Water Politics: Governance, Conflict, and Vulnerability in Andean Peru

Peru is facing serious social and environmental water challenges. Experts and policy makers are trying to better understand the social and economic impacts of an increasing rate of glacial melt and a consequential prospect of water scarcity. Currently there is a great deal of strain put on the water resources originating from Andean glacial melt because these sustain most economic and social growth taking place at the coastal desert. At the same time, the country\u27s neoliberal development policies are changing the management of resources such as water. The gradual expansion of extractive industries along with the growing influence of non-state actors is introducing new discursive representations of the environment and facilitating important changes in the spatial, administrative, and political relations of governing nature. Among the most prominent changes are the recent restructuring efforts to the Peruvian institutional and legal structure for water governance. In this context, the forms of access, control, and exploitation of water in the Andes have become more contested than ever. This thesis explores the struggle for water at Parón, one of such Andean communities. This decade-long struggle for water perfectly demonstrates how local groups, government agencies, and a private corporation negotiate their access to water. This thesis explores how organizational structures, institutional arrangements, and decision-making processes shape and are shaped by access, use, management, and regulation of water in a conflictive environment. Particularly, it analyzes how politics informs water management, and consequentially affects access to the resource. But also, given the uniqueness of this conflict, this thesis further incorporates a risk and vulnerability factor to its analysis. While this conflict comprises the socioeconomic, political, historical, cultural, and environmental components of most environmental struggles in Peru, it also presents very unique characteristics. The contested water source is managed not only for downstream water use, but also for glacial risk mitigation. As such, this thesis examines how water governance and vulnerability are co-produced in a conflictive environment. For this, I explore specific moments or instances - such as water flows and management, technology, institutions, discourses, and negotiations - that I recognize as embodying this relationship. In this analysis, I pay special attention to the impact of water technologies. I argue that a new, more convoluted, form of water politics - introduced to the watershed with hydropower technology - have created a new set of social relations that reinforce social vulnerability upon local water users, producing a transformation in vulnerability

Design of an RSFQ Control Circuit to Observe MQC on an rf-SQUID

We believe that the best chance to observe macroscopic quantum coherence (MQC) in a rf-SQUID qubit is to use on-chip RSFQ digital circuits for preparing, evolving and reading out the qubit's quantum state. This approach allows experiments to be conducted on a very short time scale (sub-nanosecond) without the use of large bandwidth control lines that would couple environmental degrees of freedom to the qubit thus contributing to its decoherence. In this paper we present our design of a RSFQ digital control circuit for demonstrating MQC in a rf-SQUID. We assess some of the key practical issues in the circuit design including the achievement of the necessary flux bias stability. We present an "active" isolation structure to be used to increase coherence times. The structure decouples the SQUID from external degrees of freedom, and then couples it to the output measurement circuitry when required, all under the active control of RSFQ circuits. Research supported in part by ARO grant # DAAG55-98-1-0367.Comment: 4 pages. More information and publications at http://www.ece.rochester.edu:8080/users/sde/research/publications/index.htm

Conocimiento sobre tuberculosis y gestación en obstetrices. A propósito de una encuesta.

Con la finalidad de evaluar los conocimientos en relación a la tuberculosis y gestación, practicamos una encuesta en 152 obstetrices. Cuarenta y tres (28%) consideraron que el PPD no tenía utilidad pues era predecible que en las gestantes fuera positivo. Treinta (20%) opinaron que la radiografía de tórax no debía ser practicada bajo ninguna circunstancia y cuarenta (26%) afirmaron que la fluoroscopía era un procedimiento alternativo más seguro. Sólo 85 (56%) respondieron que debería iniciarse tratamiento de inmediato en la gestante del primer trimestre con diagnóstico de tuberculosis. Las dos terceras partes de encuestadas recomendaron métodos de anticoncepción natural en una mujer con tuberculosis pulmonar. Más de la mitad de encuestadas afirmó que la placenta no es enviada a anatomía patológica cuando se sospecha tuberculosis pulmonar en la gestante. Nuestros resultados señalarían la necesidad de un programa de educación continua dirigido al personal de obstetrices y pueden ser útiles para diseñar tal actividad educativa

Gibbs-Donnan and specific ion interaction theory descriptions of the effect of ionic strength on proton dissociation of alginic acid

The apparent proton dissociation constants of a commercial alginic acid have been obtained in KNO3 and NaCl at concentrations ranging between 0.01 and 2 mol·L-1. An analysis of the dependence on the ionic strength at a constant value of the dissociation degree was done by means of empirical functions derived from the Gibbs-Donnan formalism for polyelectrolytes and a specific ion interaction theory (SIT). Both functions were able to fit the experimental data, although SIT yielded rather high errors in the fitted parameters due to a problem of multicollinearity, in contrast to the function derived from the Gibbs-Donnan approach.This work was funded by the projects BQU2002-02133 (from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología of Spain) and PGDIT02TAM10302PR (from the Xunta de Galicia). C.R.C. benefited from a FPU grant of the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte of Spain

Horrendo hermano siamés : cinismo y perversión en Estrella distante de Roberto Bolaño

Fundador del movimiento poético infrarrealista en México, en el plano narrativo, Roberto Bolaño se ocupa constantemente de la representación de la dictadura y postdictadura chilena de los setenta. En el año 1996, Bolaño publica su novela corta Estrella distante, considerada como una de las más logradas según la crítica. Esta novela nace del último capítulo de otra novela del mismo escritor, La literatura nazi en América. Dicho texto está conformado por capítulos que relatan la historia de personajes latinoamericanos que, a través de la literatura y el arte, exponen un discurso fascista que surge y se fortalece a partir de las dictaduras militares que se viven tanto en Chile y Argentina del siglo XX. El último relato de La literatura nazi, ‘Ramírez Hoffman, el infame’, narra la historia de dicho personaje quien anticipará la existencia de Carlos Wieder en Estrella distante. La historia es casi la misma, excepto por su extensión y la variación de alguno de los nombres de los personajes. Es, por ese motivo, que el narrador deja clara la intención de retomar el relato y convertirla en una novela: “Arturo [Belano] deseaba una historia más larga, no espejo ni explosión de otras historias sino espejo y explosión en sí misma” (11). Es por esta razón, que desde el inicio de Estrella distante ya se plantea el tema del doble no solo como la relación entre ambos textos, sino también como el motivo en el que se basa toda la estructura textual. En Estrella distante se reconoce a uno de los personajes más recurrentes de toda la obra de Bolaño, Arturo Belano, -ya unánimemente considerado el álter ego del escritor, su propio doble- quien se encuentra tras las pistas del impenetrable poeta Carlos Wieder. La novela se construye a partir del golpe de Estado del 11 de setiembre de 1973; acontecimiento a partir del cual se revela la representación de ideologías en Chile durante la dictadura de Pinochet y cómo, después de ella, Belano adopta una óptica melancólica, crítica y desencantada que se difunde a través de toda la obra narrativa de Roberto BolañoTesi

Desafiar la memoria, iluminar subjetividades en la literatura argentina contemporánea

In this dissertation, I show how the collective memory discourses dialogue with their contemporary political conditions. I analyze the novels written by the children of the dissapeared and political activists that were published during Néstor Kirchner, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner governments (2003-2007, 2007-2015). I focus on this period to explore how the memory discourse established and promoted in both administrations permeates the dynamics of a local cultural field. I propose that the existence of these narratives would have not been posible without the political achivements in memory matters during the Kirchners’ regimes. The novels written by the children of the dissapeared enlighten experiences regarding the consequences of paternal political activism in the familial sphere. These representations do not coincide with the heroic depictions that the public memory discourse propose. In that sense, these narratives highlight the gaps between the collective and private life of the children of the dissapeared. This fissure allows the construction of a new kind of subjectivity that distances from the common places of the public memory discourse. The literary critic organizes these narratives under the “literatura de hijos” category. Although, the critic reads these novels as political interventions due to the legitimacy that the children of the dissapeared statements hold, the novelists are eager to consolidate in the literary field depicting personal experiencies in fiction. In the tension between the biographical fact and fiction, I study how the political capital of the children of the dissapeared structures the classification and value of their novels inside the literary debate. This relationship organizes the dinamics of a cultural production field. The public memory discourse presents trends in cultural production, since the writers answer to the state proposals even when the Kirchners’ governments claim the dictatorship victims.Spanish and Portugues

Olvido de una historia. Reflexiones acerca de la historiografía andino-amazónica

This article reflects on the «historical oblivion» identified by Thierry Saignes referring to the fact that little attention has been paid to the frontier region where Amazonia and the Andes meet to elaborate on the marginal status of Amazonian historiography. It also reviews historical research on this area corresponding to what has been termed Andean Amazonia, the upper basin of the Amazon river and its tributaries in the tropical Andean slopes. It identifies the causes of this oblivion and suggests some steps in order to counter this situation.Este artículo propone una reflexión acerca del tema del estatuto marginal de la historiografía amazónica y andino-amazónica en particular a partir del enfoque elaborado por Thierry Saignes para implicar el escaso desarrollo de una perspectiva de encuentro y conflicto en la frontera constituida por la región amazónica y andina. Revisa la producción historiográfica sobre esta área constituida por la cuenca alta del Amazonas y sus afluentes nacidos en las vertientes de los Andes tropicales. Concluye identificando las causas de este «olvido» y proponiendo pasos para remontar la situación