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This paper analyzes the interactions between courts, experts and interest groups present in the sentence C 355/2006, through which abortion is partially decriminalized in Colombia. A detailed review of this paper allows to track the role that interest groups and social movements have in the mobilization of expert discourses in the high courts as a strategy to influence their decisions. The use of disciplines and fields of knowledge is articulated to the general structure of the sentence as literary technology that makes visible the role of the court as administrator of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the communicative practices of a Colombian trans-woman scientist, biologist Brigitte Baptiste, when she speaks publicly about environmental issues on different media platforms. In the analysis, I explore the implications of Baptiste's public presence for the imaginaries of readers and journalists regarding science, scientists, and trans-people in Colombia. Leaning on certain feminist critiques of science, I analyze communicative practices as matters of care. Throughout the analysis, I find that care in Baptiste's public presence is performed through the ways in which she connects biodiversity and sexual diversity, thinking with trans-women's experiences to transgress the borders of science and connect it to activism and public service. I conclude that Baptiste's public presence in Colombia is an exceptional example of gender diversity acceptance in the present, though it does represent a speculative commitment towards embracing diversity in general in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Colombia, there are quantitative databases on armed conflict, some of them public and open-access. This paper reviews the main theoretical and methodological traits in some of those databases and their main features when defining and measuring political violence. Based on the results of a research performed in a Colombian region, several methodological issues will be presented in order to process --statistically, spatially and cartographically? the information delivered by those databases. After the exposition, several procedures are described, which allowed to measure differences among databases. Those contents are addressed aiming to show the consequences that using one or another database has in the quantitative analysis of armed conflict, since the results of those analyses will depend on the source used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Commission to Inquiry for the Causes and Situations Present on inland Violence, better known as La Investigadora, was founded in 1958 at the dawn of the socalled National Front. This research paper explains, based on some documentary sources and newspaper accounts, how in a context of transition negotiated by elites, this initiative condensed a set of official practices and narrative plots structuring the way the Violence would be politically and socially processed and represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Violence" in Colombia in the 1950's was closed without a trial of responsibilities, without reparation to the victims or a process to assimilate the meaning of what had happened. This paper shows that general Rojas Pinilla's trial at the Congress of the Republic between August 1958 and April 1959, was not only a way to confer legitimacy upon the political agreement in the National Front, but also a privileged scenario to challenge and discuss the responsibilities on the events, as well as an arena to build and recreate collective memory at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past three years, Colombia experienced a significant change in the production of official statistics, leading to a situation in which an important tradition in the reliability and seriousness of official data has given way to mistrust and uncertainty. Complete changes in methodology, the break in continuity of historical series, the lack of transparency over the collection process and the direct access to data bases, on top of the correction of data along the way have been a constant in the midst of important transformations of the country in terms of displacement and migration of large groups of population, the country side modifies its labor structure and the conditions of poverty and extreme poverty persist. This paper deals with the development of the General Census of Population and Housing 2005, as an emblematic example of what is going on in the production of official data. The role of academia and the press in this process will be analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically explores the role of media and political conversation as antecedents to political engagement, a set of political attitudes and behaviors. Political engagement was operationalized as political interest, political knowledge, political efficacy, associational membership, and civic and political participation. The relationships of conversation, news and entertainment media uses were examined in the context of a tumultuous society. Statistical analyses suggest that the consumption of news media and political conversation are positively related to all aspects of political engagement. On the other hand, certain entertainment media uses are negatively related. The relevance of media use and political conversation to explain political engagement is discussed and their potential to predict support for democracy is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]