Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This paper dismantles thanks to cartography three myths commonly associated with the Middle Ages: the idea that the Earth was flat, that Jerusalem was in the center of the world, and that dragons inhabited its margins. The visual richness that medieval maps boast presents a more complex world than the one we have invented for it. As it is well known, appearances can be deceiving. The lack of scientific projection and the importance of religious symbolism must be overcome to discover the world of the Middle Ages.

The Latin American Comics Archive (LACA)1 is an ongoing project combining capabilities for Spanish language and culture teaching, research in the Humanities, and digital technologies as a tool for expanding the access and analysis of Latin American comics for both scholars and students. Thanks to a Digital Humanities Mellon Seed Grant, LACA started out with a small representative sample of Latin American comics that were digitized and encoded in CBML over the 2016-2017 academic year. In the Fall of 2017, a pilot course allowed students and researchers to access and explore these source materials as pedagogical tools for learning and researching about Spanish language and Latin American culture. The use of digital tagging and annotation tools on the archive enabled for the analysis of the visual and verbal language of comics, as well as cultural and linguistic items or themes, and a variety of formal categories. Students and researchers were able to collaborate in the definition of key terms to be annotated and used for the research of topics in the digitized comics, with the object of ultimately creating or collaborating in critical editions of comics for use by others, and the expansion of the archive, which will eventually be open to general scholarly use by students and researchers. Integrated applications could also allow for the production of short critical interventions in comic format.

Expository texts represent reality in a logical-scientific way. They often consist of written language and nonverbal graphic representations, such as tables and graphs, each conveying some of the text meanings (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Expository texts are prevalent in the academic world and the educational system, and are challenging at all levels of education (Berman & Nir, 2009). The current study explores preschool children’s production of expository texts: when they need them, what resources they choose, and how these contribute to text meaning. Method: Participants were four Israeli preschool teachers and their students, aged 3-6 years. In each preschool, the teacher documented text production events, describing the context of text production, transcribing children’s conversations and adding comments explaining the photographed texts. Text analysis included identifying genre markers (Coutinho & Miranda, 2009), text functions (Donald, 1991), verbal and nonverbal representations and text layout (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Findings: The children produced texts of six genres: a definition, an observation table, a bird guide, an information sheet, an instruction manual, and a bi-lingual dictionary. These helped them store and retrieve information, monitor their own behavior and communicate with others. Diverse types of representations were used: written words for naming, drawing for shapes, numerals for quantity and length, and tables for organizing data. The study shows that nonverbal graphic representations enrich children’s text producing resources, and may help them gradually grasp and appropriate expository text genres.

This Dossier pays homage to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most cited authors in the social sciences, through articles by Argentine researchers who take up books or specific concepts of the author-tribute to rethink their own research topics. Specifically, we proposed each participant to recover the contributions from a conceptual and methodological perspective, with special emphasis on field work and the process of reflexivity. To do this, we call on those who, supported by empirical and / or ethnographic research, to give an account of Bourdieu’s contribution in his processes of social knowledge production, particularly in the fields of design, education and social classes.

The multimodal approach focuses on how people give meaning to the world around them through the various semiotic modes and available resources, and that is why this approach is especially interesting when thinking about learning -in general- and communicating science and technology -in particular-. As a theoretical perspective, it analyzes the interaction between resources and socially organized semiotic modes to which people appeal in meaning making, such as writing, image, sound, gaze, tone of voice, gestures, 3D shapes, etc. This approach also considers the influence of various media (such as digital or analog), creating a particular context of meaning in a particular descriptive and analytical domain. On the other hand, for more than three decades it has been argued that museums and science and technology centers are among the best proposals for scientific communication, given their interactive and participative offer. In this work we propose a reflection about the potential of these museums and centers, specifically the interactive ones, analyzing their contributions to approaches such as multimodality and embodied learning

The initial training of teachers should contemplate in their programs the development of the multimodal competencies of the future teachers since they will be the ones who will promote those competencies in their students. This research has favored the creation of knowledge about the use of comics as a tool to enhance the development of multimodal communication skills in higher education. The study was carried out through an action-research process during two academic courses with the participation of 71 students in the first year and 130 in the second one. The creation of comics by students reflects their potential to develop both critical thinking skills and multimodal literacy. However, we must clarify and take into account that the creation of comics requires understanding and knowing the visual semiotics, grammar and linguistic tools of this medium. Being a complex and new process for most students, it is advisable to plan scaffolding activities in which feedback is conceived as a fundamental factor for the achievement of learning objectives. 

In this article I study from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s work “The peasants and their body”, my participation as a student in a course of Public and Private Image. From the concepts of Habitus and corporal Hexis I analyze the knowledge that is transmitted in the course not only as specialized information on the subject but as it transforms us, the students. First of all I describe Bourdieu’s work, my experience as a student in the center, the course and my classmates. Then I focus on describing the classes and their dynamics. Finally, I explain, from the concepts of Bourdieu, how and why classes can be thought of as a space where, in addition to providing information, new aspirations and desires are built. Where they teach us to look at another, but not in any way but one that is in solidarity with a social and cultural context where that look makes sense.

In this article I return to Pierre Bourdieu’s work, “La casa o el mundo dado vuelta” (2013 [1980]), as a descriptive-analytical strategy to reflectively address other ways of organization and classification of the domestic sphere and its practices. I seek to understand the internalization and the moral regulation of categories around the house used by a family located in the town of Haedo (Morón, Buenos Aires).

This article aims to document and analyze the way in which suburban students approach the subject Social and Cultural Anthropology of the career of Social Work of the National Universities Arturo Jauretche and José C. Paz. With this purpose we will describe how they resignify the idea of anthropological alterity, how they apprehend in practice the techniques and methods of ethnographic fieldwork; and the impact that this experience acquires in their lives, those of their families and in the academic world of the university. This analysis is inspired by the transforming role that, according to Wacquant, fulfilled the fieldwork in the work of Pierre Bourdieu cementing the foundations for its future theoretical-conceptual scaffolding

The paper analyzes the reading conditions of Bourdieu’s book: The State Nobility in relation to two investigations that address the education of two privilege groups in Argentine society. We are interested in placing different accents to the text in question, by virtue of how some problems of the nobility resonate in the field work carried out in these investigations. Firstly, the article explores the reception that Bourdieu’s seminal work had in our field and highlights its main contributions for the study of elites in Argentina. Next, it describes the ways in which the “effect of dignity” granted by a title as conceptualized by Bourdieu in his work unfolds in our respective fields. Finally, the various ways in which, in the cases studied, capital is constructed, combined, reproduced; and the place elite schools occupies in that construction.