Writings for a Liberation Psychology
Writings for a Liberation Psychology

Author: Ignacio Martín-Baró

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1996-09-01

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0674265831

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“In your country,” Ignacio Martín-Baró remarked to a North American colleague, “it’s publish or perish. In ours, it’s publish and perish.” In November 1989 a Salvadoran death squad extinguished his eloquent voice, raised so often and so passionately against oppression in his adopted country. A Spanish-born Jesuit priest trained in psychology at the University of Chicago, Martín-Baró devoted much of his career to making psychology speak to the community as well as to the individual. This collection of his writings, the first in English translation, clarifies Martín-Baró’s importance in Latin American psychology and reveals a major force in the field of social theory. Gathering essays from an array of professional journals, this volume introduces readers to the questions and concerns that shaped Martín-Baró’s thinking over several decades: the psychological dimensions of political repression, the impact of violence and trauma on child development and mental health, the use of psychology for political ends, religion as a tool of ideology, and defining the “real” and the “normal” under conditions of state-sponsored violence and oppression, among others. Though grounded in the harsh realities of civil conflict in Central America, these essays have broad relevance in a world where political and social turmoil determines the conditions of daily life for so many. In them we encounter Martín-Baró’s humane, impassioned voice, reaffirming the essential connections among mental health, human rights, and the struggle against injustice. His analysis of contemporary social problems, and of the failure of the social sciences to address those problems, permits us to understand not only the substance of his contribution to social thought but also his lifelong commitment to the campesinos of El Salvador.

Passing
Passing

Author: Rihan Yeh

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 022651191X

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Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City is an ethnography of the public sphere in Tijuana based on intensive fieldwork in 2006 and 2007 and numerous subsequent brief visits. Its central contribution is to develop an ethnographic method for apprehending how the border marks collective subjectivities in ways that illuminate the basic impasses of publicness in general. She examines major communicative genres such as print news, street demonstrations, internet forums, and popular ballads, as well as a variety of minor genres: family discussions, thank-you notes at religious shrines, police encounters, workplace banters, and personal interview. The question of collective subjectivity that she traces through all these examples is particularly live, politically and socially, at the border, where US legal categories forcefully shape the logics of class exclusion-and thus national membership and democratic possibility-that are general in Mexico.

São Paulo in the Twenty-First Century
São Paulo in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1317222962

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This book analyzes in detail the main social, economic and special transformation of the city of São Paulo. In the last 30 years, São Paulo has become a more heterogeneous and less unequal city. Contrary to some expectations, the recent economic transformations did not produce social polarization, and the localized processes of spaces production (and the plural is increasingly important) are more and more key to define their respective growth patterns, social conditions, forms of housing production, service availability and urban precariousness. In other dimensions, however, inequalities remain present and strong and certain disadvantaged areas have changed little and are still marked by strong social inequalities. The metropolis remains heavily segregated in terms of race and class, in a clear hierarchical structure. The book shows that it is necessary to escape from dual and polarity interpretations. This did not lead to the complete disappearance of a crudely radial and concentric structure (not only due to geographic path dependence), but superposes other elements over it, leading to more complexes and continuous patterns. A general summary of these elements could perhaps be stated as pointing to greater social/spatial heterogeneity, accompanied by smaller, but reconfigured inequalities.

The Three Worlds
The Three Worlds

Author: Peter Worsley

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1984-09-15

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 0226907554

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Essay on the various factors, especially the political ideologies, shaping the development of the Third World and the resulting social and economic conditions of the proletariat.

Violence at the Urban Margins
Violence at the Urban Margins

Author: Javier Auyero

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0190221453

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The inhabitants of the urban margins are hardly ever heard in discussions about public safety.

Poor People's Politics
Poor People's Politics

Author: Javier Auyero

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0822380048

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“Political clientelism” is a term used to characterize the contemporary relationships between political elites and the poor in Latin America in which goods and services are traded for political favors. Javier Auyero critically deploys the notion in Poor People’s Politics to analyze the political practices of the Peronist Party among shantytown dwellers in contemporary Argentina. Looking closely at the slum-dwellers’ informal problem-solving networks, which are necessary for material survival, and the different meanings of Peronism within these networks, Auyero presents the first ethnography of urban clientelism ever carried out in Argentina. Revealing a deep familiarity with the lives of the urban poor in Villa Paraíso, a stigmatized and destitute shantytown of Buenos Aires, Auyero demonstrates the ways in which local politicians present their vital favors to the poor and how the poor perceive and evaluate these favors. Having penetrated the networks, he describes how they are structured, what is traded, and the particular way in which women facilitate these transactions. Moreover, Auyero proposes that the act of granting favors or giving food in return for votes gives the politicians’ acts a performative and symbolic meaning that flavors the relation between problem-solver and problem-holder, while also creating quite different versions of contemporary Peronism. Along the way, Auyero is careful to situate the emergence and consolidation of clientelism in historic, cultural, and economic contexts. Poor People’s Politics reexamines the relationship between politics and the destitute in Latin America, showing how deeply embedded politics are in the lives of those who do not mobilize in the usual sense of the word but who are far from passive. It will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars of Latin American studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and cultural studies.

Surviving Dictatorship
Surviving Dictatorship

Author: Jacqueline Adams

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2012-04-27

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1136489142

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Written as a book for undergraduate students as well as scholars, Surviving Dictatorship is a work of visual sociology and oral history, and a case study that communicates the lived experience of poverty, repression, and resistance in an authoritarian society: Pinochet’s Chile. It focuses on shantytown women, examining how they join groups to cope with exacerbated impoverishment and targeted repression, and how this leads them into very varied forms of resistance aimed at self-protection, community-building, and mounting an offensive. Drawing on a visual database of shantytown photographs, art, posters, flyers, and bulletins, as well as on interviews, photo elicitation, and archival research, the book is an example of how multiple methods might be successfully employed to examine dictatorship from the perspective of some of the least powerful members of society. It is ideal for courses in social inequalities, poverty, race/class/gender, political sociology, global studies, urban studies, women’s studies, human rights, oral history, and qualitative methods.