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Community participation as a strategy in health aims to increase the role of citizens in health decision-making which are contextualised within the institutions of democracy. Electoral representation as the dominant model of democracy globally is based on the elite theory of democracy that sees political decision-making a prerogative of political elites. Such political elitism is counter to the idea of democratic participation. Neoliberalism together with elitism in political sphere have worsened social inequities by undermining working class interests. Latin America has seen adverse consequences of these social inequities. In response, social movements representing collective struggles of organised citizens arose in the region. This paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of democratic participation in contemporary Latin American context at the nexus of emerging social movement activism and policy responses. The paper will use empirical examples to highlight how such democratic practices at the societal level evolved while demanding political inclusion. These societal democratic practices in Latin America are redefining democracy, which continues to be seen in the political sphere only. Health reforms promoting participatory democracy in several Latin American countries have demonstrated that establishing institutions and mechanisms of democratic participation facilitate collective participation by the organised citizenry in state affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides ethnographic evidence on how coloniality shapes the making of Latin American psychologists. A critical ethnography was conducted at a psychology training institution in Ecuador, consisting of twelve months of participant observation; forty-one semi-structured interviews; and analysis of academic discourse, photos, videos and relevant social media content. The research was guided by the tradition of Critical Psychology – specifically Liberation Psychology – and Critical Discourse Analysis. Findings suggest the pervasiveness of coloniality in the making of Ecuadorian psychologists and, hypothetically, of others in Latin America and the wider Global South. Interpretations also highlight the non-essentialist, non-dichotomist, 'messy' nature of such processes, a consideration which may advance current ethical and analytical debates on decolonisation. Echoing ongoing critical arguments, authors suggest that a 'help-as-war' metaphor is a category with potential value to contribute to such advancement, an approach that has important theoretical and pragmatic implications for researchers and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an ethnography of a four-year, multi-disciplinary adolescent sexual and reproductive health intervention in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. An important goal of the intervention – and of the larger global field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health – is to create more open parent-to-teen communication. This paper analyzes the project's efforts to foster such communication and how social actors variously interpreted, responded to, and repurposed the intervention's language and practices. While the intervention emphasized the goal of ‘open communication,’ its participants more often used the term ‘confianza’ (trust). This norm was defined in ways that might – or might not – include revealing information about sexual activity. Questioning public health assumptions about parent–teen communication on sex, in and of itself, is key to healthy sexual behavior, the paper explores a pragmatics of communication on sex that includes silence, implied expectations, gendered conflicts, and temporally delayed knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academics are confronted with multiple and conflicting narratives as to what it is to be an academic. Their identities, however, are not entirely of their own making. Through a qualitative study, and deploying a social realist perspective, this paper analyses academic identities in Chile and attempts to locate the patterns of identity in the context of a marketised higher education system. The data were collected in both a state and a private university. The results suggest that distinct kinds of fragilities may be emerging among Chilean academics (ontological and contractual fragilities). These two fragilities can be traced to the attendant structures of the university system at an institutional level (reputational fragility in the public sector and a branding fragility in the private sector). The paper concludes by observing that, although the power of the structures is considerable, there are still spaces for agentic responses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper takes as its starting point identifying markers of Latin American psychoanalysis. The authors see this theme as a compromise between two diverging approaches. On one hand, the conference at which the content was presented provided the opportunity for Latin American psychoanalytical thinking to be discussed and, as a reward to the best papers, to be published. On the other, both the conference and the reward are more indicative of the observers biases than of the objects peculiarities. The authors consider that the conference mistakenly focused on the search for minor differences (secondary identi? cations) instead of looking for invariances (identities). Considering that uncertainty, pluralism and complexity are issues relevant to the whole of psychoanalysis in its current stage of development as a scienti? c discipline, the authors think that treating these elements as identifying markers of Latin American psychoanalysis is evidence of prejudice brought about by a colonisercolonised relationship. To develop their argument, the authors discuss a paper on editorial criteria by Tuckett as a clinical case, and use an episode of Brazilian history as further illustration. They address issues such as conformity to cultural patterns; the search for certainties and proofs; the domination of some groups over others; and editorial powermore speci? cally, its in? uence on the acceptance or rejection of scienti? c ideas. These issues have distracted attention away from the fundamentals of psychoanalysis by introducing other, extraneous aims. Publication plays a key role in feeding a possibly vicious circle wherein only a small proportion of scienti? c contributions manages to reach a wide audienceexactly those contributions that conform to established patterns. The act of publication turns that portion into of? cial knowledge, while unpublished ideas become increasingly excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the motivation for establishing partnerships, how these partnerships are evaluated, and the difficulties encountered in the partnerships among Latin-American researchers in behavioral sciences. A hundred Latin-American researchers who had published scientific work indexed in Psycinfo in which another author from the continent participated. The participants answered a questionnaire on the above-mentioned topics. The results indicated that the main reasons for establishing partnerships with other Latin-Americans were to seek broader and more significant results and increased productivity or the visibility and recognition of production. As regards the evaluation of the results of the partnership, most participants indicated that the partnership has resulted in an increase in publications and publications of higher scientific level and greater visibility. Several difficulties were recognized, which in general, were access and communication in order to maintain the partnership. The main difficulties in conducting research were related to the final writing of the paper, as an article, chapter or other, as well as data collection. In terms of work infrastructure, the main barriers were financial constraints and lack of time to devote to the partnership. It can be concluded that the main reasons to cooperate are qualitative and quantitative advances, and that the difficulties in the partnerships are secondary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to provide a way, not exhaustive, of articulation between the qualities of the so-called "consumer society" and social policies in the form of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs (CCTP) applied massively in Latin America and the Caribbean countries. This joint seeks connections between the accumulation mode in a neocolonial country from the global south as Argentina, the structure of sensibilities encouraged by the consumer society and social policies in recent decades. This article proposes a review of the three analytical phases of contemporary consumer society on the assumption that consumption has been intimately linked to the origins of the capitalist system. The last phase, where greater emphasis is placed, is characterized by the increasing commodification of lifestyles, as ways of being and being with others. Logic and qualities of this last phase penetrate even the forms taken by state interventions, configured as consumption incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops the concept of reproductive governance as an analytic tool for tracing the shifting political rationalities of population and reproduction. As advanced here, the concept of reproductive governance refers to the mechanisms through which different historical configurations of actors – such as state, religious, and international financial institutions, NGOs, and social movements – use legislative controls, economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements to produce, monitor, and control reproductive behaviours and population practices. Examples are drawn from Latin America, where reproductive governance is undergoing a dramatic transformation as public policy conversations are coalescing around new moral regimes and rights-based actors through debates about abortion, emergency contraception, sterilisation, migration, and assisted reproductive technologies. Reproductive discourses are increasingly framed through morality and contestations over ‘rights’, where rights-bearing citizens are pitted against each other in claiming reproductive, sexual, indigenous, and natural rights, as well as the ‘right to life’ of the unborn. The concept of reproductive governance can be applied to other settings in order to understand shifting political rationalities within the domain of reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we conduct the study of Healing Social Network, an NGO which provides psycho-educational service for the prevention and treatment of problems such as anxiety and depression, inspiring their mission in the model of Jesus, the Good Samaritan. The goal we have set is to investigate the relationships established between the sacred and health care -especially mental health- and analyze the resolution of problems through the official medicine in connection with the Catholic Church. We will also use the testimony of a user of the network in order to investigate the interaction between health practices related to physical, spiritual and moral states from the perspective of those who use this psychoeducational service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]