Breaking silence: exploring motherhood and social transformation in a participatory action research with Alteñan mothers

In November 2012, a researcher, two social workers and five mothers embarked on a participatory action research (PAR) journey with the aim to develop new ideas for interventions for children and young people in street situations of the city of El Alto in Bolivia. In this article, we attend to the topic of personal and social transformation in PAR. We explore how the mothers of young people in street situations perform and negotiate their subjectivities as mothers in their everyday life; how they create (new) subjectivities in exchange and in interaction with each other during the mother project; and how the performance of their (new) subjectivities can bring social change. The mothers in our group shared stories of being silenced by social services in their everyday lives, as their motherhood is declared not good enough or as they are perceived too guilty to claim for help. It was the first time the mothers shared their stories with other mothers of their lives with their children in street situations. By noticing that they all experienced or heard of similar events that their children were subjected to in the streets, the mothers grew confident enough to talk back. Mothers talked back by denouncing injustice and by transforming doubts into questions, providing them with more knowledge. Finally, as the mothers reached out to social services, mothers’ presence, questions and stories confronted aid workers with their own flaws, and their comfortable discourse of blaming families, creating new paths towards social transformation.     

Hunter-Gatherer Mobility Strategies in the High Andes of Northern Chile during the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Transition (ca. 11,500–9500 CAL B.P.)

The high Andes of western South America feature extreme ecological conditions that impose important physiological constraints on humans including high-elevation hypoxia and cold stress. This leads to questions regarding how these environments were colonized by the first waves of humans that reached them during the late Pleistocene. Based on previous research, and aided by human behavioral ecology principles, we assess hunter-gatherer behavioral strategies in the Andean highlands during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. Specifically, we formulate three mobility strategies and their archaeological expectations and test these using technological and subsistence evidence from the six earliest well-dated highland sites in northern Chile. Our results suggest that all of the studied sites were temporarily occupied for hunting, processing animals, and toolkit maintenance. The sites also exhibit shared technological features within a curatorial strategy albeit with different occupation intensities. From this evidence, we infer that the initial occupations of the highlands were logistical and probably facilitated by increased local resource availability during a period of environmental amelioration.     

Building survey forms for heterogeneous urban areas in seismically hazardous zones. Application to the historical center of Valparaíso,Chile

ABSTRACT

Building survey is an essential data-collection procedure to feed large-scale seismic vulnerability assessment. The available strategies usually consider survey forms to gather information about the urban buildings. The application of the available survey forms poses important challenges for the case of the heterogeneous urban centers including different structural typologies. This work proposes four specific survey forms for traditional structural typologies constructed with masonry, reinforced concrete, mixed steel-reinforced concrete, and timber. The proposed forms request essential information on the parameters necessary for seismic vulnerability assessment, by evaluating the lateral-load resistant system, regularity, condition of conservation, and existing damages. The survey forms were applied to the study of 111 buildings of the historical center of Valparaíso, Chile. The proposed methodology was complemented with the use of Geographic Information Systems to obtain a complete database with the structural characterization of the most representative typologies for future works of large-scale seismic vulnerability assessment.     

Of Gardens,Hopes, and Spirits: Unravelling (Extra)Ordinary Community Economic Arrangements as Sites of Transformation in Cape Town,South Africa

Debates around diverse economies have flourished in geography in recent years, challenging the consistent and limiting hegemonic framing of the economy as singularly capitalist and global, through making visible the vast array of economic practices that are taking place alongside and beyond capitalist ones at multiple sites and scales. Bringing together debates around community economies, (relational) approaches to scales and place, and Actor Network Theory, in this article we focus on the narrative of Mama Bokolo, a healer/gardener/diverse economic actor in Cape Town. Grounded on her lived experience, we suggest that allegedly local, marginalised actors like Mama are actively contributing to enact liberatory diverse economic arrangements beyond‐the‐local, by articulating networks across places and scales and fostering relations with a range of diverse, human, natural and supernatural actors. In doing so, we elucidate why precisely these more‐than‐local and more‐than‐human elements can be instrumental to enable transformative economic spaces of hope.     

Resituating Proximity and Knowledge Cross-fertilization in Clusters by Means of International Trade Fairs

This paper elaborates a proximity framework and provides empirical evidence of how knowledge cross-fertilization is instigated at international trade fairs (ITFs) and continued in a cluster network. This paper applies a case study method relying on social network analysis to explore the knowledge cross-fertilization initiated at ITFs and furthered at a Swedish cluster. The findings suggest that firms participating at ITFs translate and re-articulate the acquired external knowledge through their interactions in the cluster network. Creating awareness of the ITFs' influence on innovation is significant for policy-makers and scholars.     

Index to Volume VIII 1961

In recent decades in Spanish literature, a series of stories have emerged that attempt, with varying degrees of zeal, revisionist reinterpretations of recent historical events, especially those related to the Civil War, the postwar crisis, and exile. This is demonstrated by novels like La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón (2002), La desbandá by Luis Melero (2005), Los años del miedo by Juan Eslava Galán (2008), and El corazón helado by Almudena Grandes (2007, awarded the Premio al Libro del año by the Guild of Booksellers in Madrid and the Premio Fundación José Manuel Lara). With her novel, Almudena Grandes initiates a dangerous and conflicted way of retrieving this historical memory. This essay aims to analyze the identity conflict of the children of the Spanish Republican exile in Grandes's novel.     

Big Pharma's Internationalization of R&D to China

China's increasing integration into the global pharmaceutical value chain is occurring at a time when big pharma's traditional R&D model has entered a period of crisis, and when China faces significant challenges in providing healthcare for its huge and rapidly ageing population. Despite China's ambitions of promoting its own pharmaceutical sector, it is likely to continue to depend for some time on significant contributions from foreign companies. While this situation provides considerable opportunities for big pharma companies to expand their markets in China, they are also hoping that offshoring aspects of their R&D to China may contribute to reconfiguring their current R&D model with its weak record of producing new drugs. Drawing on interviews with a small number of pharma R&D centres in Shanghai, patent analyses and industry reports, we provide insights into both the challenges and the opportunities associated with the early stages of establishing such centres in an emerging region with a rapidly growing market. This paper contributes towards a more nuanced view of the internationalization of R&D in emerging regions.