The creation of the academic programs of Masters and Doctorate in Regional Studies is pertinent, if it is taken into account that both in the region of El Alto, as in the regional university centers of the University of Guadalajara, the educational offer in postgraduate subjects is scarce, even more in the particular case of the regional study.
As part of the educational policy and the challenges set by the University Center of Los Altos in its 2030 Development Plan, there is the expansion of the educational offer of postgraduate courses with a focus on research, which is why the creation of Master's and Doctoral programs in Regional Studies. This is intended to strengthen the substantive functions of the university in the areas of teaching, research, dissemination and university extension.
The new postgraduate course is pertinent and feasible, because it seeks to prepare researchers to strengthen the academic plant of CUALTOS in the short and medium term, as well as to promote the employment of local academics in the region.
The postgraduate course in Regional Studies is proposed as an innovative, flexible, transdisciplinary, socially relevant educational program located in the field of social sciences and humanities.
The interest of the program is oriented to the knowledge, understanding and reflection of the regional problems from the identification of different regionalization projects with different contents and ideological and operative nuances: the region as a mechanism or analytical category; the region as a territory and the differences between territory and region; the region understood as a categorical construction around a parameter or variable; the region defined from historical, social, political, economic and cultural relations or processes, that is, as functional or nodal regions.
In this sense, the postgraduate course seeks to understand the need for criticism of regionalization as a particular way of ordering the territory under certain models of development; also, underline the importance of analyzing how political decisions affect the ordering of the territory and all processes, dynamics and social relations. All of the above is part of the current processes that seek uniformity at the global level, but that simultaneously entail the need to carry out an in-depth analysis of local and regional dynamics, which account for the diversity and potentialities that each region contains.
This postgraduate program seeks to develop in its graduates a solid theoretical-methodological training that allows them to assume critical and proactive positions regarding their reality and their time; for this, during their training process as researchers, the students are accompanied by tutors and they are inserted in a research group or academic body, in which they will develop their own research skills.
Based on the above, the following general and specific objectives are stated:
General objective of the Doctorate
To train human resources capable of generating scientific and humanistic knowledge, and to apply said knowledge in an original and innovative way.
Particular objectives of the Postgraduate
- Discuss different conceptualizations and positions regarding the regional, but from questioning the neoliberal regionalization, a tradition of thinking based on individualism, productivity, competitiveness and globalization; principles that involve excessive technology, overexploitation of resources, dispossession, privilege of privatization and business orientation of productive activities, exclusion of people, etc., and that prevent the achievement of inclusive and democratic projects; this is: understanding the region as a social construction based on equity, participation, democracy and solidarity.
- Generate from the regional autonomous development processes.
- Build alternatives of thought and action that seek the recovery of concrete subjects in their daily work.
- Develop and promote the training of researchers committed to the economic, social and cultural development of the different regions, from a global perspective.
- Disseminate the results of research carried out within the framework of the postgraduate application.
- Promote the academic exchange of graduate students and teachers with highly prestigious educational institutions in the field of social sciences and humanities.