Abstract: Although (anti-)racism in Uruguay is receiving increasing academic attention, socio-linguistic analyses of racial discourse remain limited. This exploratory investigation, grounded in Black feminism (BF) and Critical Discourse Studies, examines online discussions of anti-racism and intersectionality within Afro-Uruguay on the social media platform X . Posts with #afrouruguay and related hashtags are thematically and linguistically analyzed. Findings highlight the significance of candombe and artistic expression as symbols of cultural identity and resistance, the intersectional challenges faced by Afro-Uruguayan women, and the social stigma attached to discussions of racial disparities. Discursive strategies include metaphorizing BF causes as a lucha against inequality, using rhetorical questions to encourage critical thinking, and fostering solidarity within Afro-Latine communities via first-person plural, gender-inclusive, and intersectional language. This study builds upon Limerick (2024) to extend discourse analysis of Afro-Uruguay to social media.

Abstract: This article charts the formation of citizen insecurity discourses in early-democratic Madrid, Spain (1982–96). It combines a historical-geographical materialist approach with the emphasis that urban cultural studies places on textual criticism to examine the hidden agenda contained in several newspaper maps depicting crime distribution trends in the Spanish capital. As historically constructed artifacts of visual culture, these criminality maps will serve to expose the hauntological relationship that exists between Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75) and the projects of neo-liberal restructuring that dramatically reshaped the socio-spatial contours of Madrid from the 1970s onwards. The power/knowledge dynamics of citizen insecurity not only played a key role in the electoral ascendency of mayor José María Álvarez del Manzano and his conservative People’s Party (1991–2003), but they also tapped into cultural geographies of race and social inequality to legitimize wider shifts in the city’s territorial structure. At the end of the twentieth century, the upward repositioning of Madrid’s north-south power model would indeed replace the outgoing center-periphery one, which had previously been dominant under the Franco Regime. This urban process was fueled by citizen insecurity discourses and the shifting accumulation circuitries of neoliberal capitalism.

Abstract: The current study examines the second language acquisition (SLA) of the voiceless inter-dental fricative /θ/ by nine female English-speaking learners of Spanish during a 7-week study abroad immersion experience in León, Spain. We examine the role that graphemic representation plays in this development over time. The data come from a reading task with 79 utterances in response to a discourse context in words with the target phonemes /k/, /s/, or /θ/. Participants were recorded at the beginning (Time 1) and end of the program (Time 2). Most learners use the /θ/ by T2, and there is a clear difference in the phones employed for the orthographic triggers of the /θ/ between the first data collection and the second data collection. The results indicate that L2 learners can incorporate a novel phoneme, /θ/, into their phonological system based on region in response to graphemic reading triggers. However, this incorporation varies by individual. The complex phonemic and allophonic (re-) mappings between the English and Spanish sound systems and orthographic mappings also likely explain cases of overgeneralization of the [θ] in non-native contexts.