Crossroads 2018 has an exciting line up

Maria del Carmen Rojas

Maria del Carmen Rojas got her degree as an architect from the Catholic University of Córdoba (Argentina), and holds a PhD in demography and a Postdoctoral degree on subjectivities from the National University of Cordoba (Argentina). She works as an independent researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), and she is also the coordinator of the research area “Healthy Habitat: Risk, Housing, Environment and Health” (RVAS-HABSALUD) for the Inter-American Network of Healthy Habitat (NETWORK HABSALUD), supported by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the United Nations programme HABITAT (UN-HABITAT), and the Geo-historical Research Institute/CONICET in tandem with the National University of the Northeast (IIGHI/CONICET-UNNE). She owns intellectual property rights on information systems related to environmental health (SISA) aiming at reducing social inequalities. She has also made various scientific-technological transfers on SISA to universities and management bodies at national and local levels in Latin America. She has written several publications on SISA, healthy habitat and risk management (2008, 2013, 2014, 2015), and has just finished a book on popular science for high-school students about environmental health management and citizenship development.

Conference abstract

Social Determination as a Tool to Transform the Urban/Rural Relationship

I try to overpass the myth of "urban/rural" duality, questioning the dominant paradigm of modernity. This model imposed the understanding of the world in two opposite ways: the city, which is understood as regent, cosmopolitan, advanced and prosper; and rural space, conceived as a backward, simpler and secondary world.

With this purpose, I will focus on the forms of life or ways of social reproduction that characterize to the different social groups. Then, the interpretation will not be reduced to the search for simple connections between parts. I will try to elucidate that although the social whole is composed of parts that we can describe and measure empirically, the contribution of those parts in the whole, generates a complex and superior reality, which arises with peculiarities, different from each separated part, although each one depends on the others for its existence.

Then, I will consider:
a) the social determination of the urban/rural processes;
b) the overcoming of those idea which reduces the category of place to a simple physical continent or to an administrative circumscription, which ties the design of policies to the functionalism;
c) critical geography as a contribution to overcome the empirical-reductionist meaning of place;
d) exhaustive local management of the risk, counterhegemonic because it enables the understanding and the approach to the complex relationships in general, particular and individual dimensions, both in their genesis and in their social reproduction;
e) the information systems from the perspective of the epistemology of praxis, product of the transforming activities of the social subject;
f) the social vulnerability concept, due to several aspects as political, ethical, cultural, and psycho-affective, can be expressed in the social complexity;
g) the urban/rural construction from the triangle of politics potentialities, which articulates the political project, the political strategy and the management capacity.