The feminist tsunami that has been evident globally since at least 2018, and particularly in Latin America, has been largely known for women's presence in the streets, protests against gender-based violence and femicides, and the global fight for the decriminalization of abortion. However, there are many other dimensions where women's movements are bringing about change in multiple spaces where patriarchy and the objectifying and productivist imprint of capitalism previously reigned unchallenged. One of these dimensions and arenas has been the universities.

We share the impression that the university, in its modern form, shares modernity's paradoxical attraction to the idea of ​​"ruin" (Readings, 1997). Recognizing this is necessary to conceive of the contemporary university outside of nostalgia for national culture, on the one hand, and to renounce contemporary neoliberal individualistic and consumerist discourse. At the heart of the modern university lies the idea of ​​its function as an "ideal community." This foundation, in the neoliberal decades, shifted, without entirely disappearing, toward the idea of ​​"excellence," a discourse in which we can more accurately recognize the abstract universal of competition and the market. For Readings, the moment of the nation-state's development corresponds to a concept of the university that we can think of as an "ideal community," which, in and for Latin American countries, is undoubtedly linked to the colonial period and, later, after independence, to the objective of "national development." It is with this impetus that public universities emerged in our countries. Major national problems and the alignment of academic disciplines and knowledge with the country's development would be the guiding principles of its agenda, especially during the period of Latin American modernization (1930-1960). The impact of neoliberalism on this model is clear. The decline of the nation-state coincided with the establishment of the neoliberal university, characterized by the dominance of academic productivism, a direct relationship with the market, and meritocracy and internal hierarchies within universities; the precariousness of academic work, particularly teaching, which in most of our public universities is filled by hourly workers without any means of job security. We rarely acknowledge in the university structures of our countries the influence of the student movements in Córdoba for university autonomy (1918) and the subsequent movements for democratization that expanded in the 60s. Recent decades have shown a permeability of social movements into the university. This is how, in many of our countries—Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Brazil—we recognize a pressure for inclusive spaces that acknowledge, often through affirmative action, the ethnic and cultural diversity of Latin American society. It is in this context, and with these legacies combined with those of the genealogies of feminists and women who fight for their rights, that a movement of university women and dissidents has emerged in recent years, shaking the foundations of institutions and challenging their authoritarian, patriarchal, androcentric nature.

The university is a site of social reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970), and at the same time, it is a contested space, contested by social movements, new generations, and critical theories that seek to transform it—in short, by the transformation of the society of which it is a part. As an institution, it produces and reproduces gender codes (Ballarín, 2015), as well as segregations based on various social markers (Buquet et al., 2013; Palomar, 2005), and these determine the conditions of inhabiting universities (Acuña Moenne, 2018). The university reflects social changes, and at the same time, its transformations spread and permeate society. It is this dialectic between the institutional and the social that we are interested in analyzing, focusing on feminist movements and university women's movements.

Moreover, the civilizational crisis that has been present for some time is only intensifying. In Latin America, this crisis bears the mark of the war against women (Segato, 2016). We believe that the violence that permeates our lives has been the guiding thread in questioning the system that produces it, and at the same time, we recognize in women's movements against violence a series of healing and transformative proposals and practices that are also reflected in the critique of university structures. Likewise, and with great force, they question and subvert the content and forms of knowledge.

As a working group, we are driven by a shared interest in systematizing transformative experiences in university teaching and the university itself. In a broad sense, the chosen theme intersects with studies of social movements, institutional changes, and also the prefiguration of anti-patriarchal and anti-colonialist spaces and places. As Sousa Santos (2005) has pointed out, the transnationalization of knowledge under neoliberalism has profoundly affected universities. In this regard, feminist social movements emphasize the need to move towards a democratic, emancipatory reform—one that is, as he puts it, depatriarchalizing and decolonizing.

The common ground among the members of this working group has been to meticulously trace the transformations that various movements of female university students, young women students, and professors allied with the movement have unleashed within the university space. Therefore, we want to acknowledge and collectively record the changes taking place in pedagogy, curriculum, community ties, academic practices, and organizational culture, among other aspects, in universities across the region. We do this with the awareness that youth movements of feminists and women activists are currently one of the main transformative forces in university education. Thus, we observe the urgent need to engage in dialogue, share diverse regional experiences, and systematize the results of these collective efforts. We must make visible in academic spaces that what we can now name, such as gender-based violence, and these other forms of community life, such as horizontal structures and caregiving, are the fruit of the feminist tsunami.

We believe that the strength of feminist movements (Gago, 2019) has impacted universities in our countries. In different ways and on varying scales, the revolt against gender-based violence has entered campuses in a recognizable way and has brought about change. We have observed local movements where young female students have reacted against gender-based violence, which is not only patriarchal but also produced and reproduced by precarious, racialized, and colonialist structures, where femicide is the endpoint—often rendered invisible itself—of a series of everyday forms of violence that women experience.

In Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia, to name a few countries, feminist movements in universities have denounced the prevailing patriarchal culture in educational institutions. This culture manifests itself in the normalization of sexual harassment of female students by professors, as well as in authoritarian, adult-centric, and patriarchal tendencies in teaching processes. Furthermore, these movements have reached the very heart of university life, questioning the content and approaches used to socialize students, which are reflected in the curricular design of study plans and programs. In this regard, they have denounced the androcentrism and colonialism that are evident in a null curriculum (Debia, 2019). This refers to the silences and exclusions that have erased (Lengermann and Niebrugge, 2007) the contributions of women and their struggles, as well as those of other historically oppressed subjectivities, from the institutionally legitimized knowledge of universities. The “epistemic violence” that accompanies gender inequality in universities has also been investigated (Güereca, 2017). Thus, the demands of university feminism in recent years have included calls for intervention and transformation of curricula with student involvement. In various universities, this has led to the implementation of preparatory courses, awareness workshops, teacher training courses, seminars, specific subjects on gender violence, and research projects aimed at mainstreaming a gender and feminist perspective in teaching.

Furthermore, we consider the imprint of social movements in their prefigurative character, as processes that democratize the public sphere and thereby construct a political culture and even a common sense that diverges from the hegemonic one (Alvarez et al., 2001). Thinking about the University is also thinking about education and freedom (hooks, 2021). Thinking about all of this from the perspective not of educators or grand educational models, but from that of learners (Garcés, 2020; Espinosa, 2020), a position in which, it seems to us, the recent university women's movements place us. These students are teaching us that transforming classrooms is also an insurgent practice, a way of resisting, (re)existing, and (re)living (Walsh, 2019). In this sense, the movements of young female university students have appropriated repertoires of struggle, technologies, and strategies that, we observe, have been a new way of "territorializing" the university, in the sense of making it their own and transforming it. Beyond "political correctness," they are putting the political back at the center, politicizing life.

For all these reasons, we believe that these processes, based on student protest and intervention, but also on young and not so young generations of female professors, are driving a fundamental change in university institutions, which also reaches the very concept of academic freedom (Scott: 2022), in the sense of putting at the center the notion that the University, more than an ideal community, is the community we have, with all its contradictions, and where, as the philosopher Marina Garcés (2020) says, we educate ourselves to live together, and together we learn to live.

How can we learn to live without violence? What can we do in the face of it? How does the experience of occupying university spaces, of women's university organizations, produce this knowledge? How can we overflow its walls like a tsunami?