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Posts tagged social justice
The Souls of Black Folk

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

by W. E. B. Du Bois

The Souls of Black Folk is a seminal work of American literature penned by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903. Through a collection of insightful essays, Du Bois delves into the complex issues of race, identity, and equality in post-Civil War America. His profound analysis explores the double consciousness experienced by Black individuals, the challenges of racial discrimination, and the enduring quest for justice and liberation. With eloquence and depth, Du Bois's work continues to resonate today, offering readers a timeless reflection on the African American experience and the ongoing struggle for civil rights.

Publisher? 1903. 189p.

Labeling Women Deviant Gender, Stigma, and Social Control

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

Edwin M. Schur

In "Labeling Women: Deviant," the intricate interplay between gender, stigma, and social control is meticulously examined. This thought-provoking exploration delves into the ways in which societal labels and norms are applied to women, shaping their identity and influencing their place in the world. Through insightful analysis and compelling examples, this book challenges readers to reconsider the implications of labeling women as deviant and calls for a more nuanced understanding of the complex forces at play. A must-read for anyone interested in social justice, gender studies, and the dynamics of power in society.

NY. RANDOM HOUSE. 1984. 294p.

THE GIFT OF BLACK FOLK

MAY COONTAIN MARKUP

By W.E.B.DuBois

"The Gift of Black Folk" is a thought-provoking exploration of the invaluable contributions and enduring legacy of Black individuals throughout history. From art and music to science and civil rights, this book delves into the profound impact that Black individuals have had on shaping our world. Through detailed research and compelling storytelling, it sheds light on often overlooked achievements and celebrates the richness of Black culture. A must-read for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the remarkable gifts that Black folk have bestowed upon society.

Square One Pub., 2009, 198 pages

“Hey Siri, I’ y Siri, I’m Being Pulled Over"

By Charlene Collazo Goldfield, Gabriela Chambi and Amanda Torres

Statistics show that policing disproportionately affects communities of color; police are more likely to use force against Black and brown people. Data from non-violent encounters (e.g., reason for the stop, type of force used, and presence of witnesses) is rarely collected or disregarded altogether. Video evidence can publicize police violence. Bystander video during George Floyd’s murder led to arrests and a global racial reckoning because it depicted the reality of police encounters for people of color. Although technological advancements have led to positive developments for civilian safety (e.g., body cameras and in-car videos), data collection consistency and accountability are barriers to progress. Can society benefit from innovative yet simple tools to promote safety and accountability during police encounters? Our phone application aims to support social justice and safe policing by focusing on consistent and efficient data collection. Our goals with this paper are to: (1) lay out existing policing data collection practices and current issues involving tech and policing; (2) explain and distinguish our app’s functionality; (3) describe the importance of public and private partnerships; (4) examine potential privacy and data limitations; and (5) summarize how our app can magnify law enforcement accountability and reduce race-based policing.

Unpublished paper, 2021. American University Washington College of Law

Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism

By Janice M. Irvine

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 349p.

Exposed: Living with scandal, rumour, and gossip

By Mia-Marie Hammarlin

This book illuminates the personal experience of being at the centre of a media scandal. The existential level of that experience is highlighted by means of the application of ethnological and phenomenological perspectives to extensive empirical material drawn from a Swedish context. The questions raised and answered in this book include the following: How does the experience of being the protagonist in a media scandal affect a person’s everyday life? What happens to routines, trust, and self-confidence? How does it change the basic settings of his or her lifeworld? The analysis also contributes new perspectives on the fusion between interpersonal communication that takes place face to face, such as gossip and rumours, and traditional news media in the course of a scandal. A scandal derives its momentum from the audiences, whose engagement in the moral story determines its dissemination and duration. The nature of that engagement also affects the protagonist in specific ways. Members of the public participate through traditional oral communication, one vital aspect of which is activity in digital, social forums. The author argues that gossip and rumour must be included in the idea of the media system if we are to be able to understand the formation and power of a media scandal, a contention which entails critiques of earlier research. Oral interpersonal communication does not disappear when new communication possibilities arise. Indeed, it may be invigorated by them. The term news legend is introduced, to capture the entanglement between traditional news-media storytelling and oral narrative

Lund: Lund University Press, 2019. 208p.

The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow

By Mark Schultz

Mark Schultz entered rural Hancock County expecting to confirm the standard expectations about race relations in the South, an area characterized by frequent lynchings, systematic segregation, and universal black poverty. What he found undermined and confounded his sweeping assumptions about the ostensibly "solid" South. The Rural Face of White Supremacy is a detailed study of the daily experiences of ordinary people in rural Hancock County, Georgia. Drawing on his own interviews with over two hundred black and white residents, Schultz depicts the rhythms of work, social interaction, violence, power, and paternalism in a setting much different from the more widely studied postbellum urban South.By acting on the basis of personal rather than institutional relationships, Schultz argues, Hancock County residents experienced more fluid interactions and more freedom than their urban counterparts had. This freedom created a space for interracial relationships that included mixed housing, midwifery, church services, meals, and even common-law marriages.

Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 337p.

Racism and Resistance: How the Black Panthers Challenged White Supremacy

By Franziska Meister

Even a cursory look at American society today reveals that protests against racial discrimination are by no means a thing of the past. What can we learn from past movements in order to understand the workings of racism and resistance? In this book, Franziska Meister revisits the Black Panther Party and offers a new perspective on the party as a whole and its struggle for racial social justice. She shows how the Panthers were engaged in exposing structural racism in the U.S. and depicts them as uniquely resourceful, imaginative, and subversive in the ways they challenged white supremacy while at the same time revolutionizing both the self-conception and the public image of black people. Meister thus highlights an often marginalized aspect of the Panthers: how they sought to reach a world beyond race—by going through race. Theirs, she argues, is a message well worth considering in an age of "color blindness."

Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017. 243p.

Marginalised Young People, Surveillance & Public Space: A Research Report

By Dean Wilson, Jen Rose and Emma Colvin

Young people’sright to access public space safely and without discrimination has been an ongoing focus of YACVic’s advocacy work over the years. Young people are still typically viewed with suspicion when ‘hanging-out’ in public spaces. Unfortunately, in spite of the introduction of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, policy and laws are still developed that seriously breach young people’s rights, particularly when it comes to the regulation of public space. It is for this reason that YACVic was very happy to partner with Monash University to explore in more detail the experiences of young people with surveillance in public. Young people who are experiencing homelessness or other forms of social disadvantage or marginalisation experience breaches of several of their human rights. Their right to housing, as described by Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is breached. Theymay well be denied their right to education as a consequence of the strain homelessness places on their lives. Their right to safety is regularly compromised by virtue of not having access to safe, private spaces. Further breaches of their right to safely access public spaces free from harassment and discrimination simply compounds their disadvantage and exacerbates their vulnerability. We have a responsibility to develop policy that does not serve to further marginalize young people who are already highly vulnerable.

Melbourne, AUS: Youth Affairs Council of Victoria and the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, 2010. 57p.

Racial Profiling

Edited by Wa Baile, Mohamed; Dankwa, Serena O.; Naguib, Tarek; Purtschert, Patricia; Schilliger, Sarah

Racist police checks are part of everyday life in Europe. They make it dramatically visible who is not considered a fellow citizen. While much of the dominance society finds this racist practice normal, more and more people are no longer prepared to accept it without resistance. The volume brings together scientific, artistic and activist contributions to the social backgrounds and modes of action of racial profiling and the possibilities of intersectional anti-racist resistance. The focus is on Switzerland, supplemented by perspectives from authors who are familiar with the German context.

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019. 337p.

Finding the Enemy Within: Blasphemy Accusations and Subsequent Violence in Pakistan

By Sana Ashraf

In the past decade, Pakistan has witnessed incidents such as the public lynching of a student on a university campus, a Christian couple being torched alive, attacks on entire neighbourhoods by angry mobs and the assassination of a provincial governor by his own security guard over allegations of blasphemy. Finding the Enemy Within unpacks the meanings and motivations behind accusations of blasphemy and subsequent violence in Pakistan. This is the first ethnographic study of its kind analysing the perspectives of a range of different actors including accusers, religious scholars and lawyers involved in blasphemy-related incidents in Pakistan. Bringing together anthropological perspectives on religion, violence and law, this book reworks prevalent analytical dichotomies of reason/emotion, culture/religion, traditional/Western, state/nonstate and legal/extralegal to extend our understanding of the upsurge of blasphemy-related violence in Pakistan. Through the case study of blasphemy accusations in Pakistan, this book addresses broader questions of difference, individual and collective identities, social and symbolic boundaries, and conflict and violence in modern nation-states.

Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2021. 270p.

Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam

By Keith L. Camacho

Between 1944 and 1949 the United States Navy held a war crimes tribunal that tried Japanese nationals and members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro population who had worked for Japan's military government. In Sacred Men Keith L. Camacho traces the tribunal's legacy and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notions of bare life and Chamorro concepts of retribution, Camacho demonstrates how the U.S. tribunal used and justified the imprisonment, torture, murder, and exiling of accused Japanese and Chamorro war criminals in order to institute a new American political order. This U.S. disciplinary logic in Guam, Camacho argues, continues to directly inform the ideology used to justify the Guantánamo Bay detention center, the torture and enhanced interrogation of enemy combatants, and the American carceral state.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 313p.

Justice and Vulnerability in Europe: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Edited by Trudie Knijn and Dorota Lepianka

Justice and Vulnerability in Europe contributes to the understanding of justice in Europe from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. It shows that Europe is falling short of its ideals and justice-related ambitions by repeatedly failing its most vulnerable populations.

Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020. 288p.

Disappearances in Mexico: From the 'Dirty War' to the 'War on Drugs'

Edited by Silvana Mandolessi and Katia Olalde

This volume presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the practice of disappearances in Mexico, from the period of the so-called ‘dirty war’ to the current crisis of disappearances associated with the country’s ‘war on drugs’, during which more than 80,000 people have disappeared. The volume brings together contributions by distinguished scholars from Mexico, Argentina and Europe, who focus their chapters on four broad axes of enquiry. In Part I, chapters examine the phenomenon of disappearances in its historical and present-day forms, and the struggles for memory around the disappeared in Mexico with reference to Argentina. Part II addresses the political dimensions of disappearances, focusing on the specificities that this practice acquires in the context of the counterinsurgency struggle of the 1970s and the so-called ‘war on drugs’. The third section situates the issue within the framework of human rights law by examining the conceptual and legal aspects of disappearances. The final chapters explore the social movement of the relatives of the disappeared, showing how their search for disappeared loved ones involves bodily and affective experiences as well as knowledge production. The volume thus aims to further our understanding of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico without, however, losing sight of the historic origins of the phenomenon.

London; New York: Routledge, 2015. 259p.

Social Theories of Urban Violence in the Global South: Towards Safe and Inclusive Cities

Edited by Jennifer Erin Salahub, Markus Gottsbacher and John de Boer

While cities often act as the engines of economic growth for developing countries, they are also frequently the site of growing violence, poverty, and inequality. Yet, social theory, largely developed and tested in the Global North, is often inadequate in tackling the realities of life in the dangerous parts of cities in the Global South. Drawing on the findings of an ambitious five- year, 15- project research programme, Social Theories of Urban Violence in the Global South offers a uniquely Southern perspective on the violence– poverty– inequalities dynamics in cities of the Global South. Through their research, urban violence experts based in low-and middle income countries demonstrate how “urban violence” means different things to different people in different places. While some researchers adopt or adapt existing theoretical and conceptual frameworks, others develop and test new theories, each interpreting and operationalizing the concept of urban violence in the particular context in which they work. In particular, the book highlights the links between urban violence, poverty, and inequalities based on income, class, gender, and other social cleavages. Providing important new perspectives from the Global South, this book will be of interest to policymakers, academics, and students with an interest in violence and exclusion in the cities of developing countries.

Abingdon, Oxon , UK; New York: Routledge, 2018. 244p.

National Analytical Study on Racist Violence and Crime: RAXEN Focal Point for Germany

By Stefan Rühl and Gisela Will.

The aim of the study in hand is to report on extreme right-wing, xenophobic and antiSemitic crimes and acts of violence in Germany as well as to analyse the developments linked to them. The political climate, legal provisions, political measures and existent sources of data relating to this issue will be described. As a further step, extreme rightwing crimes will be analysed more closely and various Good Practice measures will be described.

Bamberg, Germany: European Forum for Migration Studies (EFMS) Institute at the University of Bamberg

Agency and Citizenship in a Context of Gender-based Violence

By Thea Shahrokh and Joanna Wheeler.

This pilot evaluation explores how citizenship and agency among social activists can be fostered in contexts of urban violence at the local level. Many initiatives and approaches to addressing violence, particularly urban violence, tend to focus on security sector reform and policing, infrastructure and livelihoods. The role of citizens living in slums, informal settlements and housing estates in acting to stop violence and promoting peaceful relations is less understood and supported. In the urban context, violence is often a means of getting access to scarce resources (such as employment), political power, as well as enforcing discriminatory social norms such as those surrounding gender, age, race, religion and ethnicity. The focus of this pilot is to understand how a sense of democratic citizenship and the ability to act on that citizenship at the local level can contribute to reducing different types of urban violence and promote security, and how becoming an activist against violence can contribute to constructing a sense of citizenship. The case study for this analysis is based in the informal settlement of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, and focuses on community activism against gender-based violence.

Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies, 2014. 42p.

The Gendered Price of Precarity: Voicing and Challenging Workplace Sexual Harassment

By Oosterom, M.; Huq, L.; Namuggala, V.; Nazneen, S.; Nankindu, P.; Sultan, M.; Sultana, A. and Azim, F.

There is a strong belief that employment is a crucial avenue for the empowerment of young women, through income, greater autonomy, and bargaining power within the family. However, experiences of workplace sexual harassment undermine these potential gains. This qualitative study among agro-processing factory workers and domestic workers in Uganda and Bangladesh demonstrates that sexual harassment is widespread in both formal and informal workplaces, while domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to its most severe forms. Women’s agency to challenge harassment is severely constrained by social and gender norms. Most find that the best possible strategy is to avoid and prevent physical forms of sexual harassment from happening. Language is essential for voicing and challenging sexual harassment, but the study shows that social and gender norms constrain young women in articulating transgressive and inappropriate behaviour by men. Many women hide detail, deliberately use euphemisms, and even lack a vocabulary to explain what happened to them, ultimately limiting opportunities for redressal. At the same time, formal institutions are failing young female workers. Local authorities in both countries reproduced prejudice about women ‘inviting’ sexual attention, whereas the police are generally distrusted because of corruption and the need for bribes. To tackle sexual harassment in the workplace, multipronged strategies are needed that target employers and government actors. The right policies and adequate safeguarding and reporting mechanisms need to be implemented, whereas programmes need to support women to help them gain the confidence to speak about sexual harassment and support (collective) action. Longer-term strategies need to address gender norms that condone sexual harassment.

Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies, 2022. 84p.

Socialism

By John Stuart Mill.

“It was in the year 1869 that, impressed with the degree in which, even during the last twenty years, when the world seemed so wholly occupied with other matters, the socialist ideas of speculative thinkers had spread among the workers in every civilized country, Mr. Mill formed the design of writing a book on Socialism.” Reprinted from the Fortnightly Review.

Chicago. Belfords Clarke. 1879. 65P.