Ana Maria Lopez

Drawing on insights from scholarship on contentious action frames, this article examines the framing of demands for social justice for migrant farmworkers in Spain, Italy and Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus particularly on how activists in each country aligned their action frames with prevalent public discourses on the essential contribution migrants make to agricultural production, the need to guarantee “health for all,” and “increased vulnerability” of migrants’ lives during the global health crisis. Using these diagnostic frames, activists in the three countries called for secure legal status for all migrants. Drawing on the literature on contentious action frames, we then analyze if action frames advanced by activists during the COVID-19 pandemic “resonated” with the understanding of these issues by policymakers. We challenge an approach to understanding resonance in binary terms as either present or absent. Instead, we introduce the notion of “ambivalent resonance” to draw attention to the fact that some frames are accepted only partially or only by some policymakers but not the others, as was the case in the three countries under study. We then situate this ambivalent resonance in the context of immigration priorities and recent trends in immigration policy development in these three countries and suggest that activists can build on ambivalences to advance migrant rights to status.

Studies on global justice have analyzed inequalities in the dynamics of international migration in different areas, such as border control, transit migration, or access to international protection. More recently, however, it has been emphasized that forms of injustice against migrants go beyond these spheres and also occur after settlement. The large presence of migrants in urban contexts has made the city a privileged enclave for the analysis of urban justice. Until recently, the state has been the dominant framework for the empirical and normative discussion of international migration. In the last two decades, however, this perspective has changed significantly with the so-called local turn and critiques of methodological nationalism, which have spurred interest in analyzing urban initiatives in migration governance. This chapter focuses on the inclusive and exclusionary policies towards migrants with partial and precarious legal status that have been articulated by cities in recent decades and their implications for different dimensions of urban (in)justice.

Audio description remains the cornerstone of accessibility for visually impaired audiences to all sorts of audiovisual content, including porn. Existing work points to the efficacy of audio description to guarantee immersion and emotional engagement, but evidence on its role in sexual arousal and engagement in porn is still scant. The present study takes on this challenge by comparing sighted and visually impaired participants’ experiences with porn in terms of their physiological response [i.e., cortisol and heart rate ] and self-report measures of affect [Positive and Negative Affect Schedule ; Watson et al., 1988], anxiety [State-Trait Anxiety Inventory ; Spielberger et al., 1970], sexual reactivity and arousal [Sexual Inhibition/Sexual Excitation Scale ; Moyano and Sierra ; and the Ratings of Sexual Arousal ; Mosher ], and narrative engagement or transportation [The Transport Narrative Questionnaire, Green and Brock ]. 69 Spanish participants were allocated into three different groups: 25 sighted participants who watched and heard the porn scenes in their audio-visual version ; 22 sighted participants who listened to the audio described version without images ; and 22 visually impaired participants who also listened to the audio described version without images. Overall, results on physiological and self-report measures revealed no significant differences between groups or different versions of the clips. The analysis of cortisol reactivity to porn as the maximum increase or decrease in cortisol with respect to baseline values revealed no significant differences between the groups, but pointed to a higher percentage of non-responders than responders in the three groups, the highest being found in the ONCE group. As for participants’ cardiac response to the clips, no significant differences were found across the groups, with the highest HR levels being registered in the baseline phase. Self-report measures revealed significant between-group differences in negative affect. The ONCE group displayed the highest pre-task levels of negative affect and was the only group that showed a decrease in negative affect after exposure to the clips. Sighted and visually impaired participants reported to be moderately aroused and immersed in the films, regardless of exposure to AV or AD porn. In addition, correlations found between participants’ levels of self-report sexual arousal and transportation and post-task affect pointed to a positive relationship between exposure to porn and perceived levels of sexual arousal and affect. Results from the study reflected the efficacy of audio description in providing sighted and visually impaired audiences with a similar experience to that offered by original AV porn scenes. This study is exploratory but provides valid, initial groundwork for further research on the impact of audio description on porn reception.

El propósito de este artículo es explorar y analizar los principales objetivos y la evolución de la política de inmigración en Canadá desde mediados del siglo XIX hasta la actualidad. Como un país de inmigración, la cuestión de la regulación migratoria y de los procesos selectivos en la admisión de inmigrantes se han convertido en elementos centrales del disputado debate académico y político en torno a la identidad y la gestión de la diferencia en Canadá. Sin embargo, como veremos, la política migratoria ha evolucionado a lo largo del tiempo por una combinación de intereses de naturaleza económica, cultural, social y política.

Este artículo describe y compara las políticas de control de flujos diseñadas e implantadas en distintos países y sistemas migratorios a lo largo de las dos últimas décadas. La entrada del control de la inmigración en la agenda política de los países receptores es relativamente reciente. Hasta los años setenta la inmigración permanece al margen de los debates públicos. La búsqueda de procedimientos eficaces de control se ha tornado una tarea inaprensible y, aunque los gobiernos han intentado mostrar su capacidad para controlar los influjos, diversos factores de naturaleza nacional e internacional han moldeado sus respuestas y frenado su eficacia.

Desde la época de las grandes migraciones ultramarinas, hace algo más de un siglo, los estudiosos de las migraciones han elaborado marcos de interpretación de este fenómeno social. La inmigración ha emergido recientemente en las sociedades occidentales como un tema de interés político. Así, la incorporación de los estudios migratorios desde la perspectiva de las disciplinas dedicadas al análisis del gobierno y la política es una de las novedades más interesantes en el reciente panorama teórico de las migraciones. El objetivo de este artículo es detenerse en algunos de los más significativos efectos de la inmigración en la esfera política de las sociedades de acogida a partir de una premisa de partida: las migraciones internacionales han difuminado tres tipos de “fronteras” políticas profundamente interrelacionadas en las sociedades modernas. En primer lugar, los límites físicos, territoriales del Estado; en segundo lugar, el perímetro de la ciudadanía y de la pertenencia definida por la asignación de derechos de naturaleza liberal y, en tercer lugar, el contorno de las comunidades nacionales en términos de identificación o afiliación cultural.