In Search of Ordenamiento Ambiental Territorial in the Peasant Reserve Zones of Colombia

This thesis is an intersection between political ecology, rural development and agrarian studies. It examines the Peasant Reserve Zone (ZRC) as a land planning designation in Colombia created in the 1990s as part of the Colombian state’s effort at agrarian reform, and the expressions of Ordenamiento Ambiental Territorial (glossed as environmental land use planning), by the state and the peasants as ways of constructing territory. Beginning by situating the emergence of the ZRC as part of the classic agrarian question of the fate of the peasantry in capitalism, it then intersects that political-economy perspective with a geographic approach to the concept of territory. The establishment of the political technology of Ordenamiento Territorial and its environmental version, Ordenamiento Ambiental Territorial are analyzed together with the arrival of neoliberalism in the 1990s in Colombia. Using a political ecology lens, Ordenamiento Ambiental Territorial is dissected by searching the current meaning of environment from its roots in the meanings of nature and particularly with the production of nature under capitalism. Finally, through three perspectives on development, this thesis analyzes diverse forms of development planning in the ZRC (Sustainable Development Plans of each ZRC, results of the ZRC pilot project financed by the World Bank, and fieldwork results) to examine cross-cutting issues of environmental governance in the ZRC including participation, expectations and imaginaries of the state, the ZRC and “the peasant community”. The main message of this work is that ZRC peasants are not only claiming land rights but are demanding a recognition of territory through their engagements with Ordenamiento Territorial, their uses of Ordenamiento Ambiental Territorial and their participation in development planning

Understanding sampling by Chilean secondary school students

In statistical inference, importance of sampling is recognized as one of its key concepts, which has allowed its incorporation internationally in different curricular guidelines and specifically in the Chilean curriculum, since the first notions of sampling are introduced in 7th Grade. This paper presents an analysis of the responses to an open-ended written questionnaire, designed to evaluate understanding of sampling, that was applied to a sample of 1,241 Chilean secondary students of 8th, 10th and 12th Grades in six different secondary schools. A mixed methodology was used, with qualitative description of responses and a quantitative analysis of their frequencies. The results reflect outstanding difficulties in the use of elements related to sampling and its properties in different problem situations. For example, students can distinguish the concept of sample in contexts close to their experiences; but when faced with different sampling methods, they are not able to identify biases associated to sample selection. Thus, when deciding if a sample is representative, they mostly identify cases in which the given sample is not.Project EDU2016-74848-PCONICYT Chile Scholarship (PFCHA 72160521

Creating Latino communities in the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area

Studies of Latin American immigrants in Japan to date have focused on Nikkei (of Japanese ancestry) from Brazil and Peru, considering their accommodation to Japanese society as a group with ethnic ties to Japan. In the last few years, however, Latin Americans of diverse backgrounds from countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Colombia have also migrated and settled in urban areas throughout Japan. These immigrants find few avenues to organise themselves or to integrate with the population at large. The Ministry of Justice handles the legislation and enforcement of immigration laws but provides limited social services and information. A handful of non-government associations operate for the benefit of all immigrants but their reach and scope are limited due to lack of human and economic resources. Social discrimination and an increasingly tight labour market complicate this situation. In this paper, I discuss the formal and informal networks that Latin American immigrants develop to overcome these obstacles to accommodate to their host society. I argue that the social and cultural negotiations that facilitate the functioning of these networks contribute to the creation of a pan-national Latin/o American culture in Japan. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd

The latino culturescape in Japan

Reyes-Ruiz discusses the community-building strategies of Spanish-speaking Latin American immigrants in Japan, arguing that a combination of processes—social exclusion; the pragmatic demands of socializing and survival in a multinational context; and the availability of transnational Latin American cultural products, images, and spaces in Japan—have led these immigrants to (re-)create a transnational Latino culture. Inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s conceptualizations of globalization and the different transnational flows integral to it, Reyes-Ruiz names this phenomenon the Latino Culturescape. The concept of the culturescape, he argues, “overcomes the limitations of traditional immigration research that focuses only on population flows. By paying attention to the impact of the transnational media and of transnational discourses, it also moves beyond the questions of nationality and ethnicity that have so far characterized the study of immigrants in Japan.

Factors that influence the behavior of a person against the risk of starting a business in Latin America

El desempleo y la baja calidad de los empleos existentes, han creado la necesidad de emprender y pasar de ser empleado a emprendedor. Sin embargo, existen algunos factores que caracterizan a este comportamiento. La presente investigación identifica algunos de los factores que incrementan en una persona el riesgo de emprender un negocio en América Latina. Los principales factores que influyen en este comportamiento son: la experiencia, el conocimiento, la habilidad y la edad entre las once variables utilizadas en el periodo 2009-2011. Los modelos de redes neuronales utilizados clasifican a la variable dependiente (miedo al fracaso) con un porcentaje de acierto del 68% en el periodo de estudi