This reflective experience walks the streets of Valledupar, in the department of Cesar (Colombia), a territory that in this text takes shape through a resilient and disruptive metaphor: women as subjects who build the city. The reflections gathered here emerge from everyday forms of shared knowledge and dialogue with authors who, from critical and feminist perspectives, have named the phenomena that, in the daily movement through the city, intertwine with the lives of those who inhabit it. This approach is grounded in emotions, senses, and meanings, and it stands as a framework of resistance against the injustices that hegemonic powers reproduce in urban spaces. The positioning of people, particularly the women known as canahuateras, emerges from conditions of vulnerability and poverty, yet enables the creation of community-based and popular spaces where an alternative affective map is woven. From a place of dignified anger, this map redefines and restores dignity to urban life in this part of the Colombian Caribbean.
This article analyzes the historical and sociocultural contexts in which the Social Studies Curriculum Guidelines (2002) and the Recommendations for the Teaching of History (2022), developed by the la Comisi & oacute;n Asesora para la Ense & ntilde;anza de la Historia (CAEHC), were produced, with a focus on the armed conflict in Colombia. Drawing on Pierre Muller's (1998) theory of public policy referentials and Cris Shore's (2010) concept of governmentality, the article examines how these documents reflect transformations in official representations of the conflict and historical memory. Using a qualitative approach, the study combines an analysis of curriculum guidelines, standards, and Basic Learning Rights, a review of Law 1874 of 2017, which established the mandatory teaching of history, and semi-structured interviews with members of the commissions responsible for these documents. The findings show that the 2002 Curriculum Guidelines condensed tensions between the democratizing project of the 1991 Colombian Constitution and the security-oriented policy referential of the government at the time, while the 2006 Standards and the 2016 Basic Learning Rights introduced a logic of standardization that fragmented social knowledge. In contrast, the 2022 Recommendations propose a discursive and pedagogical shift toward a plurality of memories, historical thinking, and peacebuilding, although their impact remains limited by weak implementation and the persistence of inertial school practices. The article concludes that curriculum guidelines operate as technologies of power that legitimize particular representations of the conflict and shape citizenship education as a contested field between social control and critical formation.
Environmental security, understood as a key condition for guaranteeing access to and protection of natural resources, has become a strategic concern for the State. Within this framework, this reflective article examines the role of military institutions in environmental protection and sustainability, with particular attention to the experience of the Fuerza Aeroespacial Colombiana (FAC). The study adopts a hermeneutic approach to analyze the institution's capacities related to environmental security, especially in response to environmental threats linked to the context of the internal armed conflict.
This reflective article draws on a retrospective ethnographic approach to reconstruct a history of Bogota through the life stories of a woman who lived in it for more than eight decades. Rather than treating territory as a fixed backdrop, the article understands it as a layered symbolic and material landscape shaped by subjective ways of inhabiting urban space. From this perspective, the ethnographic work functions both as a tribute to a memory that is gradually fading due to Alzheimer's disease and as an attempt to recover an understanding of the city grounded in bodily movement and everyday practices. These practices reveal how the body inhabits, interprets, and continually redefines the city. In this sense, the city is approached through corporeality, understood as a constellation of lived experiences, emotions, and affects, in which the moving body becomes both a witness to and a producer of meaning. The narratives gathered through this ethnographic process allow for the construction of a portrait of the city composed of multiple urban and neighborhood memories, social ties, emotional bonds, and historical shifts that run through an octogenarian life, even as Alzheimer's disrupts linear time and blends past and present.
In this essay, we first argue that the growing number of environmental conflicts in twenty-first-century Latin America is closely linked to the region's rich biodiversity and its colonial extractivist legacy. To address this, we call for moving beyond reductionist views of the society-nature relationship and instead emphasize its political and social complexity. We then examine different forms of resistance to these conflicts, focusing on struggles against large-scale mining, agroindustry, and oil extraction, while also highlighting ancestral community practices as viable alternatives to the dominant market-driven model. Third, we argue that the social sciences must confront environmental injustice through a historical and critical lens that centers on structural and systemic inequalities. Drawing on Castoriadis (2007, 2013), we underscore the autonomous capacity of societies to reinvent their collective imaginaries and to break with the modern extractivist paradigm. From this perspective, we propose the idea of a "radical imaginary" as a way of envisioning and building new society-nature relationships, recognizing that even in conditions of uncertainty, societies retain the ability to create alternative paths.
