Women's land rights, rural social movements, and the state in the 21st-century Latin American agrarian reforms

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Diana Deere
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin American ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
The State ◽  
Agrarian Reforms ◽  
Rural Social Movements

On DH in Argentina

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-235
Author(s):  
Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste ◽  
Juan Carlos Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Research Council ◽  
The State ◽  
Technical Research ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
American Academia ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Del Rio

In this chapter, Gimena del Río Riande, the Argentine researcher based at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), talks about the state of the digital humanities in Argentina and the potential implications and promise of digital research in Latin American academia. She explains the specific challenges in the region and how technologies are playing a defining role in the reshaping of Latin American humanities at the dawn of the 21st century. As expected, the way in which the humanidades digitales developed in Spanish-speaking countries differs significantly from that of the Anglophone digital humanities. These differences can be found not only in the language that communicates research—all the different variants of Spanish—but also in the topics, methods, and tools, due to the diverse academic, cultural, and economic contexts. To illustrate this, Gimena del Río tells us how she started working in 2013 on the creation of a digital humanities community in Argentina, the Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales (AAHD), and the digital humanities projects she is currently coordinating.

Indigenous Political Representation in Latin America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Rice
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Indigenous Movements

Indigenous peoples have become important social and political actors in contemporary Latin America. The politicization of ethnic identities in the region has divided analysts into those who view it as a threat to democratic stability versus those who welcome it as an opportunity to improve the quality of democracy. Throughout much of Latin America’s history, Indigenous peoples’ demands have been oppressed, ignored, and silenced. Latin American states did not just exclude Indigenous peoples’ interests; they were built in opposition to or even against them. The shift to democracy in the 1980s presented Indigenous groups with a dilemma: to participate in elections and submit themselves to the rules of a largely alien political system that had long served as an instrument of their domination or seek a measure of representation through social movements while putting pressure on the political system from the outside. In a handful of countries, most notably Bolivia and Ecuador, Indigenous movements have successfully overcome this tension by forming their own political parties and contesting elections on their own terms. The emergence of Indigenous peoples’ movements and parties has opened up new spaces for collective action and transformed the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state. Indigenous movements have reinvigorated Latin America’s democracies. The political exclusion of Indigenous peoples, especially in countries with substantial Indigenous populations, has undoubtedly contributed to the weakness of party systems and the lack of accountability, representation, and responsiveness of democracies in the region. In Bolivia, the election of the country’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales (2006–present) of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) party, has resulted in new forms of political participation that are, at least in part, inspired by Indigenous traditions. A principal consequence of the broadening of the democratic process is that Indigenous activists are no longer forced to choose between party politics and social movements. Instead, participatory mechanisms allow civil society actors and their organizations to increasingly become a part of the state. New forms of civil society participation such as Indigenous self-rule broaden and deepen democracy by making it more inclusive and government more responsive and representative. Indigenous political representation is democratizing democracy in the region by pushing the limits of representative democracy in some of the most challenging socio-economic and institutional environments.

Beyond Origins

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelica Maria Bernal
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Common View ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
The Common

From classical stories of divine lawgivers to contemporary ones of Founding Fathers and constitutional beginnings, foundings have long been synonymous with singular, extraordinary moments of political origin and creation. In constitutional democracies, this common view is particularly attractive, with original founding events, actors, and ideals invoked time and again in everyday politics as well as in times of crisis to remake the state and unify citizens. Beyond Origins challenges this view of foundings, explaining how it is ultimately dangerous, misguided, and unsustainable. Engaging with cases of founding through a series of “travels” across political traditions and historical time, this book evaluates the uses and abuses of this view to expose in its links among foundings, origins, and authority a troubling political foundationalism. It argues that by ascribing to foundings a universally binding, unifying, and transcendent authority, the common view works to obscure the fraught political struggles involved in actual foundings and refoundings. In the wake of this challenge, the book develops an alternate approach. Centered on a political view of foundings, this framework recasts foundations as far from authoritatively settled or grounded and redefines foundings as contentious, uncertain, and incomplete. It looks to actors whose complicated relations to pure origins both reveal and capitalize on the underauthorized and contingent nature of foundations to enact foundational change. By examining such actors—from Haitian revolutionaries to Latin American presidents and social movements—the book prods a reconsideration of foundings on different terms: as a contestatory, ongoing dimension of political life.

Co-construction or prefiguration? The problem of the ‘translation’ of social and solidarity economy practices into policy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cecilia Dinerstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin American ◽  
State Policy ◽  
The State ◽  
Recent Experience ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Solidarity Economy

By engaging with the recent experience of Latin American Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) movements, this chapter discusses three ideas. First, that SSE practices by social movements can be seen as tools for the anticipation of alternative reality/ practices, relationships and horizons—in the present. Second, that the integration of SSE practices into state policy requires the institutionalisation of the SSE sector which renders invisible everything that does not fit within the ‘parameters of legibility’ of the state’s policy territory. As the state seeks to achieve order and stability, policy reforms are the crystallisation in time of ongoing conflicts. Third, an adequate ‘translation’ of the SSE into policy requires a type of co-construction of policy that engages with the emancipatory call of SSE movements, thus constituting a prefigurative translation. By escaping the contours of the state’s given reality, prefigurative translation allows SSE movements to venture into new territories. This ‘prefigurative translation’ is part of the process of ‘organising hope’ by SSE movements.

Failed Democratic Reform in Contemporary Mexico: from Social Movements to the State and Back Again

1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane E. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Research Focus ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
Theoretical Premise ◽  
Democratic Transformation

Over the last decade or so, North American and European scholars have popularised a research focus on new social movements, or so-called autonomous and democratic struggles generated from within civil society against the state. The underlying theoretical premise of this approach is that challenges to the state from social movements are a principal driving force of political change in modern society. Despite its grounding in the advanced capitalist context, many Latin American scholars have found elective affinity with the argument, as evidenced in the recent tidal wave of studies on social movements by Latin Americanists. Basing their work primarily on analyses of Brazil, Argentina and Chile, scholars have argued that social movements help challenge the legitimacy and political power of strong and centralised governments in Latin America, at the same time creating from the grassroots a political culture suggestive of democratic transformation. In sort, there is growing consensus that social movements play a central role in bringing democracy to Latin America.

scholarly journals Perspectivas e dilemas da política de formação de educadores do campo diante do ultraconservadorismo

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Safira Rego Lopes ◽  
Cacilda Rodrigues Cavalcanti
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Rural Education ◽  
The State ◽  
Field Education ◽  
Budget Cuts ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Current Context ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Rural Social Movements

The Degree in Rural Education is part of the context of public education policies that are connected to rural social movements. However, in face of the advancement of neoliberalism with its recent ultra-conservative version, the operationalization of this course has encountered challenges that are found from the formulation of educational policies in a market perspective to the structures of the State that shape the execution of these policies. Thus, this article aims reflecting on the perspectives and dilemmas of graduation courses in Field Education in the context of advances of ultraconservatism and neoliberalism, based on a bibliographic study. In this sense, the concept of trainer of the Degree in Rural Education is taken as a reference, from the analysis of the relationship between the State, social movements and public policies, seeking to identify the challenges these courses face in the current context so as to carry out its conception. Our reflections lead to the conclusion that the Degree in Rural Education, as formulated by the rural education movement, is threatened in the context of ideological persecution, budget cuts and regulatory frameworks that contradict its prospects for training educators and they can only assert its existence as an action against hegemony.

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