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

Reseña del libro de Fernando M. González, Pederastia clerical o el retorno de lo suprimido, México, UNAM, 2021, 238 pp.

Reseña

Based on interviews, this article examines the motives that led young people to participate in humanitarian aid activities to help victims of the 2017 earthquakes in Mexico City. It presents an analytical framework which sees their use of communications technologies as a symptom of disinterest in political matters. Findings are presented in four parts. The first examines the resources that interviewees utilized in the aid brigades and/or organizations in which they participated before the earthquakes. Variables such as their degree of involvement in political processes at the community (local areas) and national levels are analyzed, as is the nature of their political participation and use of information and communications technologies and digital networks to express themselves and act politically. The second part examines the discourses they utilize (the value systems to which they appeal, or that they contest) in their organizational processes and activism, including discourses on human rights and gender (in)equality. The third part deals with interviewees’ assessments of the actions taken by the authorities and ordinary citizens during the emergency, while the fourth studies the role of emotional aspects in leading them to participate in collective action. Findings show that subjective processes like memory, identity, feelings, and emotions were factors in their decisions to act, but that their experience with, and distrust of, government institutions, the authorities, and traditional forms of political participation, such as parties, also played a role.

This article presents preliminary results of an ongoing research project. The purpose is to inquire into the kinds of bonds that are constructed between caregivers –formal and informal– and the elderly in different scenarios of care. Our initial approaches reveal the social representations that the staff of a retirement home have about their elderly residents. These representations provide insight into the characteristics of the care bonds that develop. The methodology was based on in-depth, open interviews to access images of old age, care, and the female gender, and their influence on the construction of bonds between caregivers and the elderly. In the initial stage, we were able to see that the image of institutionalized elderly people, in the perspective of caregivers, recognizes a set of losses involving residents’ cognitive, physical, and social abilities, which form a negative model of the aging process that associates it with dependencies and dispossessions that reduce the autonomy and independence of elderly subjects

This document sets out from Michel Foucault’s interpretation of neoliberalism, in which he uses governmentality as a category of analysis of government action at the end of the last century. That allowed him, first, to present neoliberalism as a system of government and, second, analyze its implications for the formation of a society based on competition and the norms of private law. However, the ideality of this interpretation does not impede us from inquiring as to its viability today in countries like Mexico, where the historical trajectory of neoliberalism has been permeated by illegality, patrimonialism, and the use of corruption as a technology of governing.

Our purpose in the present work is to trace Gouldner’s contributions to a critical theory of communication that provides tools for analyses of communicative stereotypes, prejudices, authorities, and discriminations. To do so, in the context of North American philosophy and sociology of language, we address such key notions as symbols, meanings, expressions, opinions, speech, writing, and gestures, codification and decodification, conversation, and discussion, among others. After systematizing these notions, we link Gouldner’s early contributions to contemporary sociological theory, from the linguistic turn to the pragmatic turn, while also highlighting the critical meaning and current productivity of this theory of communication in order to reflect on the newest communications media, such as the so-called social networks. The problem under study is, then, that of communication, while the controversy we explore is whether or not Gouldnerian theory provides productive conceptual contributions for the study of this problem. The methodological procedure adopted to achieve these goals consists in analyzing key texts on language with dialogues from the early 20th to the beginning of the 21st century.

This study was conceived in response to the elevated indices of juvenile offenders and populations held in Juvenile Detention Centers in Mexico. The objective is to identify and analyze the principal causes of the violations of penal laws they committed while also exploring the reoccurrence of their antisocial behaviors. Seeking to elucidate the causes of these behavioral deviations, we present and discuss the characteristics observed in most of these juveniles in light of current theories of criminology. We also applied a survey to determine the kinds of criminal acts committed by the adolescent population confined in the Centro de Internamiento in Hidalgo, Mexico. Survey results contrast to the information obtained from a qualitative, comparative analysis using Ragin’s fuzzy set theory. Main findings show that for these young offenders, family disintegration, distant relations with family members, and experiences of abandonment were the preponderant factors to which they responded by violating the social order. Those conditions contributed to de-structuring their development. We also found that the absence of the offenders’ parents during processes of social reinsertion affects the success of programs, for higher levels of recurrence and recidivism were documented in those cases than in ones characterized by addiction to psychotropic substances, and those of young offenders from families with criminal histories. In conclusion, the lack of cohesion in the nuclear family unit impedes the successful reintegration of these young offenders.  

The proposal to include an ecological perspective in the curricula and university management programs is based on the need to address the ecological collapse we are currently experiencing from a new angle, one more in line with the proposals presented in important international academic and scientific circles. The goal is to validate recognizing socio-environmental deterioration as an anthropogenic phenomenon that derives from the way in which modern society has organized to produce and consume the material and service resources required to reach and maintain the standards of welfare proposed. Given the need to rethink how, as individuals, communities, and governments, we conceive the economy and make decisions, the article proposes a program of educational reform that incorporates the imperative of achieving ecological literacy

This article addresses the relationship between migration and development by revisiting the discussion on marginality in Latin American development. The aim is to elucidate the transnational dispersion of vulnerability that occurs through migration as marginalized people strive to access certain structures and assets and form relations with new agents and institutions within transnational alternatives of social reproduction. In relation to the latter aspect, the results of an earlier empirical study are added here to demonstrate how binationality reinforces migratory strategies within a specific kind of development. The result of this configuration is a substantive explanation of the correlation between migration and development in the Latin American context, one that considers the interrelation among the following main factors: a) the imbalances that result from the global, but unequal, integration of the economies in the region; b) the consequent disadvantageous situation that certain population segments face, defined here as relative social marginality; and c) migratory strategies as alternatives in which binationality is one mechanism that extends social reproduction to the transnational sphere in the face of uprooting and weak opportunities for achieving this under the conditions of a particular type of development.

The aims of this document are to provide a critical vision of the problematization and conceptualization of climate change and propose a theoretical-methodological approach to the study of these topics in urban contexts. This approach constructs a perspective on climate change distinct from its causal logic based on the increasing generation of greenhouse gases. The effects of climate change on cities, especially from the perspective of the Social Sciences, need to be addressed based on urban transformations and experiences of differentiated vulnerability to everyday risks. To sustain this argument, climate change is discussed based on the social construction of risk in the urban context. This view allows us to ‘denature’ the risks associated with this phenomenon and, therefore, present a discussion on the implications of the concept of vulnerability in relation to climate change as we seek to determine what it means to be vulnerable to climate change and how this can be analyzed in urban contexts. In its conclusions, the article emphasizes the importance of addressing climate change in terms not only of its study but also of public actions and policy, with the goal of reducing not only emissions, but also social vulnerability.