Collaborative Oral History in a Correctional Setting: Promise and Pitfalls

This article examines the challenges of collaborative oral historyresearch. Collaborative oral history—sometimes called"reciprocal ethnography"—involves the process of engagingour interviewees in the analysis of the interviews we generateand/or the creation of any products drawn from those interviews.The article contrasts the author's earlier experience on anoral history/photographic book with a more recent collaborationon an oral history and performance project in a correctionalinstitution. The author focuses on the difficulties of "sharingauthority" in collaborative research within a correctional setting,raising issues about the promise and pitfalls of collaborativeoral history research more generally.     

Topoiesis del espacio textual

ABSTRACT

The concept of topoiesis of textual space addresses an analysis of the spatial elements that tend to provide a meaning to the literary text. Based on textual semiotics where there is an organized relational system of meanings, in this article we propose that it is possible to determine the function of space as a meaning issue from three different literary text instances (event or motive; character; and object). This distinction will permit a deeper interpretation of the sense of space in the literary text.     

Fixing the Hole in the Bucket: Household Poverty Dynamics in the Peruvian Andes

Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty will require simultaneous action on two separate fronts: helping poor people escape from poverty, and stemming the flow of people into poverty. This article examines forty Peruvian communities, and finds that descents into poverty have occurred alongside escapes in every one of them. Escape and descent are asymmetric in terms of reasons: while one set of reasons is responsible for escapes from poverty, another and different set of reasons is associated with descent. Making progress in poverty reduction will require measures to accelerate escapes whilst at the same time slowing down descents. The article looks at the different policies which will be required to serve these two separate purposes.