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COVID-19 has exposed, reproduced, and created new inequalities in Latin America and the world. In this introductory paper, we discuss the impact of extant inequities on vulnerability to COVID-19 but we also identify new, and some unexpected, vulnerabilities. We emphasize vulnerabilities to the disease as well as vulnerabilities to policies and other responses in the fight against COVID-19. Building on insights from Peter Hall and Michele Lamont’s work on social resilience, we draw on the papers of this special issue to identify the important role of the state in addressing vulnerabilities and discuss the types of social resilience that vulnerable groups have turned to in their response to COVID-19.

This paper discusses the relationship between regional integration and industrialization in Latin America over the past seventy years. To this end, it shows how ECLAC’s structuralist thought and integrationist dynamics have influenced each other in practice. It outlines the positions on regional industrialization found in old regionalism, open regionalism and in 21st century regionalisms, and how such positions were shaped by conflicts between social groups. Specifically, it introduces the Andean Pact, MERCOSUR and ALBA as examples. This paper’s contribution consists in reflecting critically on Latin American experiences of drafting and implementing common industrial policy in diverse contexts.

The concept of integral human development is central to the Catholic social tradition. Yet, it remains under-explored with regard to its integrating components and their implications. What does taking an integral human development perspective mean for social analysis and action? The paper seeks to answer this question on the basis of the four encyclicals in which the idea of integral human development is treated, and in combination with the literature on human development in the multidisciplinary social science field of international development studies and its conceptual foundations in Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Based on this comparative analysis, the paper proposes an understanding of integral human development that it calls a “spirituality-extended capability approach to the progress of peoples”.

At the end of the 1960s, neighborhood movements burst onto the municipal agenda in many metropolitan environments worldwide through numerous demands related to basic needs. In Madrid, these demands took different neighborhood spaces and some former municipalities that were integrated as districts in the city’s urban core as a geographic scale of reference. This placed these locations at the center of the political debate, which gradually faded away as a result of the various municipal reforms developed during the first two decades of parliamentary democracy in Spain. In the last fifteen years, neighborhood demands have taken a different turn, as a political phenomenon has appeared linked to new forms of neighborhood protest called neighborhoodnalism. This process was not diminished during the hardest moments of the global covid-19 pandemic; rather, it has been strengthened as a dynamic of political socialization, solidarity, and daily resistance in many of Madrid’s neighborhoods. As a result, the referents and elements of identification around the neighborhood, as well as the political practice of neighborhoodnalism itself, have been expanded. From a spatial perspective of neighborhood movements that considers political identity as a dynamic and resignified process through protest and collective organization, and through ethnography and the analysis of in-depth interviews held over five years in the Madrid district of Hortaleza around the Three Kings Parade, this paper studies how these socio-political practices are being articulated in urban space and how the learning of this form of spatial socialization is influencing Madrid’s municipal agenda as a whole.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the transformations in the frameworks of reflection and action that promoted territorial documentation policies, developed in coordination between the National Direction of Migration and the provincial and municipal governments in the southern area of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina. Based on an ethnographic approach to the activities of a local office, the Dirección de Entidades y Colectividades de La Plata, and interviews with its main managers, we focus on the interrelation between documentation policies and the visibility (and production) of the electoral potential of foreigners that crystallized during the implementation of these programs. Unlike the literature that focuses on the analysis of the intentions (explicit or implicit) of the laws and projects, and on the difficulties encountered in achieving the purposes stated in them, the originality of the article is given by its monitoring of positions, relationships, languages, and objects that were produced (to some extent unexpectedly) during their implementation. This strategy reveals that the documentary programs and the officials who carry them out have gradually become part of the networks of the so-called territorial policy, in which the relevance assigned to foreigners has increased. The fundamental shift in this dynamic is the progressive recognition of its electoral potential and the conceptualization of the migration issue as an area of strategic dispute for local and provincial political life. Thus, the main conclusion is that throughout the implementation of these programs, migration policy became politicized; that is, it acquired a “political” status in the consideration of different relevant actors. This recognition lasted even after document operations were discontinued in 2016 and was part of their reinstatement in 2019.

This paper describes elements of automobile culture, a topic that has hardly been studied at all in research on transport and urban culture. Based on Colombian cases, the paper shows how the practices, beliefs, values and emotions associated with automobiles have transcended the universe of cars, to the point that many of the cultural changes in cities were related to automobilities. The argument is developed through a discussion of the role of autonomy, the notion of the driver personality and the automobility system’s own socio-material hierarchies. The research is based on the review and analysis of press items and statistical bulletins from the period of 1950-1968 referring to the cases of Bogota and Barranquilla.

This paper explores Occupational Therapy (OT) interventions using a dialogical perspective with therapists and people with functional diversity.[1] Framing the dialogue between the discourses that participate in the therapeutic process, the paper reflexively explores the interferences in the forms of subjectivity that the discipline promotes under the governmental umbrella. The research uses ethnographic and narrative material as the basis of its methodology. The material suggests that OT, like other health disciplines, constitutes a governmental mechanism of bodily regulation that produces subjectification through certain procedures: distributing persons in space, regulating their use of time, and perfecting their performance of activities. The reflection allows us to reconsider the construction of the “patient” in OT interventions considering the rights of persons with functional diversity.

This research paper presents a queer feminist analysis of gendered discourses in South Africa’s (SA) (2020-2025) National Action Plan (NAP) on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS). It builds on an extensive field of WPS scholarship by using the case study of SA’s NAP to illustrate how policy can be used to harness critical gendered language and create possibilities for radical (re)imaginings of gendered peace. While a considerable knowledge base that explores the gendered discourses of NAPs on WPS already exists, a key gap in the literature —that has only more recently begun to be explored with greater rigor— is the bridging of queer and feminist theories to further push the boundaries of discursive policy analysis. Against this backdrop, feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA) was applied to the NAP case study to surface dominant and counter-discourses on gender and their possible inclusionary/exclusionary effects. Key findings centre the potential value of policy discourses which, in their fragmentation, ruptures, continuities and ambivalences, can facilitate opportunities for queer peace at the instrumental level and beyond.

This article analyzes Argentine news coverage of Nazi crimes during the period of liberation of prisoners from concentration camps, when Allied troops discovered the “atrocities” that had been committed in them. For this purpose, a corpus was put together of news articles taken from the four main Argentinean newspapers of the period: the morning papers La Prensa and La Nación, and the evening papers La Razón and Crítica. The analysis of these materials shows that the Argentine press consolidated an interpretive paradigm of Nazism as absolute “barbarity.” This type of coverage created confusion regarding the place specifically reserved for Jews in the Nazi system of destruction, despite the fact that the same press had been reporting on the systematic extermination of the Jewish populations in Europe ever since 1942.

This paper proposes a model for characterize-ing and analyzing workspaces in contemporary Latin American organizations that seeks to portray the heterogeneous forms in which the activity of work unfolds in a single social and productive space. This model may be relevant for different types of social studies of work insofar as it sheds light on the structural characteristics that account for different social and subjective processes. It proposes the notion of work scenarios, understood as typical labor configurations where certain ways of organizing work and employment and human management practices converge which reflect the basic contribution that is expected of workers by the organization, and the type of relation the organization offers in return. In addition to proposing analytical criteria and methodological approach strategies, the paper describes a qualitative research experience that tested the notion of work scenarios as a result of which six scenarios were identified that provided cross-section of important sectors of the Chilean economy.

This paper is intended to explore modes of inquiry into culture and public discourse. To this end, the first part of the paper is devoted to situating discourses and practices within a broad notion of culture, a notion which goes beyond the cultural turn and focuses on culture in action, as well as on the dynamic dialogue between structure and action. In order to advance in a methodological proposal, the paper examines four different studies that propose differentiated strategies for making the concept of culture operational.

This article examines the scientific literature on return migration in Colombia that assesses and sheds light on the importance of this phenomenon in terms of its empirical contributions, in the first two decades of the present century. To do so, four dimensions of analysis are used as a starting point: what and who are the returnees; where they return to —the territorial scale of return from an ontological viewpoint, specifically, the territorial dimension—; the reasons for return; and the public policies of return. The bibliographic review and selection strategy was undertaken in four phases: 1) bibliographic search in indexing and abstracting systems (SIR): ALAP-OIM, DOAJ, Redalyc, Scopus, Seriunam, Clacso, Clase, LatAM-Estudios, Redib, SciELO Colombia, Biblat, Publindex-Colombia, Cepal and Web of Science; 2) purging of duplicate studies; 3) eligibility; and 4) specific selection. The total number of papers located was 424. Of these, a total of 127 were selected according to the inclusion-exclusion and methodological evaluation criteria. Despite the progress made, we concluded that there is a lack of studies on return migration in areas such as family, multidimensional reintegration, transnationalism, and political participation. There are also few studies that address current return from Venezuela, making it difficult to design policies to manage the phenomenon. Finally, the originality of this article consists in the dimensions of the analysis of return and its temporality. This in the light of a methodological procedure using grounded theory, in which each scientific text constituted a heuristic and hermeneutic unit of comparative analysis.

This paper will argue that democracy should be treated as an object of policy studies. Against some opposing theoretical views stemming from political theory, I will sustain that the public policies which are relevant for democracy are those pertaining to effective political inclusion. This requires casting light on the institutional design of political regimes, on the conditions that promote democratic values, electoral competition and political representation, and on the models of participatory governance in public policy. This paper will also discuss some factors related to the processes of institutional change that affect policies related to democracy. This paper aims to stimulate a more dynamic dialogue between political theory, comparative politics and policy studies.

The purpose of this paper is to point out some features of the relationship between solidarity and lack of solidarity in modern and contemporary constitutionalism. In order to do that, the article traces the historical emergence of two distinct notions: that of "solidarity", in the context of the French Revolution, and that of "solidarism", used as a reaction to the late nineteenth century conservative constitutionalism. After that, the paper discusses the uses of "solidarity" in the various kinds of social constitutionalism that existed throughout the twentieth century. Thirdly, it attempts to show the perversions, if not the neglect, of the idea of solidarity in what might be called neoliberal constitutionalism. After offering a brief critique of this approach, the article tries to explore the conditions for the emergence of a new kind of constitutionalism founded on democratic solidarity and fraternity. In comparison with its previous versions, this constitutionalism should be able to project it basic features in public and private relationships, within and beyond state borders.

This article aims to address the changing relationship between waste and urban space in Buenos Aires. Specifically, based on an analysis of the period between 1976 and 2019, it seeks to understand the way in which cartoneros (waste pickers) are inscribed today. By studying the productive role played by frontiers as sites of conflict, this paper presents three movements in which borders trace over waste. This mapping reveals the place of the cartoneros as important actors in a network that links waste management, the production of urban space, and a certain way of organizing the labor force.

The increasing inclusion of women into the labour market, the aging of the population, and the austerity measures affecting the public care system in the European Union have propelled the demand for domestic and care workers in the last decades. A large number of private households are choosing to employ women to provide these services. Often, those employed are migrant women who, in some cases, reside in Europe without legal resident status. As undocumented migrants, these women lack legal protection as workers. This paper will focus on this lack of protection by studying the case of Latin American undocumented female migrants employed as domestic workers in private households in Western Europe. The focus of the paper will be the affective relationship between domestic workers and their employers. Understanding this relationship within the context of the feminization of labour, the heteronormative arrangement underlying the personal interactions in private households and the differential hierarchies established through EU migration policies, this article proposes as an analytical framework the exploration the intersections between heteronormativity and Quijano's coloniality of power. The article engages with the affective dimension of domestic work and proposes domestic work as affective labour. It concludes with some thoughts on the ethico-political dimension of affects.

The expansion of middle-income sectors has, in recent years, drawn the attention of academia, international organizations, and governments. However, more recently, several studies have pointed to the vulnerability of these sectors. Based on household surveys, this paper analyzes the evolution of the middle classes in Uruguay in recent decades (1993-2016) using two complementary measures: one based on income and the other on occupation. The results suggest that the change in income levels that characterized the period did not result in a change in the structure of employment and human capital, and they alert about the vulnerability of the middle classes.

This paper is based on the results of a socio-pedagogical study in a public secondary school situated in a context of urban poverty in the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires, Argentina. A qualitative methodology is used to recover elements of ethnography and audiovisual production through a documentary film workshop. This is a collaborative effort that explores audiovisual language as a research practice that allows us to use different forms of narration. We reflect on the students’ ways of saying when they take the camera. Our hypothesis is that the way in which students construct their narratives constitutes a narrative that is told by action and that is driven by and through images.

In this paper I argue that the future of psychological research on educational processes would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach that enables psychologists to locate their objects of study within the cultural, social, and historical contexts of their research. An examination of anthropological accounts of the characteristics of education in small, face-to-face, pre-industrial societies raises the question of why major challenges have confronted contemporary psycho-educational research that seeks to implement major, qualitative changes in modern educational practices by transforming them to have the properties of education in those same face-to-face societies. The paper concludes with a description of a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary system of education that responds to these challenges while offering a model for educating psychology students in a multi-generational system of activities with potential widespread benefits.

This article provides a critical review of recent literature which has attempted to define what a ‘failed state’ is and explain why such states emerge. It is argued that aggregate indices of ‘failure’ are misleading due to the wide variations of capacity across state functions within a polity. The focus on ranking states also distracts attention away from analyses concerning the dynamics of state capacity. Moreover, many of the definitions either compare reality to a Weberian ideal, or assume that violence is ‘development in reverse’, both of which are ahistorical and unhelpful as a guide to policy. The second part of the paper assesses the contributions of functionalist, ‘new war’, and neo-Tillean approaches to explaining state failure. The paper finds that while these theories take concrete historical situations seriously, they have important theoretical and empirical shortcomings. Finally, the conclusion outlines an agenda for further research.

The mandatory confinement decreed in Argentina in the early 2020s positioned the security forces as essential workers. The police/pandemic/confinement relationship thus revolved around two differentiated poles of meaning: one that heralded a police force that takes care of use and another that denounced police violence. This paper explores this debate on the basis of three inseparable concerns: the police roles and policing practices that encourage these current crisis scenarios; the lessons they teach us given their potential reiteration; and, above all, the local and regional data revealed that allow us to reflect empirically and politically on our specific Latin American experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze irregularities and responses deployed by women workers recruited at origin in Morocco and workers from other African countries during the soft fruit season. The growth of an intensive, globalized, and delocalized food production model is giving rise to a growing population inhabiting a fourth world. The southern border of Europe and Africa make up one of the largest soft fruit producing and exporting regions. This region is the province of Huelva, where in 2020, the soft fruit season coincided with the first wave of COVID-19. A qualitative methodology based on ethnographic interviews, observation, and specialized literature allowed us to analyze the shortcomings of those who managed to safeguard production and how their essential status, granted to them for the first time, does not guarantee them their fundamental rights.

Bartering is a native practice that, while generally confined to remote periods, in recent decades has taken on a renewed significance in different contexts. In this paper, we present a case study where barter is practiced as part of the social memory of the Kokonuco people, an indigenous group in the department of Cauca, and among whom its meaning transcends the purely economic realm, something already suggested by the sociologists Marcel Mauss and Max Weber. We argue that the return to barter by this indigenous group is related to globalizing factors, established in treaties such as the Free Trade Agreement (FTA), and the need to strengthen their struggle for self-determination and food autonomy as well as instill indigenous values among new generations. The paper concludes with some questions that offer future challenges to this indigenous group.

Between 1910 and 1915 the American Museum of Natural History carried out several expeditions in Colombian territory. Taking into account recent studies on U.S. cultural imperialism and science and imperialism, this paper analyzes the collections of birds from these expeditions to explore the role of North American imperialism in science, as well as the role of North American science in the expansion of the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. The paper illustrates how theories of race and migration shaped the way in which North American naturalists appropriated and comprehended Colombian nature. Likewise, the paper explores the perspective of Colombian naturalists towards the expeditions, concluding that, far from being mere puppets of North American interests, Colombians used the relationship with U.S. naturalists to pursue their own agendas.

A critical look into research carried out in Colombia on the subject of conflict, post-conflict, reconciliation, and the role the civil society plays, is the starting point for an in-depth exploration into conditions required to achieve good governance and a sustainable human development, as set out in this paper. One of the most important challenges from the vantage point of knowledge is to review the kind of questions we are posing ourselves as regards research. To establish a distinction between actions conducive to the construction of mechanisms to explain conflict, coexistence and peace. To forestall common sense explanations, or more endogenous outlooks regarding such a sensitive issue.This paper will gradually advance from some contextual elements towards our own situations and processes, coupled with a wider analysis on the basis of knowledge and discussions arising from the modern social sciences. Pretending that more of the same thing may be good and healthy is unreasonable.We should avoid going to the extremes: either selfflagellation or self-satisfaction, even less so as regards such an issue as complex as conflict and what the future has in stock for Colombian people. Many challenges lay ahead of us, both as far as knowledge is concerned and regarding the facts we face as individuals and as a nation.

This article analyses human migration, taking forced displacement as the concept that best defines the events occurring in Honduras in recent years. To this end, it examines the dispossession to which the Garifuna communities in the Atlantic zone of Honduras have been subjected as a result of the implementation of tourism projects. The paper analyses the objectives, strategies, and impacts of dispossession and, based on the case of the community of Guadalupe, exemplifies these practices and examines the resistance mechanisms that have been developed. Based on community-based research, various typologies of dispossession are discussed. These have in common the use of legislative instruments accompanied by practices that tend to break down the social fabric and create an atmosphere of fear and distrust among the local population. Concerning the forms of resistance, we highlight the connections of local communities with national and international organisations—drawing on transnationalism—, the use of social networks, land re-appropriation practices, and psycho-legal tactics.

This paper evaluates traditional wisdom related to the introduction of central places and settlement hierarchies by the Spaniards in what today is Colombia. It is argued that both processes have a long prehispanic tradition. It is also argued that the arrival of the Spaniards and the colonial system actually implied less centralized settlements as well as a strategy of resistance that led incligenous populations to live in scattered dwellings away from the colonial power. This paper is based upon research in the Eastern Highlands (Fúquene and the Leiva Valley) and the Aburrá Valley, in Antioquia.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Foucault’s reflections on the birth of modernity, paying particular attention to the role of capitalism and discipline within it. The thesis we will defend is that in Foucault’s work in the first half of the 1970s—especially between 1973 and 1975—both dimensions appear as two aspects of the same continuum, thus establishing a necessary link between them. This approach, which contests certain Marxist positions, attempts to reveal that the research on disciplinary power can be conceived as a complement, and not a correction, of the analyses deployed by Marx in Das Kapital.

This paper analyzes the trajectories of payment for ecosystem services (PES) from the 1990s to the present, with an emphasis on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). It is concluded that these trajectories were configuring a strategy for nature conservation within the framework of North-South relations within the international system. It emerged in academic-scientific institutions in the United States, and was subsequently projected at the multilateral level through the Global Millennium Ecosystem Report, published in 2005. In Latin America and the Caribbean, a technical and political discussion developed on the possibility of measuring nature and assigning it an economic value, and cases were implemented that legitimized the PES proposal with external financing

Latin American indigenous people have undergone changes in their cultural identity, especially as a result of their contact with Western cultures. As such, a measuring instrument is required to determine the extent of this change. In the Amazon, difficulties in obtaining field data have not allowed the establishment of cultural indicators. This paper presents an instrument designed from the indigenous perspective that allows us to measure their cultural identity. The qualitative study focusing on the Ecuadorian Amazon resulted in an instrument that provides information on thirty subscale and five cultural scales, and was successfully tested for validity and reliability. Finally, it was applied to three populations with different degrees of contact with Western society in order to determine their differences

In Spain, the search for the origins of adopted people, driven by the need to communicate the prior history of minors coming mainly from China, Russia, Ethiopia and Vietnam, moves between the biological and the cultural. International adoptions introduce a rethinking of the notions of origin and identity and incorporate those of ethnicity and race into the context of adoption. In this article, through the critical discourse analysis of an ethnographic paper, we highlight the importance of rethinking what is being understood as “origins”, both institutionally as well as academically, and what are the consequences —both theoretically as well as methodologically and practically— of this conceptualization in the construction of otherness and difference in adopted people, based on their provenance.

This paper reflects upon a decisive issue, namely, the relation between modernity and coloniality in the Latin American context. What remains to be settled is whether European modernity is inherently colonial, or, in other words, whether all modern European thought is indistinguishably and inseparably interwoven with grammars of coloniality that, even today, are reproduced in the arenas of knowledge and power. The guiding thread of this inquiry will be the theoretical proposals of Walter Mignolo, a thinker who argues precisely for the consubstantiality of modernity and coloniality.

This paper analyzes the final stage of Import Substitution Industrialization in Argentina, which took place between 1960 and 1975. We present, on the one hand, the gains and structural constraints of this process and, on the other, we retrieve some economic policy ideas and definitions that sought to address these constraints. In the first case, we highlight the positive evolution of some aspects (such as manufacture exports, changes in the internal composition of the sector and the development of large projects in basic industry) that inform about the maturation of the industrial process. Regarding the ideas, we analyze how the intellectual contributions and debates reveal a relative consensus around the need to strengthen the industrial presence in external markets and thus overcome the traditional substitution strategy identified with the original proposals of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC).

This paper presents some results of a qualitative research that explores and analyzes the narratives of a group of adults who were adopted in Chile, and who have searched for their origins and made contact with their birth mothers. In their narratives, the people interviewed adhere to, strain, and/or challenge the principles and discourses that make up hegemonic adoption policies and practices, resignifying their experience of adoption in various ways, as they (re)build their identities and reorganize their kinship relationships. It discusses the tensions and ambivalences that play out in the search for origins and the challenges associated with it.

This brief article seeks to introduce the reader to this special number on industrialization in contemporary Latin America. It does so considering three issues. First, the importance of industrialization in sustaining high rates of economic growth leading to high levels of income per capita. Second, the long-standing debate in global historiography regarding the successes and failures of industrial policy: markets vs. states. Lastly, Latin America´s industrial trajectory through the lenses of four historiographical tendencies, and the ways in which each of the four original papers relate to the extant literature, and contribute to enhancing our understanding of one of the most important economic transformations in the history of the region.

A recent strategy known as “femvertising” appears to seek to end the sexism that has always accompanied much of advertising. It not only proposes overcoming sexist paradigms, but also incorporates elements of female empowerment. However, it is not exempt from risks, given its ambivalent nature and the gender interests it invokes. This paper reflects on the theoretical aspects of “femvertising” and employs a case study as a way to approach this type of advertising, on which there is hardly any literature. The conclusions suggest that this is a complex phenomenon that requires deeper analysis in order to diagnose its commitment to equality.

This paper develops a philosophical approach to Jean and John Comaroffs’ work by fleshing out and theoretically articulating the form of critique that the Comaroffs employ in their reading of the “postcolonial” condition. Even though Walter Benjamin’s classical correlation between law and violence provides the framework for the kind of critique the Comaroffs perform, I want to show that when the question refers to what kind of critique they undertake in the context of the postcolony, as well as what form it needs to take in the specific context of the postcolonial world, it is the Comaroffs’ critical approaches to Michel Foucault rather than to Benjamin that become particularly illuminating.

This paper proposes that the use of the bow and arrow and boleadoras (stone throwers) as a weapon system was simultaneously employed —in different environments— by the Aonikenk hunter-gatherer groups in the post 1520 AD period, which is different from the hypothesis found in previous historical-ethnographic studies. To test our hypothesis and due to the scarcity of stone balls in the stratigraphic excavations, we chose an analysis of the frequency of projectile points, end-scrapers and side-scrapers found in 38 post-contact sites. These three types of artefacts presented different frequencies, which may be associated with the different functions of the respective sites (limited activities vs. multiple activities). This analysis, together with the topography of the sites, allowed us to confirm our initial hypothesis, showing the usefulness of a regional approach to the analysis of post-Contact archaeology.

The notion of victim has been applied in the human rights (HR) field with a series of different connotations in each country. In this paper we aim to reflect on its uses and appropriations within the context of a series of laws and government programs designed to compensate the victims of state terrorism in Argentina and of the armed conflict in Colombia. Based on the gathering of documents and fieldwork with public servants and diverse groups of people who have been identified as victims, we analyze the meanings that this category has acquired and its possible applications in heterogeneous social contexts.

Vulnerability is one of the major terms involved in the advent of a new, more compassionate, collective sensibility towards social phenomena. Mobilizing the notion of ideal type, this paper analyzes using a comparative heuristic perspective, four major historical semantics of vulnerability (excluded, moral, proactive and performative). Each one of them might be understood as the result of the intersection of two major factors: the ethical or moral sense that is given (or not) to vulnerability, and the political function assigned (or not) to it. Additionally, this article argues that grasping the reasons of the primacy of one or another of these semantics and the forms they take in different periods or societies, allows a different understanding of the issue of vulnerability in contemporary world.

This paper proposes a social geography of environmental conflicts in Santiago de Chile, from the perspective of political ecology. For this purpose, a series of conflicts were identified and localized through consultation of three sources: judicial decisions, print media, and social networks, sources which were then cross-referenced with specialized socioeconomic information. The results show a trend towards concentration of socio-environmental conflicts in the most privileged socioeconomic sectors of the city, a phenomenon which is not consistent with their conditions of deterioration or environmental quality. Based on this finding, it discusses whether socio-environmental conflicts are a new form of social exclusion or solely a matter of the elites.

Feminist frameworks have focused on gender inequality as the fundamental explanatory factor of male violence against women in union. This paper extends the analysis to contributions produced through social research. The approaches studied consider the personal characteristics of victims and aggressors (individual focus), the male-female power relationship within the couple (dyadic focus), and structural and symbolic factors (macro-social focus). An exploration of the respective contributions of these different perspectives shows that they offer only partial, inadequate approaches, given the multidimensional complexity of the problem. The main conclusions recognize that it is necessary to develop multi-level and inter-relational analytical frameworks such as the intersectional paradigm, in order to achieve a better understanding of the connection between gender inequality and male violence against women.

For decades Latin American societies and policy-makers have attempted to confront the social, political and economic challenges brought about by high levels of informal employment and entrepreneurial activity. Social exclusion, low rates of political participation, dysfunctional social protection schemes and mistrust of the law are some of the social phenomena that are inextricably linked to informality. This research article takes a socio-legal approach to explore linkages between informal employment, social protection and labour law proposing that purely economic or legal approaches overlook crucial contextual issues that hinder the formulation of sound regulatory policies. Thus this paper develops an analytical perspective based on the social rights and citizenship discourse questioning current social policies and the role of labour law.

The paper discusses the similarities and differences between neo-developmentalism and neo-extractivism. The evaluation compares Brazil with nine other Latin American countries and is based on a framework that considers both economic policies and their outcomes. On the policy side, it looks at income, monetary, international trade, industrial and mineral resource policies; on the outcome side, it observes the composition of both exports and the Gross Domestic Product. In the end, we argue that neo-developmentalism and neo-extractivism are actually variations of the same development route and may face similar challenges in the long term.

This article inquires into the way “child abuse” has been constructed as a social problem in Argentina. The papers explores how the issue was first approached in the 1970s by a pediatric community influenced by psychoanalysis and subsequently divulged more broadly, until it became an endeavour in the hands of judicial actors that was destined to transform the way of dealing with the problem. For that purpose, the article is based on an analysis of early studies on the topic and interviews of judicial actors. These analyses suggest that the normative transformations that took place led to the removal of the “abused child” from the criminal environment, as the promoters had proposed, and also made it possible to broaden the spectrum of what could be denounced and, therefore, of what could be treated and controlled.

This paper examines the competencies in historical thinking of high school students and pre-service teachers in Spain, as well as their narratives about Spanish History. Qualitative methods are used in order to identify: a) their historical thinking, including substantive knowledge and use of meta-concepts; b) the narratives, the cognitive gradation (SOLO taxonomy), and the narrative subject employed. The findings show that a majority of secondary school students do not use meta-concepts. The degree of complexity of historical thinking among pre-service teachers is related to their use of substantive content. The results point to the need to improve history education, including substantive knowledge and the development of specific historical competencies.

The aim of this paper is to analyze what historical knowledge teachers are assessing and how they are assessing it in compulsory education in Spain. For this purpose, 359 exams and 3127 questions have been used in the Region of Murcia (Spain) in the courses in which history is mainly taught: 3rd Cycle of Primary Education, and 1st, 2nd and 4th Cycles of Compulsory Secondary Education. We have analyzed the type of exercises, the content evaluated, the cognitive skills required to answer the questions, and the presence of concepts about history of first and second order. The results show the predominance of questions that require rote-learning of conceptual-factual knowledge, with a great lack of procedures.

This paper presents some episodes that illustrate how the teaching of history and the social sciences in Colombia has been a source of conflict among intellectuals, academics and the state. This body of knowledge is presented as an attractive field that can be capitalized on by different approaches to knowledge and power. The change in the names and periodic invocations of social actors who seek to recover their relevance in relation to the educational needs of the country actually highlight chapters of such tensions, in which professional historians have played a leading role.

The promotion of critical thinking is an important but elusive goal in history, social studies, and civic education. Teachers often struggle to translate general definitions of critical thinking into specific pedagogical tools to plan learning activities and to observe and interpret student work in these subjects. They also struggle to distinguish between “teaching critical content” and “teaching students to think critically.” In this paper, I draw upon scholarship on critical thinking, history education, moral education, and critical pedagogy to propose four tools for critical inquiry in the social domain: Problem-posing, Reflective skepticism, Multi-perspectivity and Systemic thinking. I describe how each tool works, discussing how they integrate the epistemic purpose of fostering good understanding with the social purpose of cultivating thoughtful, responsible, pluralist and non-violent citizens.

This paper addresses issues concerning planning for and assessing progression in children’s thinking in primary school history. It argues that it is necessary to assess progression within the framework of constructivist learning theories, applied to the processes of historical enquiry. First, it discusses early research into children’s ability to understand concepts of time, historical sources and interpretations. Next, it describes the structure of the English National Curriculum, introduced in 1989, in which pupils are required to apply the processes of historical enquiry to content, in increasingly complex ways. The problem of what is meant by progression in history led to a large-scale research project attempting to identify patterns of development. It is argued that this proved problematic, and the level descriptors for the English History Curriculum have subsequently been removed. The article concludes that, at the moment, progression can be best planned for based on small-scale case studies, which apply constructivist theories to historical enquiries. Finally, suggestions are given for how teachers can plan and evaluate both their own practice and their pupils’ progress.