Rural development in Latin America. A critical territorial approach

Latin America attends currently to the construction of a paradigm of rural development based on the potentiality of the territory to encourage processes of rural wellbeing. Some international studies relating rural development to territory from an institutional perspective have recently come out, greatly contributing to the construction of a territorially based rural development in the region. The paradigm is mainly centred in a monetary approach, stressing the need to increase incomes at local level through new agricultural or non-agricultural production and/or increases in productivity as well as through education for migrating to urban areas. Development policies and projects that promote social and institutional transformation have to deal with the confrontation of those who oppose changing the status quo, particularly the local elites, and the resistance of those communities that consider that their identities may be lost as a result of that transformation. Therefore, a critical approach to territory (understood as an arena where different local and non local actors try to realize their projects) should be build up in order to comprehend the process generating rural poverty and development. The purpose of this paper is to present the main ideas and concepts of an analytical framework under construction that may allow us to understand rural development from a critical territorial approach. The hypothesis is that social mobilization of local actors is a main issue when approaching and promoting development in poor rural regions of Latin American countries, especially the organization of peasants and farmers as they constitute the majority of the inhabitants and are largely excluded from the socioeconomic and political system

Latin America between the dismantling of the state and the rise of social mobilization. The complexity of rural development in North East Argentina

This paper presents some preliminary empirical reflexions about rural development in North East Argentina at the light of the recent socio-economic and political changes. The processes of decentralization that have taken place in the country during the decade of 1990 illustrate the complexity of rural development strategies at local level and the necessity to create policies to take into account the collective actions from below or to promote them in those territories where they do not exist. These kind of collective actions are considered by some authors to play an important role in processes of democratization

Rural Development and Territorial Dynamics in the Province of Misiones, Argentina

During the 1990s, Latin America went through important structural transformations. The continent experienced a profound alteration in the relations between the state, society, market and natural environment. Societies have been trying to accommodate, contest and resist this restructuring, particularly once it became evident its negative effects on poverty reduction and the increasingly social and geographical inequalities. In the province of Misiones, northeast Argentina, neoliberal-inspired territorial transformations occurred in the 1990s and 2000s. Along with decreasingly favourable market conditions for small-scale agriculture production, different conflicts over land were catalysed. Eventually,the whole new economic development model based on the opening up of the provincial economy started to be questioned by many actors, who questioned as well the traditional patterns of farming production. In this context, a rural development arena emerged. This arena is a social and political space of participation and debate concerning the farming sector, an arena from which “alternative” rural development discourses and practices emerge. Novel strategies have fuelled interesting territorial dynamics that focus on the creation of new local ways of life, agricultures and markets. In this context, the objective of this thesis is to analyse the diverse understandings of rural development actors have, as well as the consequences of alternative rural development interventions in family agriculture. In particular, I am interested in scrutinizing how different discourses and practices (material expressions) frame and create new relations between society and state, market and nature. The ultimate aim of the research is to contribute to the current debate in Latin America about social change in rural areas, by exploring the linkages between rural development strategies and the construction of new geographies, new territories. The thesis have sought to answer the following research questions: What narratives and discourses on development are currently disputing the territory in the province of Misiones? What kinds of territories are under construction as a result of “alternative development” strategies and practices implemented by different actors in the rural development arena in interaction with “conventional” development strategies? In what ways are the new territorial dynamics reflecting the construction of an alternative development(s) and new territories and geographies? The evidence shows that actors in the rural development arena seek to put into practice agroecology, a kind of agriculture environmental and socially oriented, as a means to sustain agriculture and at the same time allow ‘rooting’ families to land. Agroecology is a territorial dynamic that intends to “fix people in space” by giving them the chance to live on agriculture or in the countryside and appropriate their territory. By creating new projects, new horizons of actions and thoughts and by being farmers and putting land under production, the family agriculture sector sustains and reproduces itself. However, if these projects do not bring in the middle and long term wellbeing to people, rooting farmers to land will be assisting subsistence agriculture and the reproduction of cheap labour force for the agroindustrial companies with economic interests in Misiones. Particularly, in the case of tobacco, since there seems to be currently few alternatives to this crop that could provide stable monetary incomes to families. For families to be rooted instead of moving to towns and cities or in search of new lands, or providing cheap labour to companies while eking out a living from subsistence agriculture, discourses and practices must contribute to the creation of material possibilities and bring about in the long term structural changes: legal access to land, fair participation in markets, strong participation in policy making, etc. Interventions in ecological agriculture are not just an attack on what locally has been labelled as ‘conventional’ and ‘modern’ agriculture; they are at the same time constructing new opportunities, together and despite that kind of agriculture. What started once as a promotion and strengthening of subsistence agriculture, developed into a movement for another agriculture (una otra agricultura). In confronting and creating alternatives, the roles of the state, the market and nature were redefined and reappropriated by people

Modeling crowdsourcing as collective problem solving

Crowdsourcing is a process of accumulating the ideas, thoughts or information from many independent participants, with aim to find the best solution for a given challenge. Modern information technologies allow for massive number of subjects to be involved in a more or less spontaneous way. Still, the full potentials of crowdsourcing are yet to be reached. We introduce a modeling framework through which we study the effectiveness of crowdsourcing in relation to the level of collectivism in facing the problem. Our findings reveal an intricate relationship between the number of participants and the difficulty of the problem, indicating the optimal size of the crowdsourced group. We discuss our results in the context of modern utilization of crowdsourcing.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figure

A discriminative approach to grounded spoken language understanding in interactive robotics

Spoken Language Understanding in Interactive Robotics provides computational models of human-machine communication based on the vocal input. However, robots operate in specific environments and the correct interpretation of the spoken sentences depends on the physical, cognitive and linguistic aspects triggered by the operational environment. Grounded language processing should exploit both the physical constraints of the context as well as knowledge assumptions of the robot. These include the subjective perception of the environment that explicitly affects linguistic reasoning. In this work, a standard linguistic pipeline for semantic parsing is extended toward a form of perceptually informed natural language processing that combines discriminative learning and distributional semantics. Empirical results achieve up to a 40% of relative error reduction

Robust Spoken Language Understanding for House Service Robots

Service robotics has been growing significantly in thelast years, leading to several research results and to a numberof consumer products. One of the essential features of theserobotic platforms is represented by the ability of interactingwith users through natural language. Spoken commands canbe processed by a Spoken Language Understanding chain, inorder to obtain the desired behavior of the robot. The entrypoint of such a process is represented by an Automatic SpeechRecognition (ASR) module, that provides a list of transcriptionsfor a given spoken utterance. Although several well-performingASR engines are available off-the-shelf, they operate in a generalpurpose setting. Hence, they may be not well suited in therecognition of utterances given to robots in specific domains. Inthis work, we propose a practical yet robust strategy to re-ranklists of transcriptions. This approach improves the quality of ASRsystems in situated scenarios, i.e., the transcription of roboticcommands. The proposed method relies upon evidences derivedby a semantic grammar with semantic actions, designed tomodel typical commands expressed in scenarios that are specificto human service robotics. The outcomes obtained throughan experimental evaluation show that the approach is able toeffectively outperform the ASR baseline, obtained by selectingthe first transcription suggested by the AS

Teachers’ Professional Development on Media and Intercultural Education. Results from some participatory research in Europe

Media and intercultural education are being increasingly recognised as a fundamental competence for teachers of the 21st century. Digital literacy and civic competence are facing several new challenges in response to the intensification of migratory phenomena and the unprecedented spread of fake news, especially among adolescents at risk of social exclusion, but teachers’ professional development is still far from coping with this emerging need. Intercultural understanding and a critical use of media among adolescents have now become primary goals for the promotion of active citizenship. This article intends to provide some recommendations on how to support teachers’ professional development in the field of media and intercultural education. To this purpose, it presents and discusses the results of an action-research project aimed at teachers’ improvement of teaching skills about the media in multicultural public schools. The results are part of a larger European project “Media Education for Equity and Tolerance” (MEET) (Erasmus Plus, KA3), an initiative promoted in 2016–2018 by the University of Florence (Italy)