Conceiving Latin American Feminist Counterpublics

Author(s):  
Elisabeth Jay Friedman

This chapter traces the historical outlines of Latin American feminist counterpublics to show the kind of organizing, including alternative media use, that provided the foundation upon which more recent counterpublics would build. Through their publications and face-to-face meetings, activists during the late 19th and early 20th century developed strategies to name and claim women’s rights long before the advent of the internet. Their work served as a model for the explosion of activism beginning in the 1970s, when new regional publications enriched an unprecedented, and globally unreplicated counterpublic space, that of the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounters, or large regional meetings. The chapter also profiles two global communication projects in which Latin American counterpublics were embedded, and ends with an analysis of the very first computer-mediated project to promote women’s rights at the international venue of the 1975 UN World conference on women.

Author(s):  
Enrique Mu

Until recently, there was no doubt about what constituted a university education and how it was carried out. Suddenly, the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, and in a few weeks, not only education, but the entire world changed. In the new normal, post-pandemic world, it is possible that teaching face-to-face courses will be the exception, not the rule, in the U.S. and the Latin American and Caribbean regions. Furthermore, this virtual instruction will possibly be at massive levels with tens or hundreds of thousands of students at a time, modeled after massive open online courses (MOOCs).


Author(s):  
Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar ◽  
Maria del Carmen Caba Pérez ◽  
Antonio Manuel López Hernández

This chapter examines and discusses the approach taken by local governments in developing countries to using the Web as a means of providing e-services. In particular, we focus on the capital cities of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries to discover whether their public administrations are using the Internet to transform how they interact with citizens through the delivery of online public sector services, thus advancing a benchmarking process. An empirical study was carried out of e-government services in these cities, focusing on the content of e-services by applying the CapGemini (2009) methodology, which has been widely used in prior research. Our findings confirm the existence of a wide variety of e-services among the cities examined, with many of these local administrations remaining unaware of the possibility of using Internet to facilitate the delivery of public sector services. Therefore, there is great scope for improvement in the field of e-government. Reforms in public administration are needed in order to make government more participative and open. Likewise, setting effective policies to ensure e-inclusion is the key to the future of LAC’s new empowered societies, with a more visible voice and more chances to express their concerns.


2009 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Meijer

Proponents and opponents fiercely debate whether computer-mediated transparency has a positive effect on trust in the public sector. This article enhances our understanding of transparency by presenting three perspectives: a premodern, modern and post-modern perspective, and analyzing the basic assumptions of these perspectives about transparency. The analysis shows that the proponents of computer-mediated transparency have a modern perspective on societal change: computer-mediated transparency gives people better information and thus contributes to the rationalization of society. Opponents argue from a premodern perspective that unidirectional, structured and decontextualized forms of transparency will result in a loss of societal trust. Postmodernists focus on the esthetics of transparency and argue for varied and diverse forms of computer-mediated transparency. The value of these three perspectives is illustrated by using them to analyze debates about the need for making school performance in the Netherlands transparent. On the basis of this analysis, the author argues for diversity in systems of transparency to maximize effects on societal trust. Points for practitioners This article evaluates transparency through the Internet from different perspectives. Premodernists see computer-mediated transparency as a threat to traditional mechanisms of trust such as face-to-face contacts, modernists praise computer-mediated transparency for its contribution to trust by providing objective information to the general public and postmodernists value the esthetic value of computer-mediated transparency. The ambivalent relation between trust and openness is at the heart of debates about the new transparency. This article argues that it is imperative that we understand these controversies, and debate which forms of computer-mediated transparency we want in the public sector.


Author(s):  
Grace Setyo Purwaningtyas ◽  
Pawito Pawito ◽  
Ismi Dwi Astuti Nurhaeni

Communication technology and the internet  have developed quite rapidly from time to time. The development of communication  technology and the internet has changed the way human’s communication. Human interaction is no longer limited to face-to-face meetings, but has now shifted to interaction or communication using computer and internet media which are not limited to space and time. This mediated communication is known as Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Communication through the CMC was developed by various application  providers to facilitate internet users in communicating, one of which is through the Instagram application. Text, images and videos are included in the type of computer mediated communication (CMC) interaction. The CMC interaction is used by internet users from various circles, including millennial mothers. This research was conducted to find out how the role of CMC in developing self-potential among millennial mothers. This research is a qualitative research using semi-structured interviews as a data collection method. The findings in this study indicate that informants are selective in presenting themselves through the selection of images, videos and descriptions before uploading on the Instagram page so that they are able to display their potential.


Author(s):  
Katherine M. Marino

This chapter examines how, during the Second World War, Latin American feminists continued to push broad meanings of international women’s rights and human rights in spite of little support from their U.S. counterparts. The women from the U.S. Women’s and Children’s Bureaus who replaced Doris Stevens in the Inter-American Commission of Women avoided promoting women’s “equal rights” because of the fraught Equal Rights Amendment debate in the U.S. Latin American feminists effectively pushed these U.S. counterparts on a number of issues, including toward advocacy for maternity legislation, which Latin American feminists asserted as a human right. The Atlantic Charter and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which underscored social and economic rights, inspired Latin American feminists’ broad calls for human rights. Their framings included women’s rights, and greater economic security and multilateral relations in the Americas. These demands came together at the 1945 Chapultepec conference where a number of Latin American feminists in the Inter-American Commission of Women also paved the way for Latin American countries to appoint women to their delegations going to the conference that would create the United Nations.


2019 ◽  
pp. 38-52
Author(s):  
María Luisa Femenías

This chapter examines some of the substantial suggestions for antiessentialist practices that have emerged from the problematic prejudice against women’s rights. Exploring the idea of identity, as it is lived and resignified by Latin American women, offers us a set of significant ideas that provide different ways of signifying language and reality. The chapter attends critically to these ideas, confronting their historical and political contexts through decolonial thought, subalternity, and globalization. It denies an essentialist view of “identity,” appealing to the collective resignification that women have achieved individually and among each other through self-expression, revealing the democratic value of ambiguity rather than that of univocity, of mestizaje over purity, and self-identifications over essentialist hegemonic definitions.


2016 ◽  
pp. 4-6
Author(s):  
Lebanese American University

In preparation for the Fourth U.N. World Conference on Women, The U.S. branchof Amnesty International has launched a campaign to draw attention to increasingabuses of women's basic human rights around the world.


Author(s):  
Katherine M. Marino

This chapter explains how Latin American feminists pushed women’s rights into the United Nations Charter at the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO) in San Francisco. Bertha Lutz and a number of Latin American feminists with whom she collaborated–Minerva Bernardino from the Dominican Republic, Amalia de Castillo Ledón from Mexico, and Isabel Pinto de Vidal from Uruguay–as well as Jessie Street from Australia, were responsible for pushing women’s rights into several parts of the UN Charter and for proposing what became the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. They did this over the express objections of the U.S. and British female delegates to the conference who believed that women’s rights were too controversial or not important enough to include. These Latin American women also worked alongside representatives from “smaller nations” and from U.S. non-governmental organizations like the NAACP to push “human rights” into the Charter. At the UNCIO, the racism that Lutz experienced from U.S. and British delegates, lack of U.S. and British support, and overweening power of the "Big Four" in the constitution of the United Nations, caused her to turn away from her long-time Anglo-American-philia and identify as a "Latin American."


Author(s):  
Katherine M. Marino

This chapter illustrates how Latin American popular front feminists seized leadership of the Inter-American Commission of Women at the 1938 Eighth International Conference of American States in Lima and continued to expand the movement. Drawing on the groundwork paved by Ofelia Dom쭧uez Navarro, Clara Gonzoz, Paulina Luisi, Bertha Lutz, and Marta Vergara, who continued organizing in these years, the Unión de Mujeres Americanas, the Confederación Continental de Mujeres por la Paz, and a new force of Mexican poplar front feminists united. They promoted women’s social and economic rights, anti-fascism, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism as interconnected struggles. A leader in this network, the communist feminist Esperanza Balmaceda, who was appointed to the Mexican delegation to the Lima conference, collaborated there with Latin American feminists, the U.S. State Department, and U.S. female reformers in the Roosevelt administration to remove Stevens as chair of the Commission. At the same time, they mobilized a broader defense of what the Lima conference called “derechos humanos.” There and at the Congreso de Democracias in Montevideo, Uruguay, co-organized by Paulina Luisi, feminists asserted the need for a grassroots movement, for women’s rights treaties, and for broad commitments to human rights in the Americas.


Author(s):  
María Luisa Femenías

This chapter examines some of the substantial suggestions for antiessentialist practices that have emerged from the problematic prejudice against women’s rights. To explore the idea of identity, as it is lived and re-signified by Latin American women, yields a set of significant ideas that provide different ways of signifying language and reality. The chapter attends critically to these ideas, confronting their historical and political contexts through decolonial thought, subalternity, and globalization. It denies an essentialist view of identity, appealing to the collective re-signification that women have achieved themselves and among each other through self-expression, revealing the democratic value of ambiguity rather than that of univocity, of mestizaje over purity, and of self-identifications over essentialist hegemonic definitions.


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