Work

Rural Higher Education as Misrecognition: Reconstructing the Agrarian University from Latin America

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: This concept paper reconstructs the public agrarian university as an institutional configuration of recognition and reads the rural–urban gap at the threshold of higher education as one material expression of it. The reconstruction runs from Hegel’s assignment of the agricultural estate to immediate ethical life, through the developmentalist reception of classical sociology, to Honneth’s spheres of recognition, Fraser’s institutionalized status hierarchies, and a Latin American rural sociology in which the peasant appears as knowledge-producer; it is anchored by an abductive diagnosis of published indicators. Across six Latin American countries with heterogeneous redistributive regimes, the rural–urban gap in secondary completion narrowed between 2010 and 2022, while the residential attendance gap at ages 20–24, an imperfect proxy for tertiary participation, converged more slowly in five of the six and not at all in three; the difference between the two trends is significant in every country except Chile. In Colombia, rural secondary completion rose by 20.6 percentage points while rural attendance at these ages rose by less than one. The patterns do not identify a causal mechanism; they delimit resource-based, Bourdieusian, capabilities, selection-based, and compositional accounts rather than refute them, and the paper states what would disconfirm its diagnosis. Three contributions follow. First, the non-reporting of rural origin in the higher education information systems is argued to be institutional misrecognition rather than a resource constraint: the same state records peasant self-identification in four statistical operations, the enrolment file records forty-one attributes of the student, and none is territorial origin, and the omission forecloses accountability for inequalities in admission, persistence, and graduation. Second, epistemic reciprocity is offered as the criterion of curricular reform. Third, the framework identifies reform sites and observable success criteria that resource-based accounts do not reach.

Source: Societies

DOI: 10.3390/soc16100339

Authors: Mónica Yadira Dotor-Robayo, Carlos Mario Zuluaga-Domínguez, Alejandro Pérez y Soto Domínguez

Institutions: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad de Medellín

Language: English

Topic: Higher Education in Latin America

Subfield: Education

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Reduced inequalities, Quality education

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,689