The Jujuy Community’s Perspective on the “University of the Street”

Abstract

One of the concerns of this research is to understand the perspective held by the inhabitants of the city of Jujuy regarding what the “university of the street” means, as well as the different forms of learning acquired through it.

This paper presents some of the results of the analysis of interviews corresponding to a sample taken in Jujuy’s capital city, with the aim of establishing the existing semantic valuations.

The methodology used is based on operations drawn from semiotics and discourse analysis, aimed at identifying the “discursive formations” (Michel Foucault, 1969: 44–54) through which the community constructs meanings about phenomena circulating in a given time and society. Through textual analysis, this type of approach makes it possible to observe how a group of people constructs and evaluates a social phenomenon, in this case, the “university of the street”.

The corpus consists of interviews conducted with members of the Jujuy community. The selection criterion was based on variables such as age, sex, profession, or occupation, without establishing a rigid parameter or forcing the sample into a fixed classification. The objective of the interviews was to gather current opinions in order to analyze the different conceptions of this phenomenon. To this end, the following questions were used: What is the “university of the street” for you? What did you learn from the “university of the street”? Do you remember any concrete learning situation?

The results obtained from the analysis of the interviews show that the “university of the street” is conceived in different ways: as a space where lived experiences make it possible to acquire certain forms of knowledge that help people live or survive in that immense space of permanent interrelations; as a place for acquiring knowledge outside formal institutions, such as school or university; as a place of everyday learning, among others.

This paper corresponds to one segment of a research project whose central interest is the study of the “university of the street”, based in the Chair of Communication and Education of this School of Humanities and Social Sciences.