Laura Balán
Biographic Data
| ID | 92468 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Balán |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Balán |
| SIGNATURE | BALÁN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universidad de los Andes |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7671-4702 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
The “skills-first” illusion: A critical discourse analysis of Microsoft’s AI skilling initiative
This paper critically examines Microsoft’s AI Skilling Initiative as a paradigmatic case of corporate intervention in digital education. Drawing on Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), it interrogates the language, narratives, and ideological work embedded in Microsoft’s public-facing materials. The study analyzed 15 official Microsoft communications—including blogs, press releases, and reports—publish…
The hidden curriculum of the Amazon future engineer educational program
This paper critically examines the Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) program, a global educational initiative designed to expand access to computer science education for underserved communities. While AFE promotes itself as a philanthropic intervention aimed at bridging the digital divide, this study interrogates its hidden curriculum and ideological foundations. Drawing on critical pedagogy, curriculum theory, educational sociology, and critical data…
Observations and recommendations regarding ethnoeducation in Colombia
This policy brief examines the challenges and opportunities of ethnoeducation in Colombia, highlighting persistent structural inequalities affecting Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. Drawing on critical interculturality, the analysis reveals how current policies often essentialize ethnicity, reproduce educational segregation, and limit genuine dialogue. While acknowledging advances in access and cultural affirmation, the brief critiques …
The COP 16 in Cali: A hybrid forum for collective education and intercultural dialogue
The 2024 COP 16 held in Cali, Colombia, emerged not only as a pivotal event in the global response to the biodiversity crisis but also as a transformative pedagogical space. In the context of the Anthropocene-a proposed geological epoch defined by profound human impact on the Earth's systems-COP 16 served as a hybrid forum, convening scientists, indigenous communities, policymakers, activists, artists, and educators. These actors came together no…
Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance praxis as decolonial public pedagogy: Deconstructing borders, redefining identities, and decolonizing the gaze
This article clarifies and emphasizes Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra’s long-standing articulation of performance as decolonial pedagogy, foregrounding their praxis not merely as activism or artistic provocation but as a sustained, embodied, and public form of decolonial education. The analysis highlights how Gómez-Peña’s own publications—including Exercises for Rebel Artists (2011) and La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist (2…
Shanzhai pictorial anti-essentialism: Varejão’s depictions of Brazilian indigenous people
Drawing on Critical Visual Discourse Analysis to examine how images reflect, produce, and challenge power relations, this paper analyzes how Adriana Varejão’s Invitation Figures I and II negotiate with historical scopic regimes and visual rhetorics of Otherness, identifying mechanisms of interpellation and viewer inclusion. I argue that Varejão’s strategy of appropriating 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century artworks depicting Brazilian Indigenous peop…
Educational quality in strategic negotiation: A critical discourse analysis of the rebranding of the Pisa 2025 Science test rationale
Corporate Educational Philanthropy for Racialized Latin America: A Provocation for More Critical Studies
Since the 1990s, the corporatization of humanitarian aid and the expansion of private donors have filled the gap left by declining government investment in public education worldwide. As these corporate philanthropies take over work once done by governments, they gain spaces of power. This phenomenon has intensified with the global crisis of 2008. The paper asks what are the modalities of domination in corporate philanthropic educational interven…
Radical
Porousness, theater, possession, being consumed, death, sanctity: Narratives from the field with a radical street performer
The paper reflects on the experiences of the porous body of a radical street performer from Medellin, Colombia. His narratives emphasize the reciprocal relationship between the knower and the known: as Ingold suggests, "to know things you have to grow into them and let them grow in you so that they become part of who you are." Furthermore, his narratives help to unravel the underlying threads of his actions, and the construction of his porous sub…
The Key to Authentic Pre-Columbian Fakes: The Racial Myth of the Natural Man and Its Mise-en-Scène
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Alzate family, of Medellín, Colombia, grasped the magnetism of the Natural Man (a malleable myth with porous edges that combines both the Edenic and the cannibalistic visions of indigenous peoples) and its economic potential and orchestrated a family craft business of fake pre-Columbian pottery. They created pieces that would engage in dialogue with collectors', anthropologists', museums', and tourists…
Drawing on Trouillot’s concept of the savage slot to analyze the rehashed imaginaries of Latin American indigeneities
The world order that germinated with the colonial encounter of Christianity with indigenous peoples from the ‘new continent’ created the ideological construct of ‘the West.’ The purpose of this work is to show that there is coherence and continuity between the world order that started at the end of the 15th century and contemporary processes such as ideological mestizaje in Latin America, identity politics, transnational political identities, and…
Solar Community Hubs: How multinational ‘sustainable’ technology companies are replacing church and state in their ‘civilising and philanthropic’ educational work
Since 2011, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Computer Aid International have been implementing hubs to accelerate the process of digitisation and inclusion in the ‘global digital economy’ of ‘remote and low-income communities’ in the Global South. There are currently 25 such Solar Community Hubs in operation, aligned with the SDGs. The paper shows that through the socially accepted discourse of technology as neutral, apolitical and conducive to economi…
El simulacro de documental etnográfico de Jonathas de Andrade: La fabricación de un mito estratégico
I use the artwork O Peixe by Jonathas de Andrade (2016) to analyze how a mock ethnographic documentary operates by faking the recuperation of an ancestral ritual of anthropological significance. De Andrade denaturalizes the tropes with which Otherness and historical narratives have been constructed and shows how 'Latin America' sponsored the manufacture of an identity of 'indigenous peoples' and 'blacks,' which was domesticated and prepared for m…
No prominent works on this page.
El simulacro de documental etnográfico de Jonathas de Andrade: La fabricación de un mito estratégico
I use the artwork O Peixe by Jonathas de Andrade (2016) to analyze how a mock ethnographic documentary operates by faking the recuperation of an ancestral ritual of anthropological significance. De Andrade denaturalizes the tropes with which Otherness and historical narratives have been constructed and shows how 'Latin America' sponsored the manufacture of an identity of 'indigenous peoples' and 'blacks,' which was domesticated and prepared for m…
Drawing on Trouillot’s concept of the savage slot to analyze the rehashed imaginaries of Latin American indigeneities
The world order that germinated with the colonial encounter of Christianity with indigenous peoples from the ‘new continent’ created the ideological construct of ‘the West.’ The purpose of this work is to show that there is coherence and continuity between the world order that started at the end of the 15th century and contemporary processes such as ideological mestizaje in Latin America, identity politics, transnational political identities, and…
Solar Community Hubs: How multinational ‘sustainable’ technology companies are replacing church and state in their ‘civilising and philanthropic’ educational work
Since 2011, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Computer Aid International have been implementing hubs to accelerate the process of digitisation and inclusion in the ‘global digital economy’ of ‘remote and low-income communities’ in the Global South. There are currently 25 such Solar Community Hubs in operation, aligned with the SDGs. The paper shows that through the socially accepted discourse of technology as neutral, apolitical and conducive to economi…
Radical
Porousness, theater, possession, being consumed, death, sanctity: Narratives from the field with a radical street performer
The paper reflects on the experiences of the porous body of a radical street performer from Medellin, Colombia. His narratives emphasize the reciprocal relationship between the knower and the known: as Ingold suggests, "to know things you have to grow into them and let them grow in you so that they become part of who you are." Furthermore, his narratives help to unravel the underlying threads of his actions, and the construction of his porous sub…
The Key to Authentic Pre-Columbian Fakes: The Racial Myth of the Natural Man and Its Mise-en-Scène
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Alzate family, of Medellín, Colombia, grasped the magnetism of the Natural Man (a malleable myth with porous edges that combines both the Edenic and the cannibalistic visions of indigenous peoples) and its economic potential and orchestrated a family craft business of fake pre-Columbian pottery. They created pieces that would engage in dialogue with collectors', anthropologists', museums', and tourists…
The hidden curriculum of the Amazon future engineer educational program
This paper critically examines the Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) program, a global educational initiative designed to expand access to computer science education for underserved communities. While AFE promotes itself as a philanthropic intervention aimed at bridging the digital divide, this study interrogates its hidden curriculum and ideological foundations. Drawing on critical pedagogy, curriculum theory, educational sociology, and critical data…
Observations and recommendations regarding ethnoeducation in Colombia
This policy brief examines the challenges and opportunities of ethnoeducation in Colombia, highlighting persistent structural inequalities affecting Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. Drawing on critical interculturality, the analysis reveals how current policies often essentialize ethnicity, reproduce educational segregation, and limit genuine dialogue. While acknowledging advances in access and cultural affirmation, the brief critiques …
The COP 16 in Cali: A hybrid forum for collective education and intercultural dialogue
The 2024 COP 16 held in Cali, Colombia, emerged not only as a pivotal event in the global response to the biodiversity crisis but also as a transformative pedagogical space. In the context of the Anthropocene-a proposed geological epoch defined by profound human impact on the Earth's systems-COP 16 served as a hybrid forum, convening scientists, indigenous communities, policymakers, activists, artists, and educators. These actors came together no…
Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance praxis as decolonial public pedagogy: Deconstructing borders, redefining identities, and decolonizing the gaze
This article clarifies and emphasizes Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra’s long-standing articulation of performance as decolonial pedagogy, foregrounding their praxis not merely as activism or artistic provocation but as a sustained, embodied, and public form of decolonial education. The analysis highlights how Gómez-Peña’s own publications—including Exercises for Rebel Artists (2011) and La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist (2…
Shanzhai pictorial anti-essentialism: Varejão’s depictions of Brazilian indigenous people
Drawing on Critical Visual Discourse Analysis to examine how images reflect, produce, and challenge power relations, this paper analyzes how Adriana Varejão’s Invitation Figures I and II negotiate with historical scopic regimes and visual rhetorics of Otherness, identifying mechanisms of interpellation and viewer inclusion. I argue that Varejão’s strategy of appropriating 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century artworks depicting Brazilian Indigenous peop…
Educational quality in strategic negotiation: A critical discourse analysis of the rebranding of the Pisa 2025 Science test rationale
Corporate Educational Philanthropy for Racialized Latin America: A Provocation for More Critical Studies
Since the 1990s, the corporatization of humanitarian aid and the expansion of private donors have filled the gap left by declining government investment in public education worldwide. As these corporate philanthropies take over work once done by governments, they gain spaces of power. This phenomenon has intensified with the global crisis of 2008. The paper asks what are the modalities of domination in corporate philanthropic educational interven…
The “skills-first” illusion: A critical discourse analysis of Microsoft’s AI skilling initiative
This paper critically examines Microsoft’s AI Skilling Initiative as a paradigmatic case of corporate intervention in digital education. Drawing on Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), it interrogates the language, narratives, and ideological work embedded in Microsoft’s public-facing materials. The study analyzed 15 official Microsoft communications—including blogs, press releases, and reports—publish…
Sociology (10 works) · Indigenous (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Art (4 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (4 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (3 works) · Art history (3 works) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (3 works) · Law (3 works)