FIFA/IOC‐Sanctioned Development and the Imminence of Erotic Space

Based on ethnographic research conducted since April 2014, this paper will examine the intersection between mega‐event security apparatuses, event‐led urbanism, and local geographies of desire. We argue that urban sanitisation strategies (particularly those derived from a constellation of foreign interests) threaten local geographies of desire but remain dependent upon erotic space and subjectivities in (trans)national exchange and everyday economic salvation. The erasure of sexual diversity is a case with which to examine the impact of FIFA/IOC‐sanctioned urban renewal, and the manner in which local bodies (particularly those deemed sexually ‘deviant’) are repeatedly forced to circumvent these globally determined processes of development.     

THE EFFECT OF ETHNICITY ON CRIME ATTRIBUTION

This study investigates the impact of ethnic origin on the attribution of criminal offenses to faces seen in portrait photographs. The underlying hypothesis is that ethnic stereotypes are a result of the way people perceive themselves and other groups (that is, the relation of in-groups to outgroups) and that ethnic stereotypes directly affect a person's readiness to attribute particular offenses to given portraits. Thus, this study explores cross-ethnic and intra-ethnic offense attribution.     

Imposing Identity against Social Catastrophes. The Strategies of (Re)Generation of Meaning of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Argentina)

This article explores the processes of definition, construction and social management of collective identity in situations of social catastrophe such as that defined in the Southern Cone of Latin America following the grave human rights violations that occurred in the 1970s, especially those deriving from the forced disappearance of persons. This form of repression creates deep wounds in the social fabric affected and, besides this, produces what could be called a ‘catastrophe’, that is, a permanent confusion of the mechanisms of social construction of meaning and subjectivity within which one lives. In this case, the catastrophe affects several collective goods and, principally, the social bases of modern identity construction. In order to manage these catastrophes, the subjects that inhabit the social spaces formed around them – in this case those who live in the field of the detained–disappeared – develop very different strategies, with the most widespread in the Argentinean case being what I will call the ‘narrative of meaning’. This is a hard and conservative strategy that confronts the catastrophe of identity by employing identity constructions supported on old narratives of the family and biological heritage. This article is dedicated to an analysis of this socially successfully strategy and studies the form it adopts in the work of constructing identity of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.     

The selection of party leaders in Spain

Abstract. Few parties apart from the PSOE have enjoyed stable and cohesive leaderships. A comparison between the PSOE and the AP/PP shows how much more stable the experience of the former has been. Both elect leaders at delegate congesses, although in practice there is little real involvement by rank and file members. Political culture, cleavages and the role of TV all account for this instability.