HO, BIANCA; DOYLE, KIERAN

From the document: "Pro-Palestine demonstrations involving students in the United States have nearly tripled from 1 to 26 April compared with all of March, ACLED [ [Armed Conflict Location and Event Data]] data show [...]. New York has been one of the main student protest battlegrounds since the Israel-Palestine conflict flared up in and around Gaza last October, and the arrest of more than 100 students at Columbia University in New York around 18 April heralded a new wave of campus demonstrations."

ARMED CONFLICT LOCATION & EVENT DATA PROJECT. 2 MAY, 2024. 5p.

CERVINI, ENZO MARIA LE FEVRE; CARRO, MARÍA VICTORIA

From the document: "Generative Artificial Intelligence's (GenAI) capacity to produce highly realistic images, videos, and text poses a significant challenge, as it can deceive viewers and consumers into accepting artificially generated content as authentic and genuine. This raises concerns about the dissemination of false information, disinformation, and its implications for public trust and democratic processes. Additionally, this phenomenon prompts critical ethical and legal inquiries, including issues surrounding the attribution of authority and accountability for the generated content. [...] This article delves into the impact of generative AI on recent and future political elections. We'll examine how deepfakes and other AI-generated content are used, along with their potential to sway voters. We'll also analyze the strategies various stakeholders are deploying to counter this growing phenomenon."

ITALIAN INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL STUDIES. 22 MAR, 2024. 44p.

By Gillian Shorter, Phoebe McKenna-Plumley, Kerry Campbell, Jolie Keemink, and Benjamin Scher, et al.

Overdose prevention centres can also be referred to as drug consumption rooms, safe consumption/injecting/smoking sites, and/or other relevant names. These names can reflect legal distinctions e.g. in Canada, which relate to permanency or function of the site. There are currently over 200 OPCs worldwide in 17 countries, primarily in urban areas, and they cater to a range of drug types and visitor numbers.

Overdose prevention centres can be integrated facilities with other services, specialised sites which are primarily an OPC with limited other services, mobile sites, or tent/other temporary sites. Collaboration and consultation before and after a service opens is central to successful OPCs. Potential and actual OPC users should be consulted on the design of and running of sites to support their use. Collaboration and consultation involving members of the local community, businesses, police, elected representatives, public health, or other local authority staff with OPC staff and operators can smooth over any issues before and after a service opens. Belfast, Queen's University, 2023. 188p.

pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/530629435/DS_OPC_Report_V4.pdf

By Thomas Coyne; Sean Quitzau; and Joseph W. Arnett

This publication of Zero Returns to Homelessness, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), and the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments, provides a reference guide on housing access for practitioners, including state leaders working to address homelessness as part of their Reentry 2030 goals. It details best practices and strategies around reentry housing, building from four essential steps that have worked in neighborhoods around the country as leaders have expanded housing opportunities for people reentering their communities: Collaborate, Assess, Connect, and Expand. Every year, tens of thousands of people experience homelessness as they return to their communities from incarceration. Gaps and barriers, such as housing policies that bar people with conviction histories from renting, persist that reduce even the limited amount of housing people can access when returning. Because of this, people returning from incarceration are almost 10 times more likely to experience homelessness and more often cycle through public systems designed to respond to emergencies and not provide long-term solutions. However, in states such as Ohio, Connecticut, and Utah, communities are making strides in preventing homelessness when people return from incarceration. These communities are working toward a bold, new vision—Zero Returns to Homelessness—which aims to ensure that all returning residents have access to a safe, permanent place to call home.

New York: The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center, 2024. 65p.

edited by Kacper Rekawek, Thomas Renard and Bàrbara Molas

Russia’s influence over far-right/ racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist (REMVE) milieus in Europe is multi-faceted and complex. It involves direct activities, such as financing or political support, as well as indirect activities, such as disinformation campaigns. In some cases, Russia was associated, albeit remotely, with some far-right violent incidents in Europe, including the alleged coup attempt by the sovereign movement Reichsburger, in Germany. Recognising the increasingly confrontational policy of Russia vis-à-vis Europe, and the growing threat from far-right extremism in Europe, this book thoroughly and systematically reviews Russia’s relationship with diverse far-right actors in ten European countries over the past decade. The countries covered in this book include Austria, The Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, and Sweden. The chapters are authored by some of the world’s most authoritative experts on extremism and Russian influence.

Overall, this edited volume is the first such comprehensive attempt at mapping the scope and depth of Russian influence over far-right extremism in Europe, resulting in the identification of key patterns of influence and offering some possible recommendations to counter it. This book is both a leading scholarly work, as well as a wake-up call and guide for action for European policy-makers.

by Jennifer Tilton

How do you tell the difference between a “good kid” and a “potential thug”? In Dangerous or Endangered?, Jennifer Tilton considers the ways in which children are increasingly viewed as dangerous and yet, simultaneously, as endangered and in need of protection by the state.
Tilton draws on three years of ethnographic research in Oakland, California, one of the nation’s most racially diverse cities, to examine how debates over the nature and needs of young people have fundamentally reshaped politics, transforming ideas of citizenship and the state in contemporary America. As parents and neighborhood activists have worked to save and discipline young people, they have often inadvertently reinforced privatized models of childhood and urban space, clearing the streets of children, who are encouraged to stay at home or in supervised after-school programs. Youth activists protest these attempts, demanding a right to the city and expanded rights of citizenship.
Dangerous or Endangered? pays careful attention to the intricate connections between fears of other people’s kids and fears for our own kids in order to explore the complex racial, class, and gender divides in contemporary American cities.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2010; 203p.

By Carl Gutierrez-Jones

The beating of Rodney King, the killing of Amadou Diallo, and the LAPD Rampart Scandal: these events have been interpreted by the courts, the media and the public in dramatically conflicting ways. Critical Race Narratives examines what is at stake in these conflicts and, in so doing, rethinks racial strife in the United States as a highly-charged struggle over different methods of reading and writing. Focusing in particular on the practice and theorization of narrative strategies, Gutiérrez-Jones engages many of the most influential texts in the recent race debates including The Bell Curve, America in Black and White, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, and The Mismeasure of Man. In the process, Critical Race Narratives pursues key questions posed by the texts as they work within, or against, disciplinary expectations: can critical engagements with narrative enable a more democratic dialogue regarding race? what promise does such experimentation hold for working through the traumatic legacy of racism in the United States? Throughout, Critical Race Narratives initiates a timely dialogue between race-focused narrative experiment in scholarly writing and similar work in literary texts and popular culture.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2001.

By Paul Harris

In 1971, Paul Harris pioneered the modern version of the black rage defense when he successfully defended a young black man charged with armed bank robbery. Dubbed one of the most novel criminal defenses in American history by Vanity Fair, the black rage defense is enormously controversial, frequently dismissed as irresponsible, nothing less than a harbinger of anarchy. Consider the firestorm of protest that resulted when the defense for Colin Ferguson, the gunman who murdered numerous passengers on a New York commuter train, claimed it was considering a black rage defense.

In this thought-provoking book, Harris traces the origins of the black rage defense back through American history, recreating numerous dramatic trials along the way. For example, he recounts in vivid detail how Clarence Darrow, defense attorney in the famous Scopes Monkey trial, first introduced the notion of an environmental hardship defense in 1925 while defending a black family who shot into a drunken white mob that had encircled their home.

Emphasizing that the black rage defense must be enlisted responsibly and selectively, Harris skillfully distinguishes between applying an environmental defense and simply blaming society, in the abstract, for individual crimes. If Ferguson had invoked such a defense, in Harris's words, it would have sent a superficial, wrong-headed, blame-everything-on-racism message. Careful not to succumb to easy generalizations, Harris also addresses the possibilities of a white rage defense and the more recent phenomenon of cultural defenses. He illustrates how a person's environment can, and does, affect his or her life and actions, how even the most rational person can become criminally deranged, when bludgeoned into hopelessness by exploitation, racism, and relentless poverty.

New York; London: NYU Press, 1996. 306p.

By John Tehranian

Middle Easterners: Sometimes White, Sometimes Not - an article by John Tehranian
The Middle Eastern question lies at the heart of the most pressing issues of our time: the war in Iraq and on terrorism, the growing tension between preservation of our national security and protection of our civil rights, and the debate over immigration, assimilation, and our national identity. Yet paradoxically, little attention is focused on our domestic Middle Eastern population and its place in American society. Unlike many other racial minorities in our country, Middle Eastern Americans have faced rising, rather than diminishing, degrees of discrimination over time; a fact highlighted by recent targeted immigration policies, racial profiling, a war on terrorism with a decided racialist bent, and growing rates of job discrimination and hate crime. Oddly enough, however, Middle Eastern Americans are not even considered a minority in official government data. Instead, they are deemed white by law.
In Whitewashed, John Tehranian combines his own personal experiences as an Iranian American with an expert’s analysis of current events, legal trends, and critical theory to analyze this bizarre Catch-22 of Middle Eastern racial classification. He explains how American constructions of Middle Eastern racial identity have changed over the last two centuries, paying particular attention to the shift in perceptions of the Middle Easterner from friendly foreigner to enemy alien, a trend accelerated by the tragic events of 9/11. Focusing on the contemporary immigration debate, the war on terrorism, media portrayals of Middle Easterners, and the processes of creating racial stereotypes, Tehranian argues that, despite its many successes, the modern civil rights movement has not done enough to protect the liberties of Middle Eastern Americans.
By following how concepts of whiteness have transformed over time, Whitewashed forces readers to rethink and question some of their most deeply held assumptions about race in American society.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2008. 250p.

By Mark Treskon, Lily Robin

This report provides a framework for developing an equitable development theory of change for Brownsville, Brooklyn. While Brownsville is a neighborhood with significant social and economic challenges it has a strong history and presence of community activism and action. The report presents an overview of Brownsville’s economic and social context, conducts a typology review of existing studies and planning documents focused on the neighborhood, and lays out a high-level plan for a ten-year equitable development plan for the community. The plan’s framework has four main components: economic opportunity, education and youth development, housing, and the built and social environment. We discuss how this plan fits into already-existing efforts and we present recommendations for local policymakers, advocates, organizations, and the community based around three themes: ongoing research and community assessment, identification and tracking of initiatives over time, and building community and stakeholder support.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute. 2024, 45pg