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

This essay criticizes present dominant education. It takes a wide view in order to explain how formal education becomes a powerful ally for the modernity project: natures’ control in order to achieve human progress. Process that in the XXth century leads to globalization, and to an education guided by economicist principles. On the other hand, an even wider perspective is adopted to consider not only mankind’s history, but also the Earth evolution during 4,600 million years. With this approach, it becomes evident that the idea of development and the present purposes of education are part of today’s planet crisis. Concepts like “biosphere development”, “symbiosis”, and “autopoiesis” are explored in order to sketch a coevolutionary education.

This paper tackles the figuration process of the New Coast Front of Posadas, Misiones, Argentina, considering semiotic construction of the coast as a discursive object, using a diachronic corpus that gathers urban plans and projects. Figuration is an axe of projected representations and images for the coast bearing in mind the water reservoir on Paraná River formed by Yacyretá dam. Diverse aspects linked to development’s discursive formation are treated in this article, mobilized to implement urban policies that put on scene the problem of articulation between discursive and physics planes of transformation. Besides it is described enunciation device of the figuration process, predominant subject position and its effects of sense.

Education reforms of UNESCO failed. Constructivist pedagogies did not generate better learning to avoid breaking the contradiction of subject and object, and did not exceed the limitations of the positivist behaviorism. To meet the challenge of epistemological change without falling into constructivism’s “nothing changes”, it is necessary to overcome the constraints of civilization anthropocentric: only by renouncing anthropocentrism the individual may be able to feel human as well as tree, star, river or firefly, and will learn from them what they have to say to him. To hear and feel them, he will open much more than his senses and mind, he will awaken the finite and infinite powers who sleep on his genes since the originary integral human being was domesticated by the educational and communicative rationality of the non-unity system.

This essay seeks to delve into issues deeply rooted in our imagination that make us difficult  to resolve the paradox inherent in any educational enterprise: to tame in order to release. To do this it adventures on the pretension of controlling the uncontrollable, stands out the importance of the trivial and suggests to undertake non traveled inroads recovering the role of mirror neurons and cordial reason. It asks who teaches whom in todays world and if an education without history or values is possible, and finally calls us to beware from authoritarianism in our educational practices.

Mobility and seasonal migrations are part of the labour market that generates agriculture and the export sector of agroindustry. Fruits and specially grapes demand many workers, male and female, during the crops period. This study was made in the Region of Atacama, mainly in the Copiapó Valley. This area is special for the production of grapes for international markets. In this area, salaries and wages are better than in other fruit activities. Also the grapes activities need a lot of labor working in short term periods.  Many people come year by year to the Copiapó Valley for the period of crops. This paper studies the use of the annual working period of temporary workers, to understand migration mobility, the incomes of those who at some time of the year work here, the kind of jobs they undertake and the places where they carry them out. The corpus of this paper are individual and group interviews to temporary workers of different ages, gender , ethnic and national origin, in the Valley of Copiapó. The study wants to understand the consequences of this kind of temporary jobs in the unity and composition of the families. Workers, male and female, transit through many different agricultural activities in different parts of the territory. as well as across borders. Sex, family situation, social conditions (poverty of peasant and indigenous economy, unemployment, low salaries in their places of residence) explain different patterns of  migrations for sex and age.

The progressive transfer of responsibilities in social service implementation from state to nongovernmental actors, brings a demand to the same state, who instead of reducing its labor, should develop adequate mechanisms of regulation to ensure efficiency in social offer, in order to satisfy citizens demands in those public political commitments. Likewise, public institutions should recognize the demands from the private world to act articulated towards common goals, which ultimately would lead to a horizon of development of a more egalitarian society. This study reports on the tensions revealed by social services authorities serving vulnerable people, in regards to their collaborative relationship with Non Profit Organizations, in order to reach that horizon.

This essay proposes a sociological interpretation of the current student movement in Chile, regarding their demands in relation to the orientations and interests of the new middle class. Four hypotheses are discussed: first, the claim for public education could be expressive of a legitimacy crisis; second, such crisis corresponds to the expansion and differentiation of the new middle class (regarding the massification of students, professionals and intellectuals in general) in the context of the transformation of the social structure in Chile during the last thirty years; third, the demand for public education is aligned with the exercise of reflexive control on the structural and symbolic basis of the reproduction of this group and; fourth, the critique of the institutionalization of distribution of power through education constitutes the platform to sustain, from part of this group, a potential alternative project of society.   

In this article, and from the sociology of work, we argue that the recurring antagonisms between sectors that defend the environment and those who defend the jobs are a political fiction. We base this argument on an ontological and epistemological thinking, through which we unveil a chain of hierarchies, inequalities, domination and exploitation, legitimated in the modern ideology of development and unlimited progress. An ideology under whose axis emerges a fictitious community of interests in which labor and capital share similar desires of progress and success. A fiction which happens to be a political and ideological strategy to portray environment´s advocates as antagonistic to job creation and development, as we can see in the salmon industry in southern Chile, approached here only as a “witness” case. A political strategy that acquires its full meaning in countries like Chile, where there is a double and growing process of precarization of nature and naturalization of job precariousness.