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

This article is about the responses of a neighborhood, Polígono Sur (Seville), which is facing socio-territorial stigmatization. The weight of the social and ideological-cultural impacts of exclusion in its (in)visibility is analyzed. Methodologically, the tools of the geography of power were used, and narrative interviews of 24 neighbors were conducted with regard to trajectories and diagnoses of the social fabric in three significant projects aimed at neighborhood improvement that have had recognized results: the CEIP Andalucía, the Flora Tristán University Residence, and the group of older adults "Basic General Instruction for Life". The narrative, from the perspective of Bertaux and Caicedo, allowed for the articulation of memory, experience and utopia as a projection of potential futures. The results reveal the impactof the ideology of the undeserving poor in the hegemonic narrative, which renders the disadvantaged and their dignifying experiences invisible, and severely limits their transformation potential.

After various attempts by some autonomous communities to regulate same-sex marriage, Law 13/2005 provided for the recognition of this type of union. This placed Spain as one of the pioneer countries in recognizing this type of marriage. This study addresses the evolution of same-sex marriage divorces, and several characteristics of these divorces, in one of the territories where most same-sex unions take place: Andalusia. The method used is quantitative, applying a descriptive analysis using statistics available for nullities, separations and divorces for 2012-2018. The main conclusion drawn is that divorces from this type of marriage were increasing gradually throughout the period analyzed. Furthermore, most of these divorces were characterized as being consensual. It was also found that most marriages had a duration of 5 years or more and were generally composed of spouses of Spanish nationality. Finally, more than a third of divorces occurred without the presence of minor children.

Democracy has a long history, but it has not yet been fully and completely constituted, resulting in important gaps between what is expected of it and how it has been put into practice. This paper is interested in the forms of democracy and its historical faltering from Mesopotamia to Silicon Valley, passing through the resurgence of the French Revolution and its effects.The objective is to analyze how democracy has materialized in different epochs with cases that illustrate these variations. The historical-comparative method is used, and data collection consists of gathering evidence of “democracy” from Antiquity to the present day through a bibliographic review of the contributions of authors from various specialties. The results are diverse. The introduction of democracy for a large part of the population appears historically to correspond with and to be a response to contradictory and negative situations. It is concluded that even in the 21st century democracy has not succeeded, and, although it continues to be the best instrument, the challenges remain and the idea itself is questioned in a world of democracies.

This article analyzes the narratives of the counter-movement that arose in Chile as a response to the social outbreak of October 2019, and the subsequent plebiscite for a new constitution. The focus is on those first-time demonstrators, that is, on those who did not have a previous history of militancy or political activism. The article argues that the main narrative that supports their participation in the protests is a defense of what they consider to be a just social order in society, and that it is being threatened by the mobilizations of the outbreak. They defend a social order based on the principle of deservingness and merit. We show that both notions belong to conservative and non-traditionalist currents of thought, since they are not related to positions acquired by birth. This article has been prepared by the Research Team Escucha Activa of the Center for Social Cohesion and Conflict Studies (COES), based on the analysis of 18 semi-structured interviews with first-time demonstrators who participated in the mentioned mobilizations in the months that followed the outbreak of October 2019.

The landscape of the new rights can be read, we think, against the backdrop of that paradoxical knotting, that unresolved tension, between that capacity for mobilization and expansion that give rise to a subjectivity trained in decades of neoliberalism and its capture in devices of expression –paradigmatically, digital platforms–, that often redirect those capacities toward deepening existing property relations and even intensifying their violence (the everyday war to “protect” one’s own and the little that one has). It is in relation to that type of dispute over the determination of a freedom, counterpoised to the accumulation of neoliberal violences, that feminisms, in their modes of constructing political alliances, have the capacity to be a driving force. This means giving credit to feminisms and movements of sexual dissidence in their migrant, slum, union, student, rural, Indigenous, popular, etc. compositions and in their mass, radical, and transnational character as crucial dynamics of destabilizing the sexual, gender-based, order and, therefore, the neoliberal political order, which are materialized in the dispute over the directions of the crisis that has continued to deepen since 2008.

This article presents a synthetic balance of the social advances in terms of income, labor, health, education and housing, as well as their setbacks, in Latin America in the post-neoliberal cycle. It then focuses on how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted such trends. Our argument is that the pandemic has an amplifying effect on inequalities and in particular has produced and is likely to produce social reversals in different dimensions. Indeed, Latin America is one of the epicenters of the pandemic because of its structural conditions of inequality and exclusion and, in turn, the pandemic will produce an increase in inequality and very particularly social setbacks in indicators that have been improving in recent decades. In this way, the pandemic highlights how difficult it is for our societies to achieve progress in social terms and the fragility of several of these achievements. Thus, not only does the solid fade away, but also the fragile does so, but before.

This article discusses the preponderance of the idea and of the exercise of popular sovereignty in XXI century’s Peruvian politics. The immediate context is marked by the crisis of representative democracy inaugurated in 1980 and reinstituted –in neoliberal fashion– in 2000. The main argument is that a wide array of expressions of popular sovereignty emerges to express, from the public and informal space of the street, an accumulation of social demands neglected by the State and inadequately channeled by the system of political representation. The plurality of politicized social subjects, whose diversity expresses the pluricultural and unequal character of the national society, reveals the breadth of the politicization of society but also its challenges and limits for the articulation of larger political projects.

In the article I start from the assumption that we are not currently undergoing a systemic crisis of capitalism but a scenario of novel restructurings, driven by new forces of social integration. At the heart of the present capitalist regeneration of world society is a new structure of molecular social classes (or classes of individuals), embedded in a less dynamic structure of organic social classes (or classes of countries). At the beginning of the paper, I advance the theoretical development of molecular social classes by recognising four related types: the profit-dependent class, the labour-dependent class, the crime-dependent class, and the assistance-dependent class (ADC). Following this conceptual approach, I concentrate on the sociological analysis of the assistance-dependent class in Latin America. I distinguish between a subclass dependent on state assistance and a subclass dependent on private migrant assistance. According to my estimates, the ADC is the fastest growing social class in world society as a whole.

The Chilean social revolt is analyzed under the depth and duration of the neoliberal transformation, and the specificity of the popular subject that emerges from the contradictions and conflicts typical of said conditions. The character of the crisis and its origin in such social and cultural conditions are discussed, rather than in a conjunctural economic or political crisis, unlike other regional experiences. The changes in the Chilean social structure, of classes and social groups, in the last decades, and the new conflicts and polarities linked to it, are reviewed. The inability of the political sphere to process such conflict and its overflow, typical of an ongoing legitimacy crisis, is addressed. Finally, it is proposed that there are underlying social, political and cultural conditions for the emergence of a new people, capable of opening a new historical cycle, whose specificity distinguishes it from the one that in the twentieth century faced the old oligarchic-agrarian order.

It is a summary of a Dissertation The purpose of the thesis was to analyze the relationship between the city of Bahía Blanca and a recently privatized, foreignized and expanded petrochemical complex, between 1995 and 2002, investigating the dynamics through which extractive processes intervened in the (trans)formation of the urban territory. Our working hypothesis proposed that, under the territorialization of extractive processes, in cities the capitalist appropriation of natural and urban common goods is generated as well as surpluses through the configuration of economic enclaves, producing a development that is revealed as destructive and around which various processes of conflict take place. To work on this hypothesis, we started from urban history, recovering its interdisciplinary and multidimensional character, and we established dialogues with the new local and regional history and the history of the present with the purpose of enriching the spatial and temporal scales of study.