Marginality, Again?!

This essay critically engages with the book "Urban Outcasts - A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality" by Loïc Wacquant. In this book, studying poor neighborhoods in the United States and France in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wacquant argues that a new socio-economic configuration marked by dualization and polarization of the city and of the class structure has been formed in these metropolises as a result of structural shifts resulting from the breakdown of the Fordist regime and the recoiling of the welfare state. He calls 'advanced marginality' the new regime marked by a new form of urban poverty that makes part of the working classes 'redundant'. This essay highlights the similarities between Wacquant's arguments and those of the theory of marginality of the 1960s and 1970s, which has been criticized and abandoned in Latin America. It also interrogates Wacquant's argument that advanced marginality is what will represent the future of metropolises everywhere, by introducing the case of Brazilian peripheries and asking questions about the increase of violence in poor neighborhoods. Copyright (c) 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation(c) 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Contemporary Discourses on Violence in Central American Newspapers

Huhn S, Oettler A, Peetz P. Contemporary Discourses on Violence in Central American Newspapers. International Communication Gazette. 2009;71(4):243-261.It is commonly understood that criminal violence has superseded political violence in Central America. Focusing on the social construction of violent realities in Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua, the authors describe the print media landscape in Central America and examine both the quality of leading newspapers and the main clusters of topics constituting the news discourse on violence. The analysis of the macro-structure of topic management in Central American newspapers allows a differentiation of the `talk of crime': it is more heterogeneous than often thought. There are signs that the problem of juvenile delinquency is emerging as the centre of a cross-country discourse on `ordinary violence'. On the other hand, the talk of crime is centred around a few topic clusters, with sexual violence and border-related discourse on violence being of key importance. Finally, the article points to a heterogeneous array of discourse events that is connected to political developments and power relations