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  (2018) Los discursos sobre los movimientos sociales: ¿auge, declive, efectos?

  23 June 2018, by Miguel Angel Martinez
  A raíz de una invitación recibida para participar en un taller sobre análisis crítico del discurso en Barcelona, escribí unos breves apuntes sobre el origen académico y político del estudio sobre los movimientos sociales. Un hilo conductor de esta reflexión es la perspectiva foucaultiana que invita a cuestionarse los conceptos que utilizamos y su imbricación con las relaciones de poder (ver una entrada anterior en este blog). Aunque ese cuestionamiento puede sugerir una posición ajena al objeto de (...)
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  (2018) Vertical and horizontal relations: What is ‘society’ about?

  28 May 2018, by Miguel Angel Martinez
  A regular activity of an academic is to read scientific papers. In social sciences, ‘scientific’ does not necessarily mean that a paper is based on a detailed empirical research. Very often, many social scientists intend to offer general overviews about a topic by collecting various pieces of others’ research and providing comprehensive interpretations. This is what many identify as ‘theory’. In natural sciences this is better-known as ‘meta-studies’ although these are still meant to summarise the (...)
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  (2018) Foucauldian discourse analysis

  26 April 2018, by Miguel Angel Martinez
  I was recently asked by PhD students of sociology to deliver a lecture on discourse analysis according to Michel Foucault’s insights. After a very smooth negotiation, it was my pleasure to concede. However, I am still concerned about the limitations that such a perspective might entail for the purposes of (critical) qualitative discourse analysis. First of all, this is because Foucault himself was more worried about theory than methods, in spite of some exceptions. Secondly, this author was (...)
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  (2017) What is a City?

  13 October 2017, by Miguel Angel Martinez
  What is a City? This question is coming back to my mind once and again, no matter how much stuff from the urban studies field I have read over the last 25 years. The sociological approach to the definition of cities is deeply influenced by the views of the founders (Marx-Engels, Durkheim and Weber) but perhaps the Chicago School representatives (Park, Burgess, Wirth, etc.) were more successful when it came to set a dominant standard in academia. Yesterday I attended a seminar where three (...)
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  (2017) La revolución de los paraguas en Hong Kong, tres años después: una represión prolongada

  13 October 2017, by Miguel Angel Martinez
  https://www.elsaltodiario.com/mapas/la-revolucion-de-los-paraguas-tres-anos-despues-una-represion-prolongada Publicado en El Salto, 13/9/2017 La revolución de los paraguas tres años después: una represión prolongada Desde el 28 de septiembre hasta el 15 de diciembre de 2014 –se cuenta convencionalmente como 79 días o dos meses y medio de ocupaciones callejeras– tuve la oportunidad de presenciar la movilización más intensa en favor de la democracia que se ha realizado en Hong Kong. Fue una feliz (...)
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  (2017) Umbrella Movement: Three Years Later, Protracted Repression

  5 September 2017, by Miguel Angel Martinez
  Umbrella Movement: Three Years Later, Protracted Repression From 28th September to 15th December 2014 (it is conventionally counted as 79 days, or two and a half months, of street occupations) I had the opportunity to witness the most intense pro-democracy mobilisation that ever occurred in Hong Kong (HK). It was a lucky coincidence that another Occupy-like movement affected me so deeply after my previous engagement in the 15M or Indignados movement in Spain from May 2011 until I left (...)
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  (2017) Sociological Imagination is Critical Reason at Work [ENG]

  31 August 2017, by Miguel Angel Martinez
  Sociological Imagination is Critical Reason at Work Every time I suggest my students to read Wright Mills’ book “The Sociological Imagination” (1959), especially his famous Appendix “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” I feel glad when hearing their reactions and I also remember my own joy when I read it for the first time long time ago. Perhaps, a very tricky question is that the core tenets of the book are not much about imagination in a postmodern sense. Quite the contrary, Mills outlines the (...)
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  (2017) A Marxist Approach to Social Movements?

  27 August 2017, by Miguel Angel Martinez
  A Marxist Approach to Social Movements? When I started reading and writing about social movements, my main motivation was to understand my own engagement in activism at that time. In addition, I also wished to figure out how to use sociological knowledge from within in order to guide strategies, campaigns and public communication. Some essential scholar books from the 1990s, the celebrated article by Claus Offe, Touraine’s ambitious writings on the topic, Castells’ works on urban (...)
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  (2017) Spatialities and Historicities [ENG]

  24 August 2017, by Miguel Angel Martinez
  Spatialities and Historicities One key article on the discussion of society-space relationships that made a great effort to systematise them came out a few years ago: Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner & Martin Jones, 2008, “Theorizing sociospatial relations”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, pp. 389-401. They “suggest that territories (T), places (P), scales (S), and networks (N) must be viewed as mutually constitutive and relationally intertwined dimensions of sociospatial (...)
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  (2017) The Social Production of Space: Pitfalls and Warnings [ENG]

  21 August 2017, by Miguel Angel Martinez
  The Social Production of Space: Pitfalls and Warnings Over the last two months I have been writing about the concept of ’urban movements’, which is one of the challenges I am facing once and again since I started my PhD in the mid-1990s. Theoretical exercises of clarification are always quite rewarding to me, although my ideal would be to attempt definitions in close relation with well-grounded and comparative empirical analysis. While reading through most of the classical works of this (...)

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