OVERARCHING QUESTIONS

These questions are to help you focus on the "big picture" of the Oaxaca program.  Your courses and field experience will provide you the opportunity to acquire the information and insight to respond to these questions.  We will refer to these questions throughout the program as well as incorporate them into reflective writing and other assignments. 

• What geographical, historical and socio-cultural contexts shape ways in which people in Oaxaca create a sense of place, community, and identity and organize their systems of governance and land-use?  

• In what ways are people working to maintain and regenerate their communities, cultures, and well being in Oaxaca?

• What challenges and opportunities do global economic and political forces pose for communities in Oaxaca and what are the ways in which people are responding?

• How the people, the social movements and the authorities of Oaxaca deal with the current end of an historical cycle and the contested political transition to competing political and economic regimes? How all this shapes the political, ecological, economic, artistic, and cultural climate of Oaxaca? 

• What do “the common good” and buen vivir mean in Oaxaca and why does understanding it matter? What might those notions and the corresponding practices mean in my own life and what is my actual and desired relationship to them?