Everyday (online) body politics of menstruation

There has been a growing trend to resist mainstream body ideals via social media sites. From fat-acceptance, vulva-positive to menstrual-pride blogs, Tumblrs and Facebook groups, people use social media to question and challenge mainstream depictions of the female body. In this article, I look at social media culture and how the notions of the menstrual body are evolving online. I analyze these concerns with a case study based on a women-only closed Facebook group created to discuss issues around feminine health, sexuality, and wellbeing. I argue that by looking from the lens of everyday politics, it is possible to understand how political participation and social change can emerge through people’s everyday practices. My findings suggest that the private Facebook group serves three purposes. One, as a pedagogical space to address a gap in knowledge about the menstrual cycle and menstrual health. Two, as a platform to break the silence around menstruation and make it visible to the public. Three, as a tool for building a caring community among the participants. This study illustrates how social media is used for everyday body politics, contributing to changing attitudes, beliefs, and values in daily life

Empowerment, destigmatization and sustainability

In this essay, I use the domestication framework to explore the integration process in which reusable menstrual management technologies become part of the everyday life of users. Drawing on interviews, focus group discussions and observation in online and offline sites in Argentina, this study sheds light on how technologies and users co-construct each other in the context of an emerging menstrual activism. By listening to the stories of the participants of this study, I show the potential of women’s agency in transforming technology. New and not foreseen uses and meanings were assigned to the reusable menstrual technologies, however, this happens while the identities of users are also transformed in the process of domestication, illustrating how the identity of being a menstruating woman and technologies are coshaping each other

Science and technology internationalization and the emergence of peripheral techno-dreams: the Yachay project case

On the basis of interviews, observations and archival analysis, this article explores the controversies surrounding the Yachay project case in Ecuador and unveils three ideological processes behind its conception and implementation. First, we show how the new elite in the government used this project to produce and reproduce a new power structure using a symbolic strategy based on propaganda and on an imaginary of techno-scientific modernization. Second, we unveil the material and symbolic reproduction of a cosmopolitan elite of international experts that profited from the Ecuadorian public funds in exchange for their name and prestige, thanks to a discourse based on cosmopolitanism, urgency, and voluntarism. Finally, we explain how the Yachay project has triggered the reconfiguration of the local symbolic sphere according to the new conditions of reproduction of the world system by reshaping the local imaginaries around technology and innovation. We conclude that Yachay, like other similar projects that have emerged at the same time in other parts of the world, is part of a global process of reconfiguration of the ideological and institutional conditions that accompany the deployment of the latest wave of techno-economic transformations in the global system

Transformations in the Ecuadorian scientific landscape: A bibliometric analysis of the main publications trends and the role of the scientific networks and the public international scholarship program

Like other Latin American countries, Ecuador has undergone major political and economic transformations in the last decade. Science, technology and innovation policies were at the core of some of these transformations. Despite the economic recession since 2015, the local techno-scientific landscape has experienced quantitative and qualitative transformations that need to be analyzed. This paper aims to shed light on these changes and on the Ecuadorian techno-scientific system, which so far remains under-researched. To do so, we first carry out a bibliometric analysis of more than 25,000 records with Ecuadorian affiliation from the Scopus database, published between 1920 and 2019. This allows us to reconstruct the growing complexity of local techno-scientific networks and their connections both inside and outside the country. This analysis shows a strong process of internationalization of local scientific production during the last decade, as well as a shift in research topics from publications focused mainly on health and environmental issues to research with a strong component on data and systems analysis. In a second level of analysis, we explore the relationship between these transformations in techno-scientific production and a postgraduate scholarship policy program which has sponsored Ecuadorians to study abroad over the past two decades. This analysis shows a significant correlation between the number of international scholarships granted and the number of indexed publications. The paper concludes that local transformations in techno-scientific networksarehighlycorrelatedwiththeinternationalizationprocessdrivenbythispostgraduate scholarship program and in general by international scientific research training