Introduction to Vol. 5, No. 2 of the Latin-American Review of Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth

Before arriving in this editorial page, the reader must have noticed that our Review is in mourning because of the unexpected departure of one of the most prominent international figures who were members of our Editorial Board, Dr. Eleonora Cebotarev, better known to her friends and students as «Nora». She was the author of the first paper in the first issue of our Review, a masterpiece on the Frankfurter Schule’s Critical Theory. We recommend re-reading this paper, with the certainty that it will arouse the reader’s admiration because of the depth of the text itself as well as because of the stature and warmth or its author. May she rest in peace.

This issue closes the 5^th volume of our Review. Solidly supported with the second issue of vol. 4 and the first of this volume, the Review applied for a promotion to category B in the Colombian National Bibliographic Index «Publindex». We hope to receive good news about this promotion before the end of this year.

Following the recommendation of international data bases, the entire five volumes of our Review are now available in the URL: http://www.umanizales.edu.co/revistacinde/index.html

This issue’s first section–»Theory and metatheory»–includes four articles by authors from four countries: Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Colombia. In the first of them, here published in English: «Early Childhood Education in Brazil: The obstacles for a successful experience», Fernanda da R. Becker studies the difficulties encountered by the Brazilian government to expand and to improve early childhood education in that country; she offers useful suggestions for other Latin-American countries interested in insuring children’s right to early education.

In the second article: «Youth and Violences in Latin America: Focusing on Integrated Prevention», Ernesto Rodríguez gives valuable suggestions for public policies on youth in our region in order to avoid over-reaction to the numerous outbursts of violence in the continent.

The third article bears a long and meaningful title: «Institutional recording and monitoring as tools for the transformation of social programs: The experience of the Program of Institutional Strengthening for the National Council on Childhood, Adolescence and the Family in Argentina»; in it, Valeria Llobet and José Antonio Rodríguez give a detailed description of the design and application of institutional recording and monitoring from a rights’ perspective within the Program of Institutional Strengthening of that country. A summary of this program appeared in our previous issue, and due to its interest, the Editorial Board asked the authors to give a more detailed account for all our readers, who will certainly be grateful for the celerity and care with which the authors accomplished this difficult task.

In the last article of this first section, «Free Trade and University Autonomy, a Present Day Dilemma: The Colombian Case», Consuelo Gutiérrez de González analyzes the complex relationships of the General Agreement on Trade and Services –GATS– with the educational policies of our country; she provides a timely study of a local situation that sooner or later will affect most countries in the region in a similar way.

The second section–»Studies and Research Reports» –opens with a report by the Brazilian researcher Cristina Amich Elias: «The Evolution of Legislation on Delinquent Minors during the Brazilian Dictatorship». In this paper she analyses the official discourse of the time (1964-1985) and the ideology underlying the excluding treatment of this vulnerable group of children and youths in Brazil.

In the following papers of this second section we find the participation of several of the new Doctors in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth of the University of Manizales and Cinde, as well as of professors and graduate students of these institutions. The article «Meanings of Citizenship in a Group of High School Students from Manizales (Colombia)», by Hernán Humberto Vargas López, Carlos Valerio Echavarría Grajales, Sara Victoria Alvarado Salgado and Jaime Alberto Restrepo, shows how participative methodologies can be used to draw a picture of the students’ relationship with politics, politicians, participation and citizen agency that contradicts the usual moaning about students’ apolitical attitudes.

The article «Technological Mediations in the Process of Youth Subjectivity: Interactions in Pereira and Dosquebradas (Colombia)», by Edgar Diego Erazo and Germán Muñoz González, presents a cultural study of young people who are active in the cyberspace, and their complex relationships with new technologies and with the mediators behind them. The analysis of these relationships enables the authors to propose new ways of understanding subjectivity processes in contemporary youths.

In the following article: «The Configuration of Citizenships in Undergraduate Students in Manizales (Colombia)», José Rubén Castillo García studies the discourse of a group of undergraduates about topics related to citizenship, and identifies the categories of configuration, institution, constitution and construction of citizenships.

The study «Aesthetics, Narrative and the Construction of the Public Sphere», by Carlos Alberto Ospina H. and Patricia Botero Gómez, takes the road of the new narrative, Kantian aesthetics and Hanna Arendt’s philosophy of subjectivity to argue the importance of the emotional and the subjective as central elements in the construction of the public sphere.

Finally, the paper «Conceptions of Childhood and Youth in Catholic Pedagogical Theory at the Beginning of the 20th Century in Colombia», by Diego Alejandro Muñoz Gaviria, studies that period of education in our country in order to understand the relationships between Catholic religion, pedagogy and morals. He proposes the category «panoptized temporality» as a useful conceptual tool to seek further understanding of this historical period in Colombia.

The Editorial Board has decided that the last two sections of our Review, more concerned with current events and useful information, are to be no longer published in the hard copy of our journal. Instead, they will appear in the electronic version available in the servers of the University of Manizales and Cinde, the institutions that constitute the Center for Advanced Studies in Childhood and Youth, responsible for the Review and for the doctoral program in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth. In their virtual version, these sections will be useful to all those interested in the Review, even before they receive the hard copy or when there is difficulty in obtaining it. The hard copy of the Review will have a detailed index of the contents of these two sections and indications on the way to find them in Internet.

The third section–»Information and Analyses»–begins with a call for papers in the «state-of-the-art» or «meta-analysis» style that review, summarize or comment research on youth in Latin-America or the Iberian Peninsula. This call for papers will be open until March 31st, 2008, and the selected papers will appear in a monographic issue during the second semester of 2008 (vol. 6, n. 2).

Then, there are two speeches delivered in the Commencement Ceremony of the Doctoral Program in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth, one by the Program Director, Dr. Sara Victoria Alvarado Salgado, and the other by the graduating Doctor, Francia Restrepo de Mejía.

Next, the reader will find useful information on the Fourth International Congress on Qualitative Research to be held in the University of Illinois, in Urbana-Champaign, from May 14th to 18th, 2008. The main topic of the Congress is «Ethics, Evidence and Social Justice». A session in Spanish has been planned for the first day. More detailed information can be obtained in URL: http://www.icqi.org

The detailed table of contents of the special issue of the Boletín Iberaoamericano (Ibero-American Bulletin), Year VIII, Number 156, of August 2007, on «Youth, Training, and Employment» follows next. The reader will find summaries of some of the most important parts and chapters. Next, there is some information on the contributions of the International Forum on Indigenous Youth and their experience in Internet, organized by RELAJUR/CELAJU, the site for youth in Latin America and the Caribbean, sponsored by UNESCO. This «blog» forum took place during August and September. Initial documents and interventions by the participants can be found in URL: http://www.secnetpro.com/Juventud_indigena/

In the fourth section–»Revisions and Reviews»–the reader will find some texts adapted form the web page created by the Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture, OEI, to support and spread the initiatives of the Decade of Education for a Sustainable Development, instituted by the United Nations, an effort our Review decidedly supports. The URL of the page on the Decade is: http://www.oei.es/decada/

The first text is a commentary on the Protocol of Montreal, called «Twenty Years Rebuilding the Ozone Layer». The second refers briefly to the work «Technologies for Sustainability» by Vilches, Gil Pérez, Toscato and Macías; the web site where it can be found in indicated there. The «Greenpeace» report How to save the climate? What can you do?, and the Forums organized in Colombia as part of the Decade of Education for a Sustainable Development are presented. Next, there is a description of the course Education for Sustainability offered by OEI for Central-American countries. We mention this course so that the readers of the Review from other countries might be ready to search for information on similar courses offered in other areas of Latin-America and the Caribbean.

There is also a review of the book Opinión pública y medio ambiente (Public Opinion and Environment) edited by Eva Anduiza, with the contributions of Marina Di Masso, Sergi Pardos-Prado and David Tábara, sponsored by the environmental education associations of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands.

This section continues with a review by Alvaro Díaz on the book he wrote together with other authors from the Technological University of Pereira (Risaralda, Colombia): Teaching the Humanities in Higher Education. Reflections on a Transitional Paradigm.

There is also a description of the monographic issue of the journal Polis on the topic of pluri-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity. Its director, Antonio Elizalde, invites us to read the entire issue in the URL: http://www.revistapolis.cl

The section continues with the abstracts of the last eight doctoral dissertations of the participants in the Doctoral Program on Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth who graduated in August of this year 2007, and it ends with a surprising short story by Carlos Alberto González Quitián, member of our Editorial Board. The short story’s title is Everything is found in All; in it the reader will find in it an original way to talk about participation and development.

We hope that the reader will thoroughly enjoy this issue of our Review and increase his or her expectations for the sixth volume. There is still time to send us a contribution in Spanish, Portuguese or English that could be published in the second issue of that volume (especially if it answers the call for papers on research on youth), or else, in the first issue of the seventh volume.

The Editor,

Carlos Eduardo Vasco