Editorial

This issue of Hallazgos is the result of the development of a research culture that has been forged from the Research Unit of Universidad Santo Tomás since 2004. Hallazgos 20 shares topics with the previous issue: it socializes approaches related to the topic of memory. In this issue, we find four articles which cover the following topics: writing in the learning process as a tool for the recovery of historical memory; the relationship between literature, history and memory; exploring different dimensions of the memory from alternative radio practices; and the ambiguity of the term violence and its practical use in the field of social sciences.

Regarding the Research Perspective section, there are ten papers that were chosen because of the relevance and forcefulness of their research contributions. Among them, the following topics can be distinguished: First, two articles on literature which examine, on the one hand, the urban space in the play Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon and, on the other hand, the policy of chaos in Bartebly by Herman Melville. Secondly, the topic of health is addressed in two articles: one makes a reflection about the elderly and the other one is a case report on care for pregnant women. Then, there are three papers that are interrelated in the subject of education but that analyze different points: how education affects the training of subjects, a study on the secondary education in Mexico and an analysis of higher education in Colombia. Finally, the issue closes with three papers whose objects of study —the concept of multitude, the Constitutions of America, racism and human rights— are discussed from a historical and sociological view. Thus, we can see how different topics and approaches that show a dialogue of knowledge from multidisciplinarity converge in Hallazgos.

Hallazgos would like to thank the contributors to this issue and extends the invitation to continue being a part of the publication as authors and readers.

Alejandra Hurtado Tarazona
Editor

Currently, when armed conflict frames and transition policies seem to condemn memory studies by limiting their questions and agendas to the field of violence, the papers in this volume become refreshing and encouraging. The memory-narrative relationship allows us, in that vein, delving into the everyday and long lasting memories, sieved and relegated to scenarios that compulsively make victims the only bearers of witness memory, which is legitimate and resilient.

However, it is not surprising that the arguments outlined in the various papers resume the old dual figure that recreates power struggles between the official metanarrative —of history, the mass media or of those who claim to have transmitted the authorized social legacy— and of those who imagine or reinvent history from fiction, narrate from alternative media or outline subjectivity and fragmentation in autobiographical stories of the inhabitants of the modern cities. Therefore, the topic of memory is, again, the main section of this issue.

The text of Gloria Inés Ceballos presents theoretical vignettes of a teaching work that turns into methodologies to understand the role of writing for socializing and recuperating the historical memory from the perspective of university students and their ways of linking individual and collective identity .The text of Nancy Malaver Cruz offers a look at the relationship between fiction and reality from the historical novel; without necessarily implying mutual negation, the author suggests looking in the romantic style a way of telling the history and counteract, in a way, the self-homogeneous version of the State and its institutions.

Sandra Ximena Gallego develops a work that has the bases that support a hotbed of research, a community of thought which is usually excluded from official forums for reflection on research; in her paper, memory is related to alternative ways to express and narrate that offer the means for an alternative communication for contemporary social movements. Finally, Camilo Hoyos proposes an epistemology of the view that, through the character of a peasant who produces knowledge from his experience of the concrete, can be derived from the narrative imagination that integrates within the fragmentation of urban places.

With this compilation work, the contribution of the main line of Memory Research at Universidad Santo Tomás is the addition of new routes —or a return to old ways— for debate on cultural, symbolic and communicative memory, that not only remembers but that "reminds us" that it is a constituent of all social processes, and that the conflict is not only the result of structural contradictions that make the violence possible but that it frames conceptual, historical and epistemological contradictions that enrich discussion.

Pablo Felipe Gómez-Montañez
Thematic Coordinator USTA Memory Research Group

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