understanding and hosting of targeted federal educational policies by indigenous
communities in Brazil with regard to public school system and the misunderstand-
ings of policy-makers when, with good intentions, intent to provide indigenous
communities to ‘‘preserve’’ their languages and cultures through the state school
system (Souza, 2014). He warns about the difficulties of mutual intelligibility across
cultures and states that ‘‘one should be aware of the equality in difference between
Guilherme and Dietz 11

one’s own knowledge and that of the other at the same time as one is fully aware
that one is not the other and is therefore different’’ (Souza, 2014: 55).
The question that may be posed about indigenous/intercultural universities at a
time when universities, in general, are internationalizing is whether the former are
missing this element in their daily academic life. However, Munck ‘‘would argue
that universities are glocal organizations on the whole, that is, they have both local
roots and a global reach or context’’ (2010: 32), and this also applies to indigenous/
intercultural universities as they are contributing with ‘‘a new generation bearing
both academic and community, both indigenous and western knowledge’’ (Dietz,
2009: 3). Moreover, they are not only deeply rooted in community life but also in
transnational social movements committed to saving endangered knowledges and
to maintaining an ecology of knowledges in the world. Therefore, indigenous/
intercultural universities provide various possibilities for intercultural, interepiste-
mic, and interacademic dialog as much as they move into ‘‘post-indigenismo
educational projects,’’ that is, move beyond ‘‘programmes specifically designed
by non-indigenous social scientists in order to integrate indigenous communities
into their respective nation-states’’ (2009: 2).
The concept of ‘‘interculturalidad,’’ which in English is generally translated into
‘‘interculturalism,’’ although they are not synonymous, may undertake different
meanings as it is now commonly used in documents officially issued by trans-
national organizations and, more emphatically, by Latin-American states, side
by side with academic outputs both of intercultural/indigenous universities and
traditional public universities. The concept of ‘‘intercultural’’ therefore embodies
different intentions as policies are concerned, epistemological and social implica-
tions with regard to knowledge and agency patterns, therefore, it does not imply
any ideas which can be described as universal (Guilherme and Dietz, 2015). To be
more precise, intercultural/indigenous universities represent a general attempt to let
knowledge, which is ‘‘other’’ and for that reason previously not considered as such,
breathe, grow and dialog, on an equity basis, with previously established know-
ledge. This is acknowledged as cognitive justice.
‘‘Epistemic interculturality’’ introduces the possibility for a negotiation, which
does not necessarily mean an ‘‘all the way’’ hybridization, between Latin-American
indigenous knowledge and Eurocentric colonial knowledge in Latin America
(Walsh, 2007). ‘‘Epistemic interculturality’’ is not an undertaking of one side but
a reciprocal and overriding attempt of conversing and learning together ways of
meeting and living with the unknown. According to Santos, ‘‘learning from the
South is therefore the process of intercultural translation by means of which the
anti-imperial South is constructed both in the global North and in the global
South’’ (2014: 224). Therefore, epistemological interculturality, that is critical,
involves unlearning the processes of epistemological supremacy and unilateral visi-
bility both by and within the South and the North, since they have come to
be transterritorial and internalized. Universities, in the process of internationaliza-
tion, and respectively academics, are in a privileged position to undertake this
challenge.
12 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 16(1)

This issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education accordingly focuses on

innovative initiatives which are emerging in different Latin-American university
contexts. Sometimes these initiatives are newly created higher education institu-
tions that are rooted inside indigenous regions, in other cases conventional uni-
versities start to ‘‘interculturalize’’ its student population, its teaching staff, or even
its curricular contents and methods. In general, the policy of diversifying ethno-
cultural profiles and curricular contents of intercultural universities is not isolated,
but coincides with a broader tendency to urge institutions of higher education to
become more ‘‘efficient,’’ locally ‘‘adapted,’’ and ‘‘outcome oriented.’’ Despite cer-
tain criticisms, community leaders frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of
these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering
ethnic actors of indigenous or afro-descendant origin.
These efforts to culturally transform and diversify universities react to two dif-
ferent, still existing gaps in the educational coverage for Latin America’s indigen-
ous peoples and afro-descendant communities: an institutional coverage gap, on
the one hand, and an interculturality gap, on the other hand (Dietz, 2012). With
regard to institutional coverage, Latin-American universities reflect the conven-
tional bias of any western, European-inspired university system: colleges and uni-
versities are concentrated in urban, not rural regions, and they target mestizo
(nonindigenous), not indigenous students. Only very few agricultural universities
and some teacher training institutions have developed and maintained decentra-
lized campi which shorten geographical distance for indigenous or afro-descendant
students. Apart from these exceptions and from some macro-universities which are
trying to decentralize their teaching and research activities, Latin American con-
temporary higher education remains highly centralized, urban, and focused on
conventional, western notions of university careers and study programs. As
access to higher education is thus extremely difficult for indigenous students,
their enrollment percentage is very low (estimations vary between countries from
1 to 2% of all students). Even those indigenous students who due to rural–urban
migration processes finally succeed in entering an urban BA program face huge
academic difficulties, as they have very frequently evolved through a precarious and
badly qualifying elementary and postelementary school system.
On the other hand, this institutional coverage gap is closely linked to an inter-
culturality gap which results from the above-mentioned Latin-American policy
tradition of indigenismo. As part of this long-lasting governmental policy of inte-
grating indigenous peoples into Latin-American mainstream settler societies, so-
called bilingual indigenous education systems have been created since the end of the
1970s in different Latin-American countries. These systems partly respond to indi-
genous leaders’ claims for a bilingual and bicultural education, and partly reflect
new efforts of indirect hispanization through the use of the indigenous languages.
After decades of struggles between governmental indigenismo institutions and indi-
genous organizations, these systems, currently called ‘‘intercultural and bilingual
education,’’ provide nursery, primary, and increasingly also postprimary education
for rural indigenous communities through schools in several countries start
Guilherme and Dietz 13

complementing the national unified and centralized curriculum with some classes in
the region’s indigenous language (Cortina, 2014). The mentioned gap, however,
arises as this parallel public school system for indigenous communities does not
include preuniversity college nor university educational levels. Accordingly, for
several years indigenous organizations have been demanding an expansion of the
‘‘intercultural and bilingual’’ approach toward higher education, as until now their
students are being forced to either abandon their educational careers or transit
toward urban, monocultural, and monolingual school and high school alternatives.
Due to their innovative characteristics and their rather recent nature, intercul-
tural universities are encountering a range of bureaucratic, financial, academic, and
political problems. During long processes of decision-making and political negoti-
ation and consultation on the choice of regions and communities in which to
establish the new university programs, political obstacles, rivalries, and factional
tensions have been frequent. Besides, the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity
which characterizes the indigenous and afro-descendant regions of the continent
still poses an important challenge for curricular development and diversification,
but also for the official accreditation and recognition of these novel programs and
their alumni by interest groups such as employers, professional associations,
unions, and conventional universities.
This topic issue starts with an interview to Boaventura de Sousa Santos by its
editors, Manuela Guilherme and Gunther Dietz in which he talks about the trans-
formations occurring inside the university of the 21st century and how we have to
get prepared for ‘‘a refoundation of the university’’ as we know it. In this line of
thought, Boaventura highlights the role of the university extension and communi-
tarian programs as part of a movement of resistance and argues that ‘‘the recon-
struction or reinvention of confrontational politics requires an epistemological
transformation’’ and that ‘‘we don’t need alternatives; we need an alternative
thinking of alternatives.’’ In this interview, Boaventura de Sousa Santos summar-
izes the main ideas of his thought, as it has widely been published lately, mainly on
his vision for a polyphonic pluriversity/university model, an ecology of knowledges
and cognitive justice. He finalizes his interview by unveiling some of the general
conclusions of his large project ALICE (ERC Advanced grant) whose founding
principle is that ‘‘there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice’’
given that the knowledges of the world by far exceed the Eurocentric knowledge
that has dominated and ignored other epistemologies.
The following article, by Laura Selene Mateos Cortés and Gunther Dietz, ana-
lyzes the different ways in which the Mexican intercultural education subsystem
conceives ‘‘interculturalidad,’’ more specifically, the authors carry out an ethnog-
raphy of intercultural discourses, based at Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural,
which are critical toward exogenous interculturality and focused on empowering
local subaltern subjects. The article starts by comparing/contrasting different
approaches to intercultural education as they have been described by English-
speaking publications and implemented in Europe, mainly in the United
Kingdom and the United States, as well as in continental Europe, and the same
14 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 16(1)

concept and experiments in Latin America. They also refer to the increasing ‘‘trans-
nationalization’’ of the educational policies and their technocratic tools and its
impact and pressure put on intercultural education programs of all models and
at all levels. They report a field study with teachers of this ‘‘intercultural university’’
in Mexico who define their own understanding of the concept ‘‘interculturality’’
and find out that, on the one hand, ‘‘the globalized intercultural discourse migrates
transnationally,’’ focusing here on the perspective of the local actors who partici-
pate ‘‘from the bottom’’ in what they call ‘‘the discourse migration process’’ and,
on the other hand, that the participants are receptors as well as producers of their
own discourse.
The next article, by Guillermo Williamson, also ‘‘expresses interculturality poly-
phonically from the Latin-American perspective’’ and reports ‘‘the nature and
condition of the academic reflection on interculturality carried out in universities,
in supposedly intercultural contexts.’’ This article is all the most relevant in this
collection as intercultural education is minimally represented in Chile’s educational
system, more particularly in higher education institutions, both the more trad-
itional and the newer ones, either private and public, which have been more con-
cerned about developing technological and vocational courses, following the
dominant trend of Latin American, and worldwide, universities, despite the
debate promoted by some academics engaged with plural and fairer epistemo-
logical citizenship. This article gives an overview of this debate from the particular
point of view of universities in Chile which is enlightening to the discussion of this
topic from other perspectives, mainly those that attempt to struggle the neoliberal
marketization of university masked by glittering buzzwords such as international-
ization and globalization. Despite the increasing inclusion of intercultural rights in
most Latin-American Constitutions, the path for real production of new know-
ledge and cognitive justice has still been very slow.
Then, Carlos Octavio Sandoval brings the focus back to Mexico and the
Intercultural University of Veracruz. He gives an historical account of the presence
and development of the Nahuatl-speaking group in that region and follows by
reporting how endangered it currently is due to its absence in the educational
system, low status and, in consequence, unsuccessful competition with Spanish,
the dominant colonial language. The author then gives an impressive account of
the strategies being implemented at the Intercultural University of Veracruz in
order to revitalize this endangered language, namely: (a) promoting writing and
reading in Nahuatl; (b) adopting an adequate writing system; (c) publishing a
regular local bilingual magazine; (d) showing fragments of Nahuatl poetry, written
by students and teachers, in public walls in the different municipalities of the
region; (e) using Nahuatl as an academic language at the university (guidelines
for academic writing; theses writing; colloquia; curriculum design; interdialectical
dialog; language teaching to nonspeakers; diploma program in mediation, transla-
tion, and interpretation).
In the article that follows, Isabel Dulfano explores the relationship between
antiglobalization, counterhegemonic discourse, and indigenous feminist alternative
Guilherme and Dietz 15

knowledge production. She bases her article on the autoethnographic writing of

some Indigenous feminists from Latin America that questions the assumptions and
presuppositions of Western development models and globalization, while asserting
an identity as contemporary Indigenous activist academic women.
Finally, Catherine Manathunga focuses on the issue of intercultural doctoral
supervision and deals with the questions involved with the recognition of the val-
idity of a diversity of ways of knowing, and of gathering knowledge, and bring
them into play in doctoral supervision. She argues that there is a need for serious
commitment to understanding how place, time, and knowledge play out in super-
vision across and between cultures.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

References
Barnett R (2013) Imagining the University. London: Routledge.
Cortina R (ed) (2014) The Education of Indigenous Citizens in Latin America. Bristol:
Multilingual Matters.
Dietz G (2009) Intercultural universities in Mexico: Empowering indigenous peoples or
mainstreaming multiculturalism? Intercultural Education 20(1): 1–4.
Dietz G (2012) Intercultural universities in Mexico. In: Banks J (ed.) Encyclopedia of
Diversity in Education, Vol. 3. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, pp.1480–1484.
Guilherme M and Dietz G (2015) Difference in diversity: Multiple perspectives on multi-,
inter-, and trans-cultural conceptual complexities. Journal of Multicultural Discourses
10(1): 1–21.
Lyotard JF (1986) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1st ed. 1979.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Magalhães A (2001) Higher Education Dilemmas and the Quest for Identity Politics:
Knowledge and Education in an Era of Transition. Enschede: University of Twente.
Mamani FH (2010) Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir: Filosofia, Polı´ticas, Estrategias y Experiencias
Regionals. La Paz, Bolivia: Instituto Internacional de Integración (III-CAB).
Maxwell N (2008) From knowledge to wisdom: The need for an academic revolution.
In: Barnett R and Maxwell N (eds) Wisdom and the University. London: Routledge,
pp.1–33.
Munck R (2010) Civic engagement and global citizenship in a university context: Core
business or desirable add-on. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 9(1): 29–39.
Parker J (2008) What have the humanities to offer 21st-century Europe? Reflections of a
note taker. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 7(1): 83–96.
Ribeiro GL (2011) Why (post)colonialism and (de)coloniality are not enough: A post-
imperialist perspective. Postcolonial Studies 14(3): 285–297.
16 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 16(1)

Santos B de Sousa (2005) The University in the Twenty-first Century: Toward a Democratic
and Emancipatory University Reform (PDF document). Available at: http://www.
eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-santos-en.html (accessed 14 November 2016).
Santos B de Sousa (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Boulder,
CO: Paradigm.
Souza LMTS (2014) Epistemic diversity, lazy reason and ethical translation in post-colonial
contexts: The case of indigenous educational policy in Brazil. Interfaces Brasil/Canadá
Canoas 14(2): 36–60.
Teodoro A and Guilherme M (eds) (2014) European and Latin American Higher Education
Between Mirrors: Conceptual Framework and Policies of Equity and Social Cohesion.
Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Tiana-Ferrer A (2014) The impact of the Bologna process in Ibero-America: Prospects and
challenges. In: Teodoro A and Guilherme M (eds) European and Latin American Higher
Education Between Mirrors. Rotterdam: Sense, pp.125–136.
Viveiros de Castro E (2004) Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivo-
cation. Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropological Lowland South America 2(1):
3–20.
Walsh C (2007) Interculturalidad y colonialidad del poder: Un pensamiento y posiciona-
mento ‘‘otro’’ desde la diferencia colonial. In: Castro Gómez S and Grosfoguel R (eds) El
Giro Decolonial: Reflexiones Para Una Diversidade Episte´mica Más Allá Del Capitalismo
Global. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Ed, pp.47–62.

Author biographies
Manuela Guilherme is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Centro de Estudos
Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra. She was awarded a PhD in Social Sciences,
Education (2000) by the University of Durham, UK, for whose dissertation she
was granted the Birkmaier Award for doctoral research by the American Council
on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and The Modern Language Journal,
Washington, D.C. She has (co-)coordinated and participated in several
European-funded international projects.

Gunther Dietz is a Research Professor in Intercultural Studies at the Universidad

Veracruzana, Xalapa, Mexico. He is a member of the IAIE board (International
Association of Intercultural Education). He holds an MA and a Dr Phil in
Anthropology from Hamburg University.