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Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud

versão impressa ISSN 1692-715X

Rev.latinoam.cienc.soc.niñez juv vol.14 no.1 Manizales jan./jun. 2016

 

EDITORIAL

 

Presentation of Volume 14 No. 1 January-June 2016.

 

The current volume of the Journal includes forty-four articles that cover a range of areas related to childhood and youth studies. This edition includes articles that detail the following investigations: the fate of children's voices after research work has been completed: studies on emotional intelligence in early childhood education; children's rights; child participation and citizenship; socially constructed spaces for "dangerous children"; youth movements in the hyper-digital age; the thought of Walter Benjamin applied to inter-generational relationships in schools; the event paradigm as a methodological category of social research; the impact of the armed conflict on the formation of citizens; experiences of political subjectivities of peace; youth resistance against the dictatorship in Chile; the quality of youth employment; perceptions of entrepreneurialism in higher education; challenges for families in the raising of their children; family relationships for women in prison; the daily lives of babies in the city of Buenos Aires; the emotional foundation of citizenship; child rearing and moral disconnection among infants; strategies to fight poverty; the reporting of sexual abuse of children; levels of satisfaction with the types of mental health services provided to children and adolescents; integration of adopted children in families in Argentina; meanings of corporal modification among young people in the city of Cali, Colombia; the use of alcohol among young people from ‘quilombos', rural afro-descendent communities in Brazil; young people looking for stability in their romantic relationships; an evaluation of youth public policy in Cali, Colombia; gender and parentage in transnational migration in Colombia; and neoliberal and child rearing reforms. In conclusion, this edition includes a wide range of findings that emerge from serious and in-depth analyses of our society and are presented as possibilities that provide illumination and guidance for the transformations required in the political, social, cultural and economic spheres of our countries.

Emerging from these reflections are proposals on caring for children and young people, considered a sophisticated and dense task by the authors of this research. This is because we are caring for children and young people in "enclosed" spaces, social enclosures that are defined by deficits and absences. In the modern reign of biopolitics, frugal governments invent populations consisting of children and young people and all of the sub-species to become the objectives of the modern governments of societies such as the babies or the "adolescents".

These forms of government include systems involving early childhood development, public instruction, therapeutic systems, psychiatric systems, penal systems, family welfare, etc.

A focus on the areas of emotions and affection should be a regular part of caring for human beings from the moment they are born, yet it appears that this work is limited to experts and specialists, sophisticated interventions and complex pedagogies for industrialized populations. This care is also required by populations and generations at the margins of society, sectors in which adults only occasionally interact with children and young people unless required to by their profession or job. This results in generations that are superimposed on each other but aren't connected.

The field of childhood and youth studies continues to construct more and more knowledge about the complex constitutional and generational formation of current societies using diverse research tools and methodologies. Latin America, Indo-America and Afro-America demonstrate diversity that has been subject to interventions from societies, resulting in a multitude of resistances that are now being led and sustained by children and young people. The limits and edges of social risk are also inhabited by children and youth where death and violent behavior is normalized and ‘straightened out'. In addition, the lives of this population are governed by their insertion into the normalizing mechanisms of school and work, standardized paths for the generations that are heading towards the future. These institutions act as a pendulum of government that puts it mark on children and young people's bodies and manufactures normalized gestures and sensitivities. These are humans at a tender age that have the capacity to identify what they need to the rest of society in order to meet their complex potential and address their limits.

These children and adolescents have fallen under the spell of a radical individualization and are individualized/digitalized from the earliest possible age. Luckily they are also able to build dynamic communities that are organized into flexible, colorful, happy and militant networks. In recent years, youth movements are capable of reporting on the complexity of interventions in this population with growing creativity and critical thought, inventing distinct forms of action and life.

As is our habit, our third section of Reports and Analysis includes the accumulative index of authors that have been published in the Journal and the thematic index if this work, as well as Bulletin Number 103 from the Organization of Ibero-American States that covers the water crisis, a problem as serious as climate change. In the same section there is detailed information about the II Ibero- American Biennale on Childhood and Youth (with the themes of democratic transformations, social justice and peace building processes) that will be held in November 2016 in Manizales, Colombia. This event is focused on articulating academic, social and cultural efforts that different groups, researchers, networks and collectives are carrying out in Latin America in the areas of childhood and youth. This event has the purpose of offering different formative, deliberative, communicative and projection strategies that allow for the sharing of knowledge, encourage relationships and strengthen new spaces for researchers and professionals to meet and collaborate in support of children and young people.

This edition of the Journal also includes the call for applications for the Post-doctoral Research Program in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth that is open until the 28th of February 2016 and will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in April 2016. This program is an educational space for postdoctoral research in social sciences that contributes to thought on the areas of childhood and youth and builds theoretical and practical knowledge that is relevant to the continent.

Another upcoming event that we detail in this edition is the International Congress of Catholic Universities, Humanism and Peace: Challenges for Families and Education, which will be on the 24- 26 of February 2016 in the city of Tunja, Colombia. This congress has the goal of bringing together national and international academic communities to engage in dialogue and reflect and work on their research in the social sciences. This event will highlight the importance of training future generations and the commitment that schools have in the construction of a new culture of love, with the goal of forging a common path to unite efforts from specific areas and in this way contribute as Catholic institutions to the humanization of local contexts and environments.

Finally, it is important to publicize the Social Forum on Popular Education that will be held from the 17th to the 23rd of January 2016 in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. This Forum has the objective of sharing existing experiences in popular education so that the event can be strengthened as a space for identifying and articulating partnerships in favor of another type of education.

In the fourth section of the Journal (Revisions and Reviews), the researcher Lorena Natalia Plesnicar continues the series of interviews with notable personalities that work in the fields of childhood and youth in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this edition she interviews Marlene Grajeda, a pedagogue from Guatemala with broad experience in the design, implementation and evaluation of programs and projects across all educational levels and is the Representative fro Education, Science and Culture of the Organization of Ibero-American States in Guatemala.

Richard Millón, professor from the University of Manizales, Colombia, writes about the Doctorate in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth, which is run by the University of Manizales-CINDE partnership and the recent awarding of its High Quality Accreditation by the National Ministry of Education of Colombia on the 30th of September, 2015.

Professor Jeanette Pérez Jiménez from the Universidad de la Frontera, Chile, writes a letter to the editor with the title: "Mathematics education with a gender equality perspective: Towards inclusion and relationality in the post-modern era" as a response to the article by Giraldo-Gil (2014) that proposes a critical analysis of the gender-curriculum dynamic and implications for educational practices and discourses. This letter proposes a critical perspective of mathematics education, one of the subjects that has the most notable gender differences in terms of academic achievement.

Finally, the Editors of this Journal demonstrate our inconformity with the policies used to measure the investigative and academic production of people and institutions dedicated to the social sciences. Specifically in the case of the Journal, we would like to share the response that we had from the Selection Committee for inclusion in the Scopus database regarding our application to include the Journal in this important index. We do not agree with this decision and stated as such to the Committee.

The Selection Committee argues that our Journal is overly ambitious and diffuse in the declaration of its objectives and that its thematic coverage is so broad that it is difficult to distinguish articles related to specific disciplines, which is why the focus of the articles published in the Journal vary dramatically. It is important to note that the Journal does not pertain to just one discipline and engages in significant inter and trans-disciplinary contributions that contribute to interventions and understanding of the complexities of the social world and the concrete realities of children and young people.

At the Journal we are aware that the constitution of childhood and youth as "objects of knowledge" has occurred through significant contributions made by different disciplines and distinct types of reflections. The notion of childhood, for example, has been configured through varied contributions from the fields of psychoanalysis, sociology, law, social work, literary studies, communication and cultural studies, anthropology, history, pedagogy and others. In addition, it has also drawn on all types of imaginaries and representations that on occasion are contradictory: "minors", persons in need of protection, objects of intervention, objects of care and subjects of rights, just to name some of the symbolic places in which childhood and youth have been situated. However, despite the fact that there are as many approaches as there are topics and problems, the trends in social and cultural research in the fields of childhood and youth studies point towards research that is less and less homogenized, abstract and disciplinary and more and more plural, contextual and relational.

The multiple forms of being a child and the complexities of children and young people's experiences have led to forms of research that are more flexible and open, both in theoretical and methodological approaches that exist at the intersections of disciplines and resist reductionist and centrist approaches that regard children as second category citizens or as subjects without agency. Research in the field of childhood and youth studies have been questioning the supposed universal and ahistorical character of childhood, the reductionist approach that sees children as depositories of tradition and subject to teaching from adults, perceptions of childhood and youth that are exclusively biological and the approach focused on vulnerabilities and what is lacking. In their place, based on situated and local approaches (without calling them specific), childhood and youth have been thought of as a group of socio-cultural constructions immersed in interwoven material and structures of meaning that affect the possibility of certain movements, determine life trajectories and consolidate practices. At the same time, this conceptualization makes other movements possible, doesn't take away their agency and is situated beyond historical concepts.

This epistemological discussion currently occurs at a high level in the investigative and academic world in order to respond to challenges in childhood and youth studies and explore the possibility of impacting on policies that aim to improve living conditions for this population. For this reason, the current debate that is occurring in the social sciences on this topic is fundamental for the different contexts of Latin America, the Caribbean and the world.

Another point highlighted by the Selection Committee was that articles vary dramatically in quality, stating that some are of a high quality but others seem "amateur". We base our analysis on our rigorous, serious and high-level evaluation of articles, which is reflected on the percentage of articles that are rejected by the Journal, currently at 40%. All of the Journal's reviewers are active researchers and have published in scientific journals in the last two years.

The Journal was created in the framework of the Doctorate in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth and the Masters in Education and Human Development, run by the Centre of Advanced Studies in Childhood and Youth from the International Centre of Education and Human Development (Cinde) and the University of Manizales, Colombia. As a result, the Journal helps students from the Doctorate and Masters programs to position themselves in the investigative world and the articles that are published in the Journal have been evaluated with a high level of scientific rigor. We believe that their condition as young researchers starting out in the academic and scientific community is not an argument to deny them space in the dissemination of knowledge through high-level publications. The Journal makes this contribution to the academic community, mindful of its role as a formative medium that is recognized at an international level for its excellence. The articles produced by the students are the results of their completed Masters and Doctoral theses.

The Scopus Selection Committee stated that the references cited in the articles published in the Journal have an international impact that is below what would be expected from the Journals that are included in Scopus. If we review the Impact Factor of the Journal in the Scielo Colombia index (a bibliographic index with a Selection Committee), in 2014 it was at 98 with 3,038 references published by the Journal and 383 citations of articles published in other scientific journals, which in the first semester of 2015 increased to 451. This indicates that work published in the Journal is being increasingly cited.

We believe that if the Latin American Journal of Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth is included in Scopus it would result in increased visibility for the generation and diffusion of Latin American and Caribbean thought and increased awareness of the work of researchers from our region.

The Journal has become an important contribution in the field of childhood and youth in Latin America and the Caribbean, facilitating permanent dialogue between researchers from around the world and the Latin American and Caribbean region. Its inclusion in the Scopus index would be a very important contribution to increase these these exchanges and would results in the fruitful production of knowledge at both local and global levels.

We share these concerns as part of an open and productive discussion that should contribute to our investigative and academic contexts and the redirecting of policies by those that make decisions related to the production and validity of knowledge in the social and human sciences.

Director-Editor,

Héctor Fabio Ospina

Guest Editor

Fabión Acosta
Professor, National University of Colombia, Colombia

Associated Editors

Sônia Maria da Silva Araújo
Universidade Federal do Paró, Brazil.

Liliana Del Valle
Secretariat of Education, Medellin, Colombia.

Marta Cardona
Member of the Coordinating Collective of the Masters in Education and Human Rights of the Universidad Autónoma Latinoamericana, Medellin, Colombia.

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