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

In migration studies about literature, food usually signals the preservation of a migrant’s identity in his/her new country. Considered as a transitional condition, the very travel of migration itself is instead overlooked and perceived as a non-place. Consequently, also all aspects of migration related to feeding are mostly ignored. In my paper, I will argue that spaces of transit are heterotopic spaces rather than non-places. In these spaces, the lack of food, or its being often a ‘leftover’, is a key fact to understand the representation of the commerce of migrant bodies.

Studies of science, technology and society (STS) are characteristics in relating objects and practices. The relationship differs from the role it has in the sociology of science and in the social construction of technology. It is usually affirmed in STS, contradicting humanities, that the nature of the social actors would not be defined in advance. Considering that the semiotic is something exceptional of the human subject, where objects only accredit their agencies through symbolic processes, would be to lose sight of the empirical richness of collective practices that articulate the human and the non-human. Instead, subjects and objects are often thought of in STS as reconfigurable sociomaterial effects of in situ relationships. The figure of the actor-network, the situated reading of material-semiotic actors, the study of boundary objects and the use of assembly methods are some of the conceptual turns in this variation of action theory. Here I will delineate a partial route to travel through its arguments, introducing the debate on the divisions of nature and culture, to examine the notion of agency with the concepts of translation, configuration, multiplicity and non-coherence. As an example, I finish with a reading on the sociality and spatiality of ATMs.

Positive discrimination, also known as affirmative action, has been positioned as a framework from which actions have been developed to reduce inequalities and increase opportunities in the educational field. Universities, at the international level, have not been left out, and have implemented actions to improve access, retention and graduation of indigenous students. This article discusses the history, the rationale and the tensions of this concept, and discusses some international debates about its effectiveness. Finally, it is proposed a reflection on these actions, as policy and discourse that allow us to broaden our critical view of the actions implemented by universities to reduce educational gaps.

Discursive territories are created through the conformation of two dimensions, one that attends to its discursive components and the other that responds to the territorial characteristics where everything unveiled through discourse is constituted in a territorial-identity hologram. This means that we are facing a type of territory traditionally rendered invisible, in large part, by the subalternization of discourses and the recusal of territories. Therefore, this research aims to account for the components that make discursive territories a territorial reality with recognizable meanings, both in its symbolic and material aspects, from an epistemological origin that attends to the nature of the phenomenon.

This article proposes to configure knowledge-trope plot as a strategy to uncover colonial ties that persist in the daily lives of situated and incarnated subjects, whose existences develop in conditions of material precariousness, exclusion, exploitation and non-recognition. With a marked epistemic-methodological character, and based on the postulates of the tropology, the notion of trope and knowledge is discussed, as well as pointing out the possible relationships that can occur between them, and finally, in demonstrative terms, to propose a procedure aimed at identifying and analysing the tropes that allow us to reveal colonial ballasts in everyday narratives. The relevance of this proposal is based on the need to construct methodological tools that allow us to understand the principles of decolonial thinking. From there, the trope is proposed as an expression and figurative discussion of knowledge, because it can be used persuasively to affect the way in which the world is inhabited, while at the same time it allows us to understand social action and, consequently, colonial matrices with which we must break.

This essay seeks to epistemologically feed the figure of the scriptwriter as a singular translator. It is a creator who does not translate but let translate from an exercise of symbolic imagination where the cosmic, the oneiric and the poetic are expressed in a type of language. Using a reverse technique, he opposes the thesis of the untranslatable. The control of interpretive gaps would be, rather, the requirement that allows the content of messages from one grammar system to be adapted to another, each with its own codes and rules, but using the figure of a semi-open work. We approach the role of scriptwriter-translator from a double conceptual anchorage. On the one hand, the idea that translation is a form, thesis developed by Walter Benjamin in his essay "The task of the translator". On the other hand, the paradigm described by Paul Ricoeur in "On translation", in which he develops the practical alternative of fidelity versus treason. In both authors the existence of an original is supposed. The translator maintains a close relationship with that original. In the theory of the script, since the translation exists, it is necessary that it be possible.

This article reconstructs the main motives that led to the most recent renewal of the epistemological foundations of critical theory. It analyses the move from a theory based on the notion of “communicative action” (Jürgen Habermas) to one centred on “recognition” (Axel Honneth). The article argues that both this renewal and the “inter-subjective turn”, proposed decades ago by Habermas as response to the original agenda focused on the “critique of ideology”, can be understood by looking at one of the distinctive goals critical theory seeks to meet from its epistemological positioning: to conceive its forms of knowledge as a moment of self-reflection of a socially existing emancipatory interest. This implies connecting in some way its critiques of injustice to the lived experiences of injustice. In sum, the different ways of addressing this self-reflective goal can be understood as the guideline between consecutive epistemological renewals of this tradition of social criticism.

This article answers the question about the character of the Chilean anthropological literature in its hybrid position between science and literature, for it uses the categories of the anthropologist and literary native of the Martinique Édouard Glissant, with regard to his conception of "All World" as a possibility of transcultural understanding, using concepts such as archipelago, rhizome (at its source in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), opacity, chaos and creolization. With this we managed to assume the Chilean anthropological literature as a textual form that responds to own definitions of literature and poetry and that is basically defined as an instrument of intercultural communication, with an origin in the social sciences.

This paper identifies epistemological principles that would come to define the task of anthropological research. These principles are theoretical assumptions which would inform the practice of a discipline based on a method of qualitative observation, and on the systematic recording of the things observed with a markedly subjective tone. In this study, I offer a proposal on the ethical stance implicit in the acknowledgement and explicitation of the locus of research, which would in turn underpin the articulation of an explanatory discourse that is demonstrative in nature. A hypothetical researcher would be aware of the multi-dimensional and subjective representation of the phenomenon observed and shun immediatist or prescriptive interpretations. In the conceptual framework offered by Bourdieu, interpretation in this case would entail a modus operandi as a practical expression and “common sense” as a cultural manifestation. What is proposed here is a meditative observation that would result in the co-involvement of the anthropological subject in that which the anthropologist seeks to explain.

The aim of this article is to study analytic induction as a scientific research method, that is, as a valid way of making science. In 1934, the philosopher and sociologist Florian Znaniecki, its creator, referred to this methodology as the method that should be adopted by any sociological research. Its relevance lies on the fact that its goal is to find global explanations to social phenomena by using qualitative research techniques. I adopt a historical perspective to inscribe this method’s emergency and evolution in a larger context of the development of qualitative methods in sociology, and then reflect upon its epistemological basis and the criticisms made in relation to it. Finally, I evaluate this method’s contributions to the discipline.