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Objective: this paper aims to discuss development practices through the presentation of two case studies from Latin-American contexts. This reflection was done during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Post-development perspectives were mobilized to explore new analytical dimensions in the epistemological and socio-political critique of the capitalist mode of appropriation of nature in América Latina and their potential implications amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Methodology: two study cases from Brazil and Costa Rica were elaborated. The qualitative methodological framework used to identify actors and their complex interactions became a useful tool in reconstructing different socio-political expressions, symbolic narratives, and survival/resistance strategies emerging from local groups. Results: social-environmental crisis emerging in the Anthropocene context suggest the need for different points of view and ontological turns to gain a better understanding of social change occurred in the margins of in the Western world. Latin-American societies are multiple and diverse. Both, Brazilian and Costa Rican experiences discussed in this paper, represent situated realities which cannot be generalized, but this is a rather important and critical issue. These case studies help illustrate how the non-critical adoption of hegemonic categories of sociotechnical control and securitization is inadequate to understand and explain the contingency emerging from these situated realities. Conclusions: we suggest in the final part of the paper that these reflections contribute to bring a different perspective on how science, political and nature converge in knowledge systems and how these systems are contested for different people, groups, and communities around the world. This reflection is crucial to the study of processes concerned with political legitimacy, democracy, and territorial political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the thought and philosophy of South Asian intellectuals affiliated to the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CCF's founders – anti-communist European and American scholars – encouraged allies across several continents to establish magazines and organise conferences warning of the threats posed by 'totalitarianism' to free cultural expression. But South Asian members, more interested in postcolonial politics, used its resources to initiate transnational conversations about social change. Probing neglected local CCF magazines and seminar transcripts, the paper also constitutes an early intervention on intersections between the cultural Cold War and decolonisation among non-state actors in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that contemporary accounts of ideology critique—paradigmatically those advanced by Haslanger, Jaeggi, Celikates, and Stanley—are either inadequate or redundant. The Marxian concept of ideology—a collective epistemic distortion or irrationality that helps maintain bad social arrangements—has recently returned to the forefront of debates in contemporary analytic social philosophy. Ideology critique has similarly emerged as a technique for combating such social ills by remedying those collective epistemic distortions. Ideologies are sets of social meanings or shared understandings. I argue in this paper that because agents must coordinate on them to be mutually intelligible, ideologies, on the fashionable contemporary account, are conventions. They are equilibrium solutions to a particular kind of social coordination problem. The worry is that changing pernicious conventions requires more than the epistemic remedy contemporary critical social theorists prescribe. It also requires overcoming strategic impediments like high first-mover costs. Thus contemporary proponents of ideology critique—the "new ideology critics," as I'll call them—face a dilemma. Either their account of social change fails to account for important strategic impediments to social change, in which case it is inadequate, or it incorporates a theory of strategic behavior, and thus merely reinvents the wheel, poorly. It adds nothing to prominent convention-based accounts of social change in the social sciences. More generally, this is an example of a pernicious trend in contemporary critical social theory. Contemporary critical social theorists have abandoned their predecessors' commitment to engaging with social science, thereby undermining their efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the agency of governments engaged in implementation processes that take place over a number of years and through multiple stages. The long timeframes associated with staged implementation leave reforms vulnerable to the institutional effects that may ultimately derail policy aspirations. Governments engaged in staged implementation need to be able to plan longitudinally (foresight capacity) and analyse whether implementation processes are creating endogenous sources of institutional change and the likely impact of such change (reflective capacity). In this paper, we argue that being able to exercise foresight capacity and reflective capacity is necessary but not sufficient, if long‐term policy goals are to be realised. Governments must also be able to navigate the inconsistent objectives that arise across the different stages of an implementation process by modifying implementation approaches in ways that reduce the likelihood of unwanted implementation effects occurring—what we have labelled "mitigation capacity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Against a backdrop of more than four decades of war, conflict and insecurity, Afghanistan is recognised as suffering from endemic violence and children are exposed to multiple forms of violence, including at the family and school levels. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of school-based peace education and a community-based intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence in conflict resolution, implemented in Afghanistan with the aim of reducing violence against and between children. Methods: The evaluation consisted of a cross-sectional, interrupted time series design with three data collection points over 12 months. Data was collected from students in 11 secondary schools (seven girls’ and four boys’ schools) in Jawzjan province of Afghanistan, with a total of 361 boys and 373 girls sampled at endline. All children were interviewed with a questionnaire developed for the study. Key outcomes included children’s experience of peer violence (both perpetration and victimization) at school, corporal punishment both at home and at school, and observation of family violence. Other outcomes included children’s gender equitable attitudes, attitudes towards child punishment, depression and school performance. Results: Between baseline and endline evaluation points, there were significant reductions in various forms of violence at the school level, including both boys’ and girls’ past month experience of peer violence victimization, peer violence perpetration, and corporal punishment by teachers. There were also significant reductions in boys’ and girls’ experience of corporal punishment at home and observation of family violence, with a particularly strong effect observed among girls. Both boys and girls had significantly more equitable gender attitudes and significantly less violence-supportive attitudes in relation to children’s punishment, and significantly fewer symptoms of depression. Girls’ school attendance was also significantly higher at endline. Discussion: To our knowledge this is the first time that a peace education program has been evaluated in Afghanistan, with or without a community intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence for conflict resolution. The evaluation suggests that the intervention may have led to a reduction in various forms of violence, including children’s peer violence, corporal punishment of children both at school and at home, and in children’s reports of domestic violence against women at the household level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the term "capitalism" carries with it baggage that interferes with our ability to understand contemporary market economies. The evolution of work in the "varieties of capitalism" literature is used to make the argument that more essentialist modes of analysis win out over those that emphasize variation and contingency. It is argued that analysts should instead use the terminology of variegated societies operating within a capitalist world economy in order to develop a better toolkit for analyzing political, social, and economic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing and Urban Researchers (HURs) are under intensifying pressures to impact on society. Although this orientation towards research impact sits well with “policy oriented” HURs, it has sat less well with some “critical” HURs. It would nevertheless be wrong to paint critical HURs as unconcerned with research impact. Debates about research impact led to the emergence of “critical” Housing and Urban Research (HUR) in the first place. Critical HURs simply seek to ensure that their research impacts in different ways. In fact, this is the problem. Policy and critically oriented HURs both presume social science to be an appropriate vehicle for impacting social change. Yet, such presumptions were questioned in my 'Fallacy paper', which was philosophically hostile to the idea of social scientific HUR which it sought to dethrone. However, it stopped short of outlining an alternative to it. This paper addresses this lacuna by suggesting an anarchist approach to impacting social change that is equally suspicious of social scientific HUR but, unlike the 'Fallacy paper', conciliatory towards it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Google Books Ngram Viewer (Google Ngram) is a search engine that charts word frequencies from a large corpus of books and thereby allows for the examination of cultural change as it is reflected in books. While the tool's massive corpus of data (about 8 million books or 6% of all books ever published) has been used in various scientific studies, concerns about the accuracy of results have simultaneously emerged. This paper reviews the literature and serves as a guideline for improving Google Ngram studies by suggesting five methodological procedures suited to increase the reliability of results. In particular, we recommend the use of (I) different language corpora, (II) cross-checks on different corpora from the same language, (III) word inflections, (IV) synonyms, and (V) a standardization procedure that accounts for both the influx of data and unequal weights of word frequencies. Further, we outline how to combine these procedures and address the risk of potential biases arising from censorship and propaganda. As an example of the proposed procedures, we examine the cross-cultural expression of religion via religious terms for the years 1900 to 2000. Special emphasis is placed on the situation during World War II. In line with the strand of literature that emphasizes the decline of collectivistic values, our results suggest an overall decrease of religion's importance. However, religion re-gains importance during times of crisis such as World War II. By comparing the results obtained through the different methods, we illustrate that applying and particularly combining our suggested procedures increase the reliability of results and prevents authors from deriving wrong assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Cultural changes faced by immigrants and ethnic minorities after moving to a host country may have a detrimental or beneficial influence on their oral health and oral health-related behaviors. Therefore, this paper reviews the literature to see the impact of acculturation on immigrants and ethnic minorities’ oral health outcomes. Methods: We searched seven electronic databases up to January 2018. All cross-sectional and longitudinal quantitative studies that examined associations between acculturation and oral health status and/or oral health behaviors among ethnic minority and immigrant population[s] were included. Study selection, data extraction, and risk of bias assessment were completed in duplicate. The Newcastle-Ottawa checklist was used to appraise the methodological quality of the quantitative studies. A meta-analytic approach was not feasible. Results: A total of 42 quantitative studies were identified. The studies showed a positive association between acculturation and oral health status/behaviors. The most frequently used acculturation indicators were language spoken by immigrant and ethnic minorities and length of stay at the host country. High-acculturated immigrant and ethnic minority groups demonstrated better oral health outcomes, oral health behaviors, dental care utilization, and dental knowledge. Conclusions: According to existing evidence, a positive effect of acculturation on oral health status and behaviors was found. Practical implications: Dental practitioners should be culturally competent to provide the appropriate services and treatments to immigrant and ethnic minorities. Policymakers should also be sensitive to cultural diversities and properly address the unique needs of each group in order to maintain oral health equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding institutional change remains a major theme on the agenda of social sciences. Thus, this working paper analyzes, through a comparative perspective, the different institutional transformations of the Portuguese and Spanish intelligence systems after the transifition to democracy and after 9/11. We applied an institutional change model centered on the relationship between ideas and interests, and used process tracing as a technique in order to identify the key drivers and inhibitors that explain the different institutional paths observed in the intelligence systems of both countries after two critical junctures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented which states that social-ecological resilience helps to understand in developing sustainable futures following an understanding of biophysical, environmental, and human systems and refers several papers submitted by authors on the subject. He further expresses that social-ecological resilience requires progressive collaboration among several scientific disciplines amalgamating traditional and trans-formative approaches with reflexive trans-disciplinary method.

Malaysia is undergoing a transformation plan from an industrial-based to a knowledge-based economy in an effort to become a high-income nation by the year 2020. The fact that knowledge is foregrounded means that at the center of the transformation is education, and higher education, inevitably, has to, hand in hand, work with the government policy. In this new transformation plan, higher education in Malaysia has to promote creative and innovative minds. Nonetheless, there exists a gap between the administrative policies at Malaysian public universities and students' own understanding of what creativity is all about. This gap is wider especially in the social sciences since the term innovation is often associated with the hard or pure science. This paper, using qualitative approach, analyzes students' descriptions of creativity in three focus group discussions - male only, male and female and female only groups. The aim is to provide data that can be used by the university with regards to students' understanding of creativity in social sciences. This hopefully will help young social scientists to start thinking about being innovative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the use, and potential misuse, of the ‘institution’ as a key concept in sociology. The concept of the ‘institution’ is interrogated using ‘family’ as an example and new institutional economics (NIE) as a crucible. The sociological understanding of family as an ‘institution’ is challenged by the distinction between ‘institutions’ and ‘organisations’ in NIE. The blurring of generic non-sociological terms with critical sociological concepts causes confusion between institutions and organisations. This is highly problematic for understanding social change in increasingly complex systems. I conclude that the contextual embedding of sociological concepts remains important to the appropriate use of the term ‘institution’ in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Memory is an enormously important resource for the social sciences. This paper takes the subject of maternal memory to examine a corpus of work in the sociology of childbirth concerned with how women remember the experience of childbirth. It suggests that the sociology of memory has been more concerned with collective than individual experiences, and that women's memories of childbirth have generally been treated as a special case, rather than as a route to enhanced understandings of how memory works in relation to the all-important topics of time, identity and social change. Drawing on data from a 37-year follow-up to a study of childbirth conducted in the 1970s, it argues that maternal memory shares key characteristics with other kinds of memory, but can be significant in allowing women to reposition themselves as active social selves in a process that is remembered as not allowing much agency or autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access repositories. In this paper we introduce D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment. This expandable and open-access database (accessible at ) brings together a dispersed corpus of information on the geography, language, culture, and environment of over 1400 human societies. We aim to enable researchers to investigate the extent to which patterns in cultural diversity are shaped by different forces, including shared history, demographics, migration/diffusion, cultural innovations, and environmental and ecological conditions. We detail how D-PLACE helps to overcome four common barriers to understanding these forces: i) location of relevant cultural data, (ii) linking data from distinct sources using diverse ethnonyms, (iii) variable time and place foci for data, and (iv) spatial and historical dependencies among cultural groups that present challenges for analysis. D-PLACE facilitates the visualisation of relationships among cultural groups and between people and their environments, with results downloadable as tables, on a map, or on a linguistic tree. We also describe how D-PLACE can be used for exploratory, predictive, and evolutionary analyses of cultural diversity by a range of users, from members of the worldwide public interested in contrasting their own cultural practices with those of other societies, to researchers using large-scale computational phylogenetic analyses to study cultural evolution. In summary, we hope that D-PLACE will enable new lines of investigation into the major drivers of cultural change and global patterns of cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory action research has been used by Latin American social sciences researchers in order to deal with social and community problems to encourage social changes. Participatory action research experiences with industrial workers have been less visible. This paper focuses on workers’ research experience at state-owned Venezuelan metallurgical industries. The methodological approach is based on workers’ educational needs with participation in their own emancipation process. Workers and researchers share experiences, knowledge, and set the basis for increased democracy at industry through workshops, meetings, and other educational activities. These experiences allowed the emergence of an industrial participatory action research project that is being deepened through participatory appraisal and education research programs with readings, “generating questions,” working roundtables, consensus and dissent, experience systematization, and a living language of participation to strengthen local and national education-research network with people, especially workers, increasing their voice through knowledge democracy and technology democracy which implies industrial democracy too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, scholars and practitioners across the social sciences, policy and beyond have proposed, trialled and developed a wide range of theoretical and practical approaches designed to bring about changes in behaviors and lifestyles that contribute to climate change. With the exception of the establishment of a small number of iconic behaviors such as recycling, it has, however, proved extremely difficult to bring about meaningful transformations in personal greenhouse gas emissions at the individual or societal level, with multiple reviews now pointing to the limited efficacy of current approaches. We argue that the majority of approaches designed to achieve mitigation have been constrained by the need to operate within prevailing social scientific, economic and political orthodoxies which have precluded the possibility of non-marginal change. In this paper, we ask what a truly radical approach to reducing personal emissions would look like from social science perspectives which challenge the unstated assumptions severely limiting action to date, and which explore new alternatives for change. We emphasize the difficulties likely to impede the instituting of genuinely radical societal change with respect to climate change mitigation, while proposing ways that the ground could be prepared for such a transformation to occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]