Foreword

This issue starts the 5^th volume of our Review. We have good news for our readers, especially for those who have published in it or are planning to submit a manuscript soon. The good news is that we have recently been accepted in the Brazilian "Lilacs" database,¹ a respected bibliographic index for the Health Sciences.

With the completed 4^th volume and this first issue of vol. 5, our Review will attempt to qualify for promotion to category B in the Colombian National Bibliographic Index "Publindex". We expect to appear soon in that respected list of Colombian journals. We are sure that such level of indexing and the inclusion in the "Lilacs" database will attract many more authors who will wish to publish their theoretical reflections and research results on different topics of the social sciences related to childhood and youth in our Review. To all authors and researchers who sent us their manuscripts for publication in volumes 4 and 5, our sincerest thanks for their support: because of the high quality of their submissions we are very confident of obtaining the promotion to category B.

If we now examine the conditions for promotion to category A, we find that our Review is about to comply with all pre-requisites for that category, except being indexed in a world-class bibliographic database, like the Scientific Electronic Library Online "SciELO", for which we have already started to receive instruction. Once we obtain confirmation of our promotion to category B of "Publindex", we will apply for inclusion in "SciELO", which is one of the bibliographic indexes accepted by our National Science Foundation "Colciencias" in order to qualify for category A.

To be admitted in "SciELO", our Review must be accessible full-text in the World Wide Web. We are already converting all four published volumes into pdf-format, which will allow every paper to keep its original page numbers. The first three volumes are already accessible at the URL http://www.umanizales.edu.co/revistacinde/index.html

Our Review has also applied for inclusion in the International Bibliography of Social Sciences "IBSS" database. They will inform us soon of their decision to include it in their indexing or to require some other additional conditions for inclusion.

This issue starts with two papers in its first section «Theory and Meta-Theory». The first paper, "Citizen Education: A strategy for the construction of justice" by Sara Victoria Alvarado and María Teresa Carreño-Bustamante, displays the relationship between citizenship and justice from the perspective of Rights as a framework for Citizen Education.

In the second paper, "Education and globalization: A change in perspective", Francisco Antonio Arias-Murillo offers a positive approach to globalization; without obscuring the negative aspects of this world process, such approach allows thinking about education in globalization, not against it.

The second section in this issue, «Studies and Research Reports», has significant contributions from three Argentinean colleagues. The section starts with a paper by María del Carmen Castrillón-Valderrutén, "Institutional discourses on the family in Brazil and Colombia: To biologize, to nuclearize, or to recognize diversity?" Writing from Argentina, and comparing discourses on the family recorded in Brasilia, Brazil, and Cali, Colombia, she shows the unresolved tensions between beliefs on the family held by institutional agents and the complex social configurations from which institutionalized children and youths actually come.

Maggui Gutiérrez, Sergio Castellanos, Juanita Henao, and Andrés Santacoloma, in their report "Psychic atmosphere and significant links of expectant and nursing adolescent lowincome mothers: Implications for psychological development", provide remarkable partial results of a long-term support-and-follow-up project with 97 adolescent mothers in the city of Bogotá.

In the paper "Colombian immigrants in Spain: Parental experience and immigration", Amparo Micolta-León analyzes interviews with Colombian parents who made the difficult decision of migrating to Spain with their families, through which she tries to situate and understand their experiences in confronting the new cultural situation.

Elsa María Bocanegra reveals in her report "Child-rearing practices from Colonial times to the Independence of Colombia: Discourses that make them visible" some of the veiled modes of children’s presence in 18^th- and 19^th-Century manuscripts, and elucidates the relationship between the then-prevalent social representations of children and the ways in which their families and institutions treated them in those times.

In their article "Determinants for the use of health services in the Colombian Pacific Coast", Luis Fernando Aguado-Quintero, Luis Eduardo Girón-Cruz, Ana María Osorio-Mejía, Luis Miguel Tovar-Cuevas and Jaime Rodrigo Ahumada-Castro perform careful qualitative and quantitative analyses of pre-natal, natal and post-natal attention services to mothers of that secluded and forgotten zone of Western Colombia.

Germán Muñoz-González synthesizes in his report "Communication in the life-worlds of Colombian youth" the extensive studies and in-depth analyses he carried out in his doctoral dissertation. He collected narratives from many youths in three Colombian cities; from those narratives, among other results, he found the basis for a new field of study: communication-culture, to enlarge the informational framework in which communication is currently conceptualized.

Carolina Duek, in her paper "School, games and television: Systematizing a problematic intersection", studies the influence of TV-viewing in children’s game scripts in the city of Buenos Aires.

Maximiliano Korstanje reports in his paper "A new way to believe: A sociological perspective on the role of religion in a group of adolescents from Argentina" the remarkable paradox of the re-emergence of the sacred among Argentinean youth, in spite of the recurrent sociological predictions of the expansion of secularization and the end of religion.

Finally, in her paper "Intimacy and the experience of the public sphere", María Teresa Luna summarizes in a few pages the detailed phenomenological study of auto-biographic narratives of four college graduates she carried out in her doctoral dissertation, in which she makes explicit the hidden links between their experiences lived in the intimate sphere and those realized in their activities in the public sphere.

In the third section, «Reports and Analyses», the reader will find in the first place a short report on a valuable experience of joint work on the design and application of followup and evaluation instruments from a perspective of Rights, within the Argentinean Program for Institutional Consolidation of the National Council for Childhood, Adolescence, and Family. This overview of the project, written by its directors, Valeria Llobet and José Antonio Rodríguez, will entice the reader to wait for a more detailed paper on these issues, which we expect to publish soon.

The second brief report describes another interesting project, directed by Martha Cecilia Herrera of the National Pedagogical University at Bogotá. She co-ordinated the joint work of her research group, of two other groups from two other Colombian cities, and of one artistic group, "Cloth of Gold", from London, England. The topic was the conceptions of city and citizenship of school children and adolescents in Bogotá, Manizales, and Medellín. This joint project, carried out during the years 2005 and 2006, tried to understand and promote processes of configuration of youth cultures, citizenship and youth identities in relation to their own city. We also hope to publish one or more detailed papers on different aspects of this fascinating project.

Then, the reader will find the poster and part of the information about the Conference of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies ISQOLS. It will be held in San Diego, California from the 6^th to the 9^th of December, 2007. More information can be found in the website of ISQOLS: http://www.isqols.org

Then, there is a short notice about the virtual Master’s degree program in Gender, Society and Public Policies, offered by the Buenos Aires-based Regional Program of Studies in Gender and Public Policies PRIGEPP (Programa Regional de Formación en Género y Políticas Públicas). More detailed information can be found in their website: http://www.prigepp.org

Finally, the reader will find a more detailed comment about the inclusion of our Review in the "Lilacs" database that was announced in the beginning of this Foreword.

In the fourth section, «Notices and Reviews», the editors of the new book Justicia, moral y subjetividad política en niños, niñas y jóvenes (Justice, morals, and political subjectivity in children and youths), Eloísa Vasco M., Sara Victoria Alvarado S., Carlos Valerio Echavarría G. y Patricia Botero G., review their publication, issued this year in Manizales at the Center for Advanced Studies on Childhood and Youth of the University of Manizales and Cinde, the same Center that publishes our Review.

Then, Héctor Fabio Ospina reviews two other titles published by the same Center, this time in alliance with Noveduc, a noted Buenos Aires educational publisher:

Narodowski, M., Ospina, H. & Martínez Boom, A. (comps.) (2006). La razón técnica desafía a la razón escolar. Construcción de identidades y subjetividades políticas en la formación. (Technical reason defies school reason: Construction of political identities and subjectivities in education). Buenos Aires: Noveduc-Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Niñez y Juventud, Cinde-Universidad de Manizales.

Ospina, H. F., Narodowski, M. & Martínez Boom, A. (comps.) (2006). La escuela frente al límite. Actores emergentes y transformaciones estructurales. Contingencias e intereses. (School faces its limit: Emergent agents and structural transformations; contingencies and interests). Buenos Aires: Noveduc-Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Niñez y Juventud, Cinde-Universidad de Manizales.

A fourth review is about a timely Spanish dictionary on family and gender: Diccionario Especializado en Familia y Género, edited by Ángela María Quintero-Velásquez (Buenos Aires: Lumen/Hvmanitas, 2007).

Finally, the reader will find a transcription and adaptation of three short texts taken from the website of the Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture OEI, through which our Review attempts to spread and support the initiatives of the Decade of Education for a Sustainable Future proclaimed by the United Nations. These and other interesting documents related to sustainability and environmental issues can be found in the URL http://www.oei.es/decada/

The Editor’s wish is that the reader will much enjoy the present issue of this Review, with increased expectations about the next, the closing issue of volume 5. It is still time to send us a manuscript in English, Spanish or Portuguese that might still be published in the first or second issue of volume 6.

Notas:

¹"Lilacs" is an acronym for "Literatura Latinoamericana y del Caribe en Ciencias de la Salud".

The Editor,

Carlos Eduardo Vasco