Newsletter
Coping with Crisis
Periodismo de frontera en América Latina. Violencias y desigualdades múltiples
En América Latina, la libertad de expresión y el derecho a la información se violan constantemente. A partir de una crítica a los modelos mediáticos provenientes del norte global, Celia del Palacio analiza las múltiples desigualdades de los trabajadores de medios en contextos de violencia, en las zonas que se han llamado »de frontera«, donde se prueba que ellos son más vulnerables.
Recordar para perdurar. La participación del cine en la reparación de experiencias traumáticas
Film constitutes a powerful cultural tool that operates in multiple ways in the rescue of memories, as well as in the collective reparation and interdisciplinary conceptualization of traumatic experiences in communities devastated by systematic violations of their fundamental rights. It reviews and makes perceptible the prolongations of silenced or legitimized political violence both in the individual and in the social fabric disrupted by disturbing traces that disrupt existence and coexistence.
La politicación feminista e indígena en Abya Yala. Encrucijadas y discontinuidades
Based on dialogues and the collection of documentary material in seven countries of three sub-regions during a decade, Andrea Ivanna Gigena addresses in this essay the feminist politicization in Latin America and the Caribbean / Abya Yala in its relation with the women of the "Plural Indigenous Movement". She reflects on the historical conditions and genealogical constructions on which we are currently discussing or disputing the question of the subject of feminism.
Narrativas de exesclavizados afroamericanos. Conflictos de autoría
The central subject of the book is the conflict unleashed by the authorship of autobiographies written by people of African descent, enslaved in the Americas, during the 18th and 19th centuries. The book deals with the cases of three male and one female author whose testimonial narratives have been widely disseminated since they were written: Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Juan Francisco Manzano and Mahomma Gardo Baquaqua.
Mara Viveros Vigoya: El Oxímoron de las clases medias negras. Movilidad social e interseccionalidad en Colombia
Addressing the existence of a black middle class in Colombia is not only difficult but an apparent contradiction, an oxymoron, because black people are inevitably imagined as poor and "lower class". But are there not other class experiences within this population? In order to respond to the research gap on this social group, this essay examines the configuration of the black middle classes since the late 1930s, based on life histories of members of three generations of families from the Pacific and Caribbean region who identify themselves as part of this class.
Henry Veltmeyer: América Latina en la vorágine de la crisis. Extractivismos y alternativas
This essay is an extended inquiry into the dynamics of development and resistance unleashed by the advances of extractivism, a form of capitalism characterized by a multidimensional crisis of global scope. Extractivism takes many forms, but the epicenter of extractivism in its most recent incarnation is Latin America. The region has been the main target of its negative socioecological impacts, but also the setting of the most powerful forces of resistance.
Klaus Meschkat: La crisis de los regímenes progresistas y el legado del socialismo de Estado
Progressive regimes find themselves in a serious crisis. Those who are not satisfied with denouncing the predictable machinations of "imperialism" should seek the internal reasons for the failure of the proclaimed "socialism of the 21st century". Why have such regimes, which owe their emergence and early successes mainly to the mobilization of the masses, been unable to maintain the active support of the majority of the population? The answer is sought here by resorting to the record of the Latin American left.
Jeffrey Gould: Entre el bosque y los árboles. Utopías Menores en El Salvador, Nicaragua, y Uruguay
This book presents cases of social experiments in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Uruguay. In these spaces, where horizontal and multi-class communication flourished, Jay Winter's concept of minor utopias is suitable. This essay is inspired by Winter's important work, tracing what he calls the "visions of partial transformation," which coexisted temporarily with the great narratives of social transformation, but then lost their proper place in the historical record.
Pablo Alabarces Pospopulares: Las culturas populares después de la hibridación
The book offers an in depth balance of the debates that have organized the studies on Latin American popular cultures for the last thirty years. Simultaneously, it proposes new perspectives in times of crisis for the category: the central question is what does the popular mean today? The relationship between popular cultures and mass culture has changed radically in this century, in a way not foreseeable by classical texts.
León Enrique Avila Romero: Alternativas al colapso socioambiental desde América Latina
Latin America is facing a serious environmental crisis, which is leading the subcontinent to a collapse, understood as a shift in society and in the current way of living. This ecological crisis has been intensified by the entrenchment of the neo-liberal economic model and neo-extractivism, which has led to a dispute over common goods.
Claudia Briones: Conflictividades interculturales. Demandas indígenas como crisis fructíferas
Fake news, populisms, environmental risks due to the anthropocene are radiating signs of disconcerting crises in recent years. Which other questions should be asked in order to face the uncertainties and concerns that they open up to us? Which new approaches are being rehearsed in the social sciences to confront the challenges we face? Where can we look for more precise and alternative definitions?
Sarah Corona Berkin: La producción horizontal del conocimiento
This text ratifies that knowledge does not pertain to a particular discipline or region of the world. The Horizontal Construction of Knowledge refers to the vigor that social knowledge acquires when it is based on the disciplinary dialogue with the voices of the multiple knowledges possessed by those who live and overcome the social problems that afflict them. Research that responds horizontally to social questions contributes in two ways: it produces new knowledge, and new relationships between people.
Néstor García Canclini: Ciudadanos reemplazados por algoritmos
Who worries about us as citizens? Many parties and unions seem to be reduced to domes that distribute prebends. Since the expansion of video politics, television channels complaints and social criticism of those in power, reducing us to spectators. The networks promise horizontality and participation, but they tend to generate highly intense and short-lived movements.
Elvira Narvaja de Arnoux: La crisis política en la Argentina
The debate about the Social Security Reform, approved in December 2017, initiates the current political crisis in Argentina. The parliamentary process revealed strong tensions, which were heightened, a few months later, regarding the agreement with the International Monetary Fund. The text deals with the positions at stake and their inscription in antagonistic discursive formations, based on the ways of referring to the outside of the premises, the memories that are triggered and the semiotization of emotions.
Edgardo Lander: Crisis civilizatoria. Experiencias de los gobiernos progresistas y debates en la izquierda latinoamericana
In the context of the profound civilizational crisis that humanity is experiencing, there is also a severe crisis of the left in different parts of the world. The alternative proposals that were represented by the so-called progressive governments in Latin America fundamentally failed in terms of the transformative objectives they set for themselves.
Claudia Zapata: Crisis del multiculturalismo en América Latina
Has the life quality for the Indigenous peoples in Latin America improved after three decades in which legislation has been developed to recognize them? Statistical information and the increase of social conflictivity in the indigenous territories leads to the negative answer on that question.
Maristella Svampa: Las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina
The present book analyzes the progress of neo-extractivism in Latin America, through four fundamental nuclei. 1) It proposes the categories of neo-extractivism and Commodity Consensus as privileged vantage points for reading the current crisis. 2) It analyzes the different phases of neo-extractivism, from 2003 to the present. 3) It addresses the social resistances and the new political grammars, from the concept of the ecoterritorial turn and places the accent on the advance of indigenous peoples and the increasing protagonism of women.
José Manuel Valenzuela: Trazos de sangre y fuego
The destructive features of the late international capitalist order brought the life-and-death relationship to the forefront of social, humanist, ecological and artistic discussion. The processes of poverty and social inequalities have been emphasized, as well as the scenarios of violence and death that involve people, the planet and life itself.
Olaf Kaltmeier: Refeudalización
In contemporary societies we observe a state of social inequality as in the Ancien Régime, the concentration of wealth in the "1 percent", billionaires as presidents, the increase of luxury consumption and the emergence of a culture of distinction as well as the concentration of land and spatial segregation. In order to understand these phenomena in a coherent interpretative framework, this essay proposes the hypothesis that we are living in the early 21st century a new conjuncture of re-feudalization.