Our proposal for a CLACSO Working Group responded to the women's movements that shook various universities and educational institutions in several countries of Latin America and the Caribbean between 2017 and 2021. The hypothesis we have been working with since then is that of the university as an institution with patriarchal and colonial characteristics, against which a variety of movements have protested and mobilized. What was particular about this period was the presence of young female students protesting and organizing in response to gender-based and patriarchal violence. Thus, in a context of civilizational crisis that in Latin America bears the mark of the war against women (Segato, 2016), it has been in the universities of our region where we have observed and accompanied student feminist movements, to account for their impact on a series of key areas around which we organized the work of our first period: the questioning of classical pedagogies; the highlighting of the limits of academia; the patriarchal violence that is reproduced in it, including that of a Eurocentric and colonial knowledge; as well as the tendency present in several of our universities to oppose patriarchal authoritarianism in the classroom and on campus.

In this first period, we documented the power of the green wave and the feminist tsunami overflowing universities in the region, as well as the effects of the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, with its (de)virtualization of teaching. We generated testimonies of the organizational processes, analyzed the institutional changes achieved, as well as the tensions and barriers faced (Blázquez Graf et al., 2023; Quijano et al., 2024; Millán et al., 2024; López Dietz and Garrido, 2025; Basurto, 2025). This occurred within local contexts where the transformations generated at the level of community culture, university policies, and institutional and legislative changes are not without setbacks or more subtle forms of control and manipulation. More recently, and as the institutional rightward shift has progressed in several of our countries—as exemplified by the elimination of the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity in Argentina—we have identified the difficulty of maintaining the gains achieved during the feminist student movement, where there is institutional dissimulation, appropriation, and backlash. These phenomena raise questions about persistent institutional barriers and how to sustain, despite and beyond them, the community spaces and changes achieved, while also considering how to engage new generations entering universities within this context of renewed forms in which patriarchal and colonial forces are reproduced in higher education institutions.

This is why, for this new period, we have observed the need to study the reactive stances of young men in the university environment, which in some cases have led them to become involved with hate groups targeting feminism, women, and sexual minorities (Tena, 2024). The relationship between the rightward shift in national and international state politics is expressed in intolerance and backlash against feminism and sexual minorities, and it poses challenges to the effort to de-patriarchalize universities, education, and knowledge. We see it as essential to understand this resonance between new generations and right-wing proposals, their expressions in universities, and the need to advance alternative initiatives in the face of this new patriarchal-authoritarian wave (Broggi and Martínez, 2017). In the face of conservative movements that seek to capture young people, we challenge this attempt at capture, considering it essential to delve deeper into the critical approach to hegemonic masculinities and to explore practices in universities that strengthen alternative subjectivities (Bravo, 2024).

We therefore find ourselves at a crossroads between recognizing, documenting, and sustaining what has been achieved and the urgent need to subvert the reactive onslaught of conservative tendencies. We acknowledge that, through the alliance of professors and students, the feminist movement has succeeded in generating transformations in the content and methods of academic work, but that these are now being challenged by the rise of antifeminist and anti-rights policies. The restrictions promoted by right-wing forces in the region seek to increasingly curtail the life possibilities of those who are different, through subtle and direct forms of control. Among the most evident are the reduction of funding and limitations on the guarantees of their rights. These economic cuts are reducing public budgets for universities, which must optimize resources and confront pressures regarding investment priorities. In this context, we recognize that the struggle against patriarchy in universities also involves defending the spaces, voices, and agency of diverse bodies historically marked by power relations. In this regard, we propose opening spaces for exchange and dialogue with the Working Group on Critical Disability Studies and the Working Group on Theoretical and Practical Mapping of Popular Economies, allowing us to continue discussing these issues from critical and anti-systemic perspectives. In our struggle for de-patriarchalization, we consider it essential to strengthen the public character of the university by ensuring the presence of diverse groups within its classrooms and guaranteeing that historically oppressed groups can also have a place there.

Education is a central axis of social reproduction; it is within education that the battle for ideas, ways of life, and common sense is waged. It is therefore a contested and indispensable site for research into its content, practices, and socio-cultural imaginaries. Within this framework, the university is also a site of social reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970), while simultaneously being a contested space for social movements, new generations, and critical theories that seek to transform it and, ultimately, change the society of which it is a part. As an institution, it produces and reproduces gender codes (Ballarín, 2015) and segregations based on various social markers (Buquet et al., 2013; Palomar, 2005) that permeate the conditions in which universities are inhabited (Acuña, 2018). The university is thus a reflection of social changes, while at the same time its transformations disseminate and permeate society. It is this dialectic between the institutional and the social that we are interested in continuing to analyze and transform into the key of feminist movements and university women, who paved the way for it to be so.

From the initial proposal for the Working Group's structure, we considered the violence that permeates our lives to be the common thread in questioning the system that produces it. 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. With great force, the women who participate in universities across this continent are challenging these patriarchal forms of violence, which manifest themselves in concrete forms of sexual, psychological, economic, community, and epistemic violence. In response, we are developing an analysis of feminist student movements (Millán et al., 2024; Basurto, 2025); and subverting the content and forms of knowledge (Aldana et al., 2021; Aldana, 2023; Serú, 2024; López and Garrido, 2025). tracing forms of epistemic justice through the recovery of female authors (Rocha, 2023; Crespo et al, 2024).

Furthermore, we consider university education to be a key moment in shaping the political subjectivities of young people who will later constitute social sectors embedded in various ways within the social whole. Therefore, the reproduction of gender roles and their connection to critical, or conversely, conservative political subjectivities, play a significant role in this space (Bravo, 2024). In this sense, we observe that while graduating generations have ended their participation in feminist collectives and organizations, incoming generations have been socialized with the influence of social media and the sexist discourses circulating on many of them. This raises important questions about the pedagogical challenges we face with the weakening of collective organization and the strengthening of authoritarian forces. The increase in mental health problems in universities (UNESCO, 2024) and the loss of meaning experienced by young people within these institutions are particularly concerning.

We can hardly dismantle the master's house with his tools (Lorde, 2003 [1984]). Therefore, we propose that we address the struggle for public universities and education through critical and situated approaches and tools for generating knowledge, as well as anti-patriarchal pedagogical practices. Based on our experiences participating in training and mutual care groups, we consider it essential to establish an ethics of care for others (Tronto, 2020) within the university, one that integrates into our university work and fosters (Freire, 2007) the possibility of transformation in the face of increasingly unacceptable realities. For this reason, we propose spaces for exchange where thinking from the body and emotions can take place (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018), safe spaces for slow and affectionate feeling-thinking. For example, the reading circle experiences during our first Working Group period allowed us to recognize in this type of meeting a possibility for fostering reflections and experiences from our specific contexts. For this period, we propose strengthening these reading circle initiatives as spaces where we can recognize the convergences and contrasts of what is happening in different countries of the region and articulate collective proposals for building common ground to mobilize our universities. Similarly, we believe it is essential for the next period that critical theory and the analysis of the reality of our countries draw upon the knowledge produced by women's movements in universities, in dialogue with the theories generated by critical thinkers in Latin America and the Caribbean—theories which we recover, update, and continue to propose to understand our reality.