Locking down adolescents: Victims,irresponsible subjects,or just social actors

The article presents the results of a qualitative study investigating the experiences of a sample of Italian adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were analysed in the light of the two social representations (adolescents as criminals and as victims) that permeated the Italian public debate throughout the outbreak. The findings showed the ability of boys and girls in dealing with the relationships altered by the pandemic constraints and in adapting to different regulations. This demonstrated their competence as social actors, neither criminals nor victims, who were also able to cope with the coronavirus risk in safeguarding their significant others.     

Undoing raciolinguistics

In this commentary, we discuss common pitfalls associated with the study of race and language, focusing specifically on the recent emergence of raciolinguistics as a frame for these efforts. We examine how raciolinguistics can be taken up in ways that silo discussions of race from the rest of linguistics—as something that the “raciolinguists” do—such that careful study of issues including colonialism, power, and societal hierarchies is perpetually pushed to the margins of the field. We also consider how the nominalization of raciolinguistics can suggest that race and language are agreed upon objects in ways that reproduce troublesome essentializations. We show how a raciolinguistic perspective can resist such tendencies by continually interrogating the colonial reproduction and transformation of modern knowledge projects and lifeways across societal contexts, as well as by continually examining the fundamental nature of language, race, and power. We end with what we see as the implications of a raciolinguistic perspective for all of linguistics.     

The sexual division of labour: A qualitative analysis of social organisations in Peru

This is a study on participation in civil society organisations in Peru, which adopts a gender perspective to understand the dynamics of social welfare production in a family model, and in which there is also a preponderance of community intervention in the field of social protection. The study uses a qualitative methodology and an ethnographic analysis based on 21 organisations. The results indicate polarity of discourses between those who recognise gender differentiation and those who consider that there is gender equality. Despite the polarity, differences in roles, quantity and quality of services, leadership, involvement and motivation are shown. The differences identified vary according to the type of organisation, which shows the relationship between the organisations and the intervention in territories-regions.