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The purpose of this paper is to provide an honest and critical reflection with regard to the damage neoliberalised education systems have had on the “crime science” of criminology in Spain.

This paper is a viewpoint based on our experience of teaching criminology and researching crime problems in Spain.

We argue that the neoliberalisation of education systems results in a “crime of science” in the sense that this produces rampant competition between university institutions which is amplified by the emergence of internal and external corporate enterprises who compete against each other in commodifying knowledge around crime which is largely focussed on a combination of statistical measurements and zonal mapping. This results in the reproduction of misleading conceptions about how crime occurs because the research is not grounded in offenders’ experiences and pays no attention to the political economy, power and corruption and the oscillating relationship between agent and social structure. This has negative implications for the development of critical knowledge which should equip we to reconceptualise how and why social problems occur.

These infractions have major implications on how we are able to report on crime problems.

As researchers/students, the authors are only able “diagnose problems” and answer questions and lose the capacity to question the answers as well as question the way the authors question.

We do not think that many criminologists would be prepared to write these words (unless it was being published in a high-impact factor journal).

The authors thought of the idea for this exploratory paper for Drugs and Alcohol Today after visiting a local prison on the outskirts of Madrid from which these field notes are taken. The authors have also had informal conversations with the contacts working in the Spanish Prison service. When the authors looked at some of the literature around the relationships between drugs and prisons in Spain, the authors found lots of statistics, and material which either said there were lots of drugs in prison or literature which presented over-medicalised processes of drug treatment. In short, the authors found few studies which could bring to life the kind of problems drugs bring to the prison and how the dynamics of the prison are not only directly impacted by drug use but also as drug dealing/trafficking. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

What the authors offer is only really to draw your attention to the issue. The authors have no real methodology to reflect on other than one of us is an experienced participant observer and the other is a lawyer and criminologist who has worked with numerous clients processed for drug offences in and around prisons in Madrid. Between us, we have undertaken six visits to Madrileñas prisons.

In this explorative paper the authors want to do three things. First, draw attention to the extent of problem of drugs in prison in Spain. Second, the authors want to suggest that the role drugs needs reconsideration as it plays a pivotal role in the functioning of the prison. Lastly, the authors push for more research into this issue which goes beyond conventional surveys and unnecessary complex regression analyses and instead takes a qualitative approach using observational data and informal conversations to explore these dynamics in more detail.

First, that there is an urgent need to go beyond these official statistics and explore in some nuanced detail about the prison experience in Spain. The existing research is limiting in that it talks tiresomely about the numbers incarcerated and fails to admit the significance of drugs not only as a motivating factor for incarceration but also the role drugs play in the prison environment. The authors need to consider as much the changing demography of Spanish prisons – for example more immigrants, different drugs, etc. – as the everyday experience of drugs, debt, disagreements and violence and how they intersect as a lived experience rather than consider them as separate issues of analysis, dormant from the interconnectedness of the micro-interactions of the prison environment and the respective institutional power structures. The key to this debate, and the general messages of this paper, is to realize a study which can explore the nuances of the role and function of drugs play in Spanish prisons.

Cuba’s 1959 Revolution brought about dramatic changes not only in that island‐nation but also in the USA. Cubans, and later Cuban‐Americans, have changed the face of Miami and south Florida. The economic and social successes of Cuban‐Americans, the third largest Latino group in the USA, are prevalent in scholarly and popular literature. In this annotated bibliography, the author presents journal articles, chapters in books, books, and human rights reports, published between 1990 and 1998, as well as World Wide Web sites, that discuss the Cuban‐American experience. Articles from the popular literature are not included, nor are materials that deal primarily with Cuba or Cuba‐USA relations.

This study aims to identify how Spanish consumers’ extrinsic preferences for food have evolved by examining the extant literature on food preferences in Spain, focusing on food-related attributes and food-related values.

This study is based on a synthetic review of the extant academic literature on Spanish consumer preferences for food-related attributes and food-related values from the mid-20th to the 21st century. This study uses key economic and social milestones that are most likely to influence food value chain actors to show how consumer preferences have evolved over the study period.

Spanish consumer food attribute preferences expanded as the food sector of the nation continued to grow, and value preferences showed a similar pattern from the mid-20th to the 21st century. The drivers of these preferences were trust, lifestyle, education (campaigns), sociodemographic factors and purchasing power.

Evaluating the extant literature’s contribution to consumer preferences for food-related attributes and values is important because it can aid in understanding the hierarchy and variety of consumers’ food preferences as well as the factors that drive these preferences. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore how Spanish consumer preferences evolved between the mid-20th and 21st centuries.

Given the potential for authorial fashion to lead the way in the field of sustainable fashion and digital platforms to be a powerful tool for spreading sustainable messages, this study seeks to explore the emphasis given to sustainability in the digital communication of Portuguese and Spanish’s authorial fashion.

A thematic analysis of all the posts published on the feeds of the 63 designers who presented their collections at the Madrid and Lisbon fashion weeks in September/October 2022 (Spring/Summer 2023) or February/March 2023 (Fall/Winter 2023/2024) editions was carried out. The information was collected over a six-month period between the two fashion weeks. This study is based on the categories identified in the reflexive thematic analysis developed by Testa et al. (2020). After adapting the categories to our analysis, 14 emerging themes were identified as observation criteria.

A total of 4,699 posts were examined. The analysis reveals a general lack of interest in mentioning sustainability – a subject evident in just around 6% of the content – as well as a high emphasis on the visual aspect of the fashion product. Several similarities between the Portuguese and Spanish markets were observed.

This study is important since there are few cross-cultural studies in the field of fashion between the two countries, particularly on sustainable fashion. Furthermore, it establishes a structure that is easily replicable in various markets and geographical areas.