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Some literature on public sociology conceives of students as a public rather than potential or real practitioners of this type of sociology. There is a dearth of texts reflecting on graduate student training in public sociology and the trade‐offs they face. In this paper, I engage in a reflexive account of my experience doing public sociology, as I partnered with nonprofits to conceptualize, research, and write a report on the effects of stripped citizenship in Colombia after a mistaken administrative decision deprived 40,000 mostly binnational Venezuelan‐Colombians of their nationality in that country. This report has served as part of strategic litigation and to raise public awareness of the harmful policy. I argue that three things are key for graduate students to engage in public sociology and have been overlooked. First, training in public sociology, especially training with elements of apprenticeship, can develop the publicly engaged sociological imagination and toolkit, which is key to identifying opportunities for interventions in the midst of fieldwork, and models for interventions. Second, support from established professors. And third, local, contextual knowledge is indispensable. I also discuss ways to offset some of the trade‐offs that graduate students are likely to face when doing public sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some literature on public sociology conceives of students as a public rather than potential or real practitioners of this type of sociology. There is a dearth of texts reflecting on graduate student training in public sociology and the trade‐offs they face. In this paper, I engage in a reflexive account of my experience doing public sociology, as I partnered with nonprofits to conceptualize, research, and write a report on the effects of stripped citizenship in Colombia after a mistaken administrative decision deprived 40,000 mostly binnational Venezuelan‐Colombians of their nationality in that country. This report has served as part of strategic litigation and to raise public awareness of the harmful policy. I argue that three things are key for graduate students to engage in public sociology and have been overlooked. First, training in public sociology, especially training with elements of apprenticeship, can develop the publicly engaged sociological imagination and toolkit, which is key to identifying opportunities for interventions in the midst of fieldwork, and models for interventions. Second, support from established professors. And third, local, contextual knowledge is indispensable. I also discuss ways to offset some of the trade‐offs that graduate students are likely to face when doing public sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This working paper arises from the conviction that it is possible to propose a temporally oriented sociology with Georg Simmel. From his idea of the extension of the present, which belongs to his philosophy of history as to his sociology and philosophy of life, this paper looks forward to contributing to discussions related to historical experience, as well as collective and cultural memory, and social imagination. Framed within an ongoing research experience on future imaginaries of former guerrilla fighters in process of re-incorporation to the civilian life in the city of Medellin (Colombia), and resorting to other authors with problematizations on the present as a particular mediator between past and future, we state that an extended present in which a fundamentally traumatic past is constantly stalking and conditioned to the expectancies concerning the fiction of the new beginning characteristic of the post-conflictual imaginary is a particular feature of the Colombian temporal regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the construction and development of cross-cultural analysis tools for students in Colombian universities. Primarily, it is a reflective piece of research which shows how ethnographically based constructs when combined with appropriate curricular platforms can constitute valuable tools in the acquisition of complex concepts such as culture and power in the context of conflict societies. Through the use of storytelling and narrative, the dynamics of power and culture are explored in the context of a university-level classroom. Lastly, the students’ standpoint in relation to critical societal issues is partly embedded in the narratives as the product of incremental or add-on exchanges during and beyond classroom time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents how a Constitutionally grounded effort to institute 'cross subsidies' for public utility payments gave rise to a set of numbers that never achieved the goal of cross-class solidarity. This legal based system lived on, in large part because the numbers were quickly adopted both in popular speech and by multiple institutions, in an uncoordinated manner. Scalar tensions are key to the story: the Colombian 'estrato' system for classifying residential properties (initially for differential utility payment purposes) has at its core a set of numbers that was designed as nationally valid: but the work of labelling all residences with one of the six numbers to produce zoning-like 'estrato' maps incites qualitative micro-local knowledge. Overall, we show that local knowledges of socioeconomic difference constantly clash with and undermine not only the initial ambitious plan to render cross-class 'solidarity' technical but also the subsequent efforts to propose more rational alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does exposure to violence affect attitudes toward peace? Civilians living in war zones see peace agreements as an opportunity to improve their security prospects. However, in multiparty conflicts, this does not automatically translate into support for peace. Support hinges on the interplay between which faction has victimized civilians in the past and which faction is sitting at the negotiation table. If civilians have been victimized by the group that is involved in the peace agreement, they will be likely to support peace. On the contrary, if they have been victimized by another faction, they will be likely to refrain from supporting peace if they believe that this can trigger retaliatory violence against them. This article explores this argument empirically in the context of the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC; both quantitative and qualitative data yield support to the study's theoretical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Poor early childhood development (ECD) in low- and middle-income countries is a major concern. There are calls to universalise access to ECD interventions through integrating them into existing government services but little evidence on the medium- or long-term effects of such scalable models. We previously showed that a psychosocial stimulation (PS) intervention integrated into a cash transfer programme improved Colombian children's cognition, receptive language, and home stimulation. In this follow-up study, we assessed the medium-term impacts of the intervention, 2 years after it ended, on children's cognition, language, school readiness, executive function, and behaviour.Methods and Findings: Study participants were 1,419 children aged 12-24 months at baseline from beneficiary households of the cash transfer programme, living in 96 Colombian towns. The original cluster randomised controlled trial (2009-2011) randomly allocated the towns to control (N = 24, n = 349), PS (N = 24, n = 357), multiple micronutrient (MN) supplementation (N = 24, n = 354), and combined PS and MN (N = 24, n = 359). Interventions lasted 18 months. In this study (26 September 2013 to 11 January 2014), we assessed impacts on cognition, language, school readiness, executive function, and behaviour 2 years after intervention, at ages 4.5-5.5 years. Testers, but not participants, were blinded to treatment allocation. Analysis was on an intent-to-treat basis. We reassessed 88.5% of the children in the original study (n = 1,256). Factor analysis of test scores yielded 2 factors: cognitive (cognition, language, school readiness, executive function) and behavioural. We found no effect of the interventions after 2 years on the cognitive factor (PS: -0.031 SD, 95% CI -0.229-0.167; MN: -0.042 SD, 95% CI -0.249-0.164; PS and MN: -0.111 SD, 95% CI -0.311-0.089), the behavioural factor (PS: 0.013 SD, 95% CI -0.172-0.198; MN: 0.071 SD, 95% CI -0.115-0.258; PS and MN: 0.062 SD, 95% CI -0.115-0.239), or home stimulation. Study limitations include that behavioural development was measured through maternal report and that very small effects may have been missed, despite the large sample size.Conclusions: We found no evidence that a scalable PS intervention benefited children's development 2 years after it ended. It is possible that the initial effects on child development were too small to be sustained or that the lack of continued impact on home stimulation contributed to fade out. Both are likely related to compromises in implementation when going to scale and suggest one should not extrapolate from medium-term effects of small efficacy trials to scalable interventions. Understanding the salient differences between small efficacy trials and scaled-up versions will be key to making ECD interventions effective tools for policymakers.Trial Registration: ISRCTN18991160. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conditions in the social and physical environment influence population health and risk for CVD, including hypertension. These environmental conditions are influenced by the decisions of public officials, community leaders, and service providers. Examining the frames that local decision makers bring to understanding hypertension can provide important insights into the decisions that they make about strategies for addressing this problem in their jurisdiction. The goal of this study was to examine the frames that local decision makers in Quibdó, Colombia, bring to understanding hypertension risk, and in particular, whether and how they use frames that encompass associations between living conditions and hypertension risk. Data for this qualitative study were collected using a stratified sampling strategy. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2012 with 13 local decision makers and analyzed using a framework approach. Participants linked the structural conditions experienced in Quibdó, including displacement, limited economic opportunities, and the infrastructure of the city, to hypertension risk through multiple pathways, including behavioral risk factors for hypertension and physiologic responses to stress. They described the social patterning of these factors across socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and gender hierarchies. Although several conditions associated with hypertension risk are widely distributed in the city's population, social processes of marginalization and stratification create additional disadvantages for those on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of whether and how internal wars can lead to state building. I offer a new conceptual framework for understanding the varied effects of internal conflict on state capacity, as measured through taxation. Contrary to the general scholarly consensus that internal wars make states fail, I hypothesize that like external wars, internal wars can lead to increased taxation when they enhance solidarity toward the state among the elite and motivate the state to strengthen and territorially expand the tax administration. Elite solidarity, in turn, depends on the degree to which elites perceive the risks of war as real, decide to protect their interests with the help of the state, and feel a sense of patriotism. However, due to the existence of insurgent actors with taxing capacity, the positive effect of internal wars on state building may be hampered. I use this framework to make sense of the cases of Colombia, Malaysia, and Singapore, where internal wars, despite their otherwise destructive effects, resulted in state building instead of state failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we compare cooperation among Colombian and Swedish children aged 9–12. We illustrate the dynamics of the prisoner's dilemma in a new task that is easily understood by children and performed during a physical education class. We find no robust evidence of a difference in cooperation between Colombia and Sweden overall. However, Colombian girls cooperate less than Swedish girls. We also find indications that girls in Colombia are less cooperative than boys. Finally, there is also a tendency for children to be more cooperative with boys than with girls on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid social and political conditions that could well lead to Colombia being described in the terms of a failed state, the country’s electorate chose Álvaro Uribe as its thirty-ninth president in 2002, and again in 2006, preferring to keep in office a man who seemed to be putting the country together again, rather than respecting the constitutional prohibition against consecutive presidential terms. Though his presidency was marked by scandals and irregularities – most notably, the falsos positivos (false positives: young, poor Colombian civilians, assassinated in cold blood by the zealous armed forces and listed as guerrilla kills) – Uribe enjoyed approval ratings previously unknown in Colombian history. He is in fact credited with giving Colombia its ‘second independence’, and his leaving office was, for many, tragic. Here, I present an explanation for this paradox, analysing an aspect of Uribe’s discourse for the way it contributed to producing a shared national sentiment by articulating a social imaginary with limited possibilities for making sense of Colombia. Drawing on Geertz, Durkheim and Brubaker and the concepts of hegemony and identification, I elucidate the effectiveness of Uribe’s discourse of the nation in a context of a long experience of frustration and decadence, and show why and how so many Colombians could, at least for a time, give their overwhelming support to a regime wherein murder was authorized, unacknowledged as anything more significant than the price to be paid for that second independence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on an analysis of negotiations between the Colombian government and international donors over Colombia’s Poverty and Inequality Reduction Strategy, this article describes the normative, institutional and technical patterns that configure a political governance structure within the international cooperation and development system. The article argues that this structure works as an interface that integrates global governance processes aimed at the regulation of global risks (e.g. poverty and inequality) into national political systems in aid-receiving countries. This case study suggests that the shape of this governance structure leads to a form of ‘agreed violation’ of sovereignty that can be defined and analysed as an instance of the ‘emergent formations of multi-scalar globalization’, to which the sociology of globalization refers. However, this interpretation necessitates a fine-tuning of the sociology of globalization’s understanding of governance, which is discussed in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Colombia has been in the grips of a continuous struggle for over 40 years, thus making the Andean nation home to one of the longest running civil conflicts within the Western Hemisphere. Examined here is the way in which the development theory elaborated by the economist Lauchlin Currie has licensed this conflict, combining as it does an advocacy both of ‘free market’ policies and of the ‘dampening’ of rural opposition to their implementation throughout Colombia. In this combination, it is argued, lies the uniqueness – and perhaps the notoriety – of his monetarist framework. Although monetarists took part in debates about economic development in Latin America that occurred in the 1920s and 1960s (the Kemmerer Mission, ECLA), their views did not gain ascendancy until the 1980s. From the 1950s onwards, however, Currie insisted that ‘accelerated economic development’ required dispossession of the peasantry and the consolidation in the countryside of large capitalist farms. To counter grassroots resistance to this process, the Colombian government has used his theory of ‘dampening’ to justify the war being waged on the rural population. The conclusion examines the contradiction inherent in the latter strategy, and also its implications for theory about the agrarian question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products - thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions - whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning. ( Bourdieu, 1990 : 55) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents informatio on various international meetings, to be held worldwide, as of September 1, 1964. The seventh Latin American Congress of Sociology will be held in Bogota, Colombia, in July 1964, in collaboration with Latin American Sociological Association. The central theme of the congress will be sociology and the present Latin American transformation. Sub-themes to be discussed include the following sociology and national planning, sociology of agrarian transformations, sociology of education. The 11th New Zealand Science Congress will meet in Auckland, New Zealand, in February 1965.

This article examines whether hypotheses about communication sources at adoption states hold true to cross-culturally peasant farmers in Colombia. The matamaleza or 2,4-D weed spray innovation was selected for the study. The researchers employed personal interviews to determine communication sources at each of the stages in the adoption process. The communication sources were classified into four categories which represent combinations of personal-mass communication media sources and localite-compolite dimensions. Four hypotheses based on past research in the U.S. were tested. It was found that media exposure is related to farm innovativeness, even though no mass media sources were specifically mentioned in any stage in the adoption process of a farm innovation.