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

Homelessness is an extreme form of social exclusion which, although universally present in contemporary societies, has tended to be invisible. This lack of visibility has once again been highlighted by the measures put in place to tackle COVID-19. Although since the onset of the health emergency there have been various research studies that have examined the impact of COVID-19 on the Spanish population, few proposals have been devoted to analysing the specific impact of the pandemic on homeless people. In this sense, the aim of this paper is to analyse the experiences of homeless people during the confinement and pandemic, delving into the specific impact that the COVID-19 crisis has had on the reality of these citizens. The research is based on a mixed methodological design using a questionnaire survey and a semi-structured in-depth interview. On the one hand, the questionnaire was administered to a sample of 641 homeless people. On the other hand, 18 homeless people participated in the interviews. The results confirm that the place where they were confined is fundamental to understanding the experiences of the participants. Furthermore, it is noted that the negative experiences of homeless people were a consequence of the measures put in place to cope with the pandemic and prevent contagion, especially those related to the closure of services where their basic needs were met. This is especially significant considering the transformations that the responses to the health emergency have imposed on some dimensions of their lives. The results also allow us to conclude that pre-existing social inequalities have played a significant role in the impact of the pandemic on citizens, with particularly severe consequences for people affected by extreme social exclusion.

This paper proposes a strategy, named as Model of Social Cognitive Networks, for collecting relational data from key informants. We offer a solution to the double problem of, on the one hand, defining the boundary of a network of interactions, and on the other hand, collecting data from a complete network based on the perception of informants who are privileged observers of the social process under study. The design was implemented as part of a diagnostic on the dynamics of community relations in traditional fishing communities, in the service of a research-action project (PESCARTE), in the field of environmental education, on the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The proposal combines techniques for collecting data from personal networks and complete networks. The instruments elaborated for data collection and the procedures used to validate the strategy are detailed.  Article financed by the Environmental Education Project (PEA) PESCARTE, a mitigation initiative required by the Federal Environmental License conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA).

This article analyzes solidarity initiatives directed at vulnerable groups in Spain in the context of the post-2008 crisis. The analysis is based on Polanyi's perspective on the counter-movements that develop in society to counteract the mercantilist forces inherent in capitalism (Polanyi, 2001; Fraser, 2012). The work is based on a series of case studies of solidarity initiatives developed in the field of social reproduction and aimed at meeting basic needs. These case studies have shown how in these initiatives similar patterns are repeated both in the objectives of the groups and in their practices. First, they pursue social inclusion through social justice; and, secondly, they construct an alternative collective identity, a "we" that seeks to resist the individualism of the market through solidarity and mutual aid. We argue that the constitution of this collective identity takes place through the formation of circles of recognition (Pizzorno, 1986) in activism that recover a popular epic based on solidarity and mutual care, in the construction of an "interdependent we" and that have the local sphere as a sphere of action.

In both Western culture and contemporary social theory, the term person is commonly used as an equivalent of human being, individual and subject. Faced with this substantialist semantics, and starting from the recovery of the original meaning of the Latin term persona, carried out by de baroque political philosophie to theoretical cement the emerging european states. To do this, a genealogical tour will be carried out that will start with Thomas Hobbes analysis of the person as an actor. We will then review some of the most conspicuous representatives of the sociological tradition, in whose work the person is conceptualizated not merely as an actor, but as an social actor. To do this, we will explore the Works of Tönnies, Simmel and Goffman –in the latter case, in connection with Mead´s theory of self–. Finally, base don the concepts of double contingency and communication, as constitutive problema and characteristic operation of the social systems, the article propose a socio-structural radicalization of the sociological approach to the person, in order to determine conceptually which basic needs of the social orders meets the construction of human beings as social actors, and how this construction is the key factor for the structuring of their consciousness, wich leads to the development of the self. The fundamental thesis on wich this sociological radicalization is based is the interpretation of the person as one of the basic forms of social structuring: the social addressing; that is, the understanding of human beings as social addresses that help to determine and reduce the complexity os social systems as systems of communication.

The objectives of this article are: first, to review the quantitative indicators used in the literature to measure bonding, bridging and linking types of social capital; and, second, to review its operationalization process. It takes into consideration the methodological ambiguity with which these concepts are treated. It is argued that there is a good number of indicators that do not represent the theoretical concepts, based on: (i) the overlapping of chosen indicators between the dimensions of the concept; (ii) the theoretical ambiguity of social capital in its definition (especially from the communitarian approach); (iii) the empirical ambiguity in the choice of indicators; (iv) the lack of an ad hoc design to measure social capital.

The opposition driven by social movements rooted in native or peasant communities against mining projects, such as the Conga’s ones (Peru), shows a special difficulty for the analysis due to the importance of ceremonies in which entheogens are used to contact with spirits and to enable the production of information, diagnoses and plans. This kind of social movements require a cultural analysis that underlines the cultural gaps between the collective actors that also affects the ideological frameworks and the theoretical models that are used by the activists and the researchers. At the end, the article concludes that the four-ontology map proposed by Descola, which establishes four relationships between the human and the non-human, is very useful in order to analyze conflicts in terms of ontological gaps.