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Nanotechnology has great potential in the food industry. The goal of this study is to identify food applications that are more likely and food applications that are less likely to be accepted by the public.

The study was conducted in México and was a replica of a study conducted in Switzerland. Another goal is to compare the acceptance ratings of citizens from a highly developed European country to the ratings of citizens from a less developed country. Face‐to‐face interviews were conducted in three different places in México, which yielded N=378 datasets.

Affect and perceived control are important factors influencing risk and benefit perceptions. Applications that can be consumed are perceived as more controllable than applications related to the packaging or external use. The results are similar but not identical to the findings from Switzerland.

A convenience sample was used that was clearly more highly educated than the average population. One should be cautious when generalizing the findings.

It is important to pay attention to public views regarding new technologies in the food business during the product development stage to avoid some of the pitfalls that GM technology had.

This is the first study to analyze perceptions of nanotechnology applications in a less developed country. Emerging countries often do not have regulations that are as strong as those of developed countries; therefore, analyzing these markets is important, too.

Natural and technological catastrophes are worrying our societies at all levels (economical, political, social, psychological) because of the disturbances they generate on the populations in a large scale. Natural catastrophes reveal an old reality to which mankind has always been exposed and industrial risks are the consequence of technological development in the present century. Our study will analyse the influence of risk perception on psychological stress in two populations exposed to extreme risk and that have already lived in a catastrophe situation. We propose a theoretical model of the risk perception process and we observe that there is a direct effect of risk perception factors in stress. Interactions between the nature of risk individuals are exposed to and the risk perception in stress and coping strategies prove that risk perception interacts as a mediator in a complex process facing the risk situation responses.

This paper aims at a better understanding of contemporary women’s relationship paths and their reasoning behind them. Qualitative interviews with 48 rural and urban women from Western Mexico were conducted and analyzed using a thematic approach and data discussed from a feminist, gender approach and late modernity approach. Findings reveal civil and religious marriages were the paths two-third of women followed to start a family and that women living in permanent and alternating cohabitation did not seek to marry. Women held ambivalent views on marital life and poorer and less-educated women, particularly urban participants, had no choice but to marry. Findings on reasoning reveal a more complex and diverse reality than previous sociodemographic studies have portrayed, where pragmatism and social order were the main causes for marrying and cohabitation. Narratives show premarital sex and the symbolism of marriage and family are changing. A comparative approach between contexts of study, age groups, civil status, and social strata enriched and strengthened the discussion of the findings. The results were contrasted with existing Mexican literature from different fields. A larger qualitative study is needed to broaden the scope of the findings made by this study, whilst large-scale studies should consider either the use of mixed approaches or the inclusion of items that allow them to identify the elements of social and cultural change. The study could help to demystify women’s attitudes toward marriage, sex, and love; a field currently sprinkled with western romantic love values and gender-driven idealizations. This paper might be of interest for social demographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians conducting research on these themes from feminist and gender perspectives.

This chapter reflects upon the main reasons for the universal, deep, and long-lasting impact of the Mexican neozapatista movement during the 25 years of its public life, recuperating not only the immediate reasons but the reasons linked with process in the middle and in the long term. We argue that the neozapatista movement changed the correlation des forces in Mexico in 1994, opening the transition of all indigenous Latin American movements to pass from a defensive and marginal position, to a new offensive and protagonic position. In the general context after 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Mexican neozapatism restores hope in social protest and social fight of all the anticapitalistic and antisystemic movements all over the world. With the above basis, it is possible to understand that this Mexican neozapatism was able to define the general agenda of the main demands and targets that were vindicated for the antisystemic movements during the last 25 years, including all the movements of 2011, such as the Spanish Indignados, or the so-called Arab Spring, or Occupy Wall Street, or even the current French movement of the Gilets Jeaunes, among many others. It explains partially the real function of a kind of “avant-garde” of the antisystemic movements all over the world, playing by the Mexican neozapatismo in the last five lusters and even today.

The purpose of this article is to present the results of research carried out by the research group on human security and local human development of the Hegoa Institute since 2007. It aims to further the understanding of the processes of local human development, proposing analytical categories for this purpose and showing their application to the study of concrete cases.

To this end the experiences of the reconversion of the sugar industry of Holguín (Cuba) and the development of the Saharan population in the refugee situation of the Tindouf camps were selected. The methodology applied includes three dimensions. On the one hand, the analytical framework, which includes a comprehensive framework of local human development processes. Furthermore, research techniques applied have been qualitative techniques considering them the best approach to study the complexity of social processes. Finally, the paper contrasts the opinions and views expressed in research with the results obtained during evaluations conducted by the institutions responsible for implementation, as well as bibliography of reference.

Main conclusions refer to the collective capacity of the two societies to take control of their development model, the collective capacity of resilience and to the contradictions in processes of appropriation of local human development.

This work synthesises and sets out the main conclusions drawn both from analysis of the latest approaches to the theoretical framework of human development, and from the two case studies dealt with in the field work.