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

The present article addresses the geography of urban violence in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It shows how State action is apart from the logic of spatial experiences through which Rio’s popular working classes work and get organized. The goal is to stimulate a discussion that could reach beyond the stigmatizing discourses related to the slums population. The adopted methodology resembles the curves of the slum’s alleys and lanes as an option for us to drop empirically in the concretude of the slum’s space. It is also a way to revisit the marginalized narratives of lyrics composers who have, for decades, given many clues for mapping the socialization logics and spatial experiences of the studied population. Historically, the appeals of the mainstream media such as the quantitative research have influenced the construct of a universalist speech that naturalizes the criminalization of the poorest and their ways of integration/surviving in the cities. Thus, we can say -even though hypothetically- that the convencional mechanisms of analysis and methodological tools based on the distance of their «objects» are insufficient for a minimal understanding of what goes on in everyday oppression and resistance of the working classes.

The technical advances have created disparities related to the field of information technology; some companies are trapped by the knowledge of passwords, licenses and copyrights, prompting the civil society to be held hostage to this process of commercial exploitation and creating a division among the community of technicians on the computer. Arises the Free Software Movement-FSM, for the establishment, use and dissemination of alternative and collaborative software, a new form of collective action that aims to break with the prevailing economic system, using the potential of networks, especially the Internet, because it has its dissemination and spreading across Internet by means of mutual cooperation between professionals engaged in information technology and has achieved several segments of civil society. From these considerations, this paper presents results from a survey of some Non-Governmental Organizations-NGOs in Brazil, about the contributions of FSM for accession, implementation and migration of free software by these NGOs

The thesis defended on this essay is that the promise-desire called “democracy”, understood as the necessary and beneficial confluence between citizenship participation and a political management model (today concertacionista), is one of the main national debts of the Concertación Governments. Debt, because in the political plan for after regaining democracy social forces were excluded from “power practice” -although in the struggle for achievement of femocracy social forces played a fundamental role- all wich has risen to a deficit of citizenship participation and of participative citizenship in the twenty years of concertación governments. Nevertheless today, because of social forces action and potentially because of the last Government’s discourse, a series of conditions have arise that enable to discuss and conduct the sociopolitical model towards inclusion and citizenship participation, understood in two ways: first as a strenghtening of civil society against the fragmentation of social network (demos reconstruction) and the development of mechanisms of citizenship participation in public management, opossing the devaluation of democracy and politics (polis reconstruction).

In this article is presented a formative proposal using the cinema as a cultural material and as a source of knowledge. A film like Babel offers a good material in order to approach globalization and citizenship education, with propositions that demand a new humanism, a new relationship among people, aware of the communication problems, prejudices and cultural collisions derived from technological development. The film Babel questions the existence in a globalize world where everything is interrelated, for this purpose it brings the old biblical myth of the Tower of Babel emphasising wrong identifications, misunderstandings and failed opportunities, as invisible hands that guide our lives; or where destiny eludes us.Babel enables to understand globalize reality. It also allows us to be almost present in four different places as far as USA, México, Morocco and Japan, not only physically distant. We see the contradiction of miscommunication and isolation due to cultural difference in spite of the fictitious technological proximity. We live together, but isolated from one another.

Studies of collective action and cooperation in the provision of public goods made from a sociological analytical instrument are useful and relevant to both social and political analysis and democratic public policy making. In that sense, thinking on collective action in a broad sense -as the grounds for  the constitution of “the social” and the making of relevant social results Cumming from the interests of various social groups that form “the social”- is and should be of great use to social scientists interested in defining and designing social environments more horizontal and territorially fair. This article recovers some study notes from an investigation that was carried on in some Spanish-American cities, on the aforementioned topics.

This article presents an analysis on women, who being mothers “opted” to enrol with the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, the majority of them turning into “labourers of war” in order to fulfil their maternal function of securing the survival of their offspring. They are combatant mothers, who went to war to fight for their children, sacrifying their own life for that other being that once was a part of her. I try to show that those combatant mothers do not transgress the norms of hegemonic maternity. Nonetheless they transgress the gendered stereotypical vision considering women to be essentially “peaceful”. But they are not really transgressors to the ideals associated with motherhood, seen fundamentally as essence, as a biological and individual fact. Finally, I propose to revise motherhood in a (post)conflict society, such as Colombia.

Considerable scientific research in different fields has been motivated by sustainable development model. Such is the case of psychology which looks for behavioral and mental factors that take place in human-nature relations. Even though the emerging field of environmental psychology has proposed itself stimulating sustainable conducts, it has been working within epistemological frameworks that tend to maintain modern worldview approaches related to environmental damage. Narrative approaches of psychology are suggested here as an alternative method capable of subverting the epistemological order.     

The present article retakes some of the arguments and categories of the speech that criticizes the “eurocentrism of the Latin American .feminism” to draw attention on the circumventions or generalizations in which it incurs. Without unknowning the undeniable origins of feminist thought, the article insists on the particularities of Latin American feminisms, in its neohistorical location. With this intention it narrates the ups and downs of feminist mobilization of the years seventy-eighty in the region.

This article shows the advance of the productive transformations and tertiary sectors’ diffusion in the economic field of the Rio Lerma’s high basin. The model of richness production, started in Mexico since the 80’s, represented the concentrated of efficiency in some economic structures branches. With the consequent transference of resources and manufactures’ deteriorate, reinforcing the tertiary sector. On balance, it glimpses a reduce in the tertiary sector according to the intensify of industrial crisis and loss of the formal economy. Consequently, the territorial diffusion derived of the flexibility stills very weak. It is demarcate by the urban’s and territorial’s structure capacity.

The cultural heritage includes an essential and dynamic offert of human activity. About that, the historical centers mean privileged communities in quantity andquality way. The right management of this cultural heritage can become an increase of quality of life of these communities. The analysis of cultural heritage management‟s cases experienced in Latin-American historical centers which could transformed this heritage in a sustainable development factor helps to develop a panoramical view and to organize this data in a systematic way of “learned lessons”.