Social Justice Research Within the Appalachian Higher Education LGBTQ Community

U.S. college campuses are becoming more diverse regarding color, religion, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Much of the past research has focused on the multitude of struggles and hurdles Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBTQ) students face. This review of the research has shown what these minority students face daily and are beneficial in understanding the cultural impacts on the growth and development of LGBTQ students. Additional research is needed to further consider the effects of higher education facilities for students and educators. Extensive research concerning LGBTQ students' treatment in rural areas is needed, specifically for Appalachian LGBTQ students, as many gaps still require research to solve various issues.

Critical Duoethnography

Critical duoethnography, as a research methodology, can be used in innovative ways to assist educational researchers engaged in social justice research projects. This chapter offers four responses to the question of how critical duoethnography, as a form of qualitative inquiry, can be used by educational researchers to further social justice initiatives. First, critical duoethnography will be described as a tool for reflexivity; second, as an engaged form of collaborative reading and deciphering; third, as an interactive feminist approach to interviewing; and fourth, as a research methods pedagogy.

Paradigmatic Perspectives for Social Justice Research

This chapter presents a conceptual analysis of the current trends for research paradigmatic perspectives used in doctoral social justice research approaches. The chapter offers a concise resource for doctoral scholars and their research supervisors to establish and illustrate a relevant paradigmatic perspective aligned with the research method and design choice to view the dissertation research problem in doctoral social justice research. Paradigmatic perspectives from feminist, critical theoretical perspectives, and grounded theory are also included as examples of specific approaches.

Avoiding Justice: Research at the Auction Block

Although the principle of justice plays a peripheral role in domestic research in high-income countries, it grounds a series of requirements in international research relating to responsiveness to host community health needs, the standard of care, and assurances of post-trial access. This chapter reviews a proposal to eliminate what is seen as a cumbersome mix of requirements on international research in favor of a framework of procedures that render considerations of fairness more manageable within the confines of orthodox research ethics. This might appear to be an alternative to the approach defended in this book because it would avoid having to engage with difficult issues of justice that reach beyond the confines of the field as it is currently configured. This chapter argues that efforts to avoid substantive conceptions of justice wind up tacitly enforcing a particular conception of justice, and it is shown that the proposal to streamline the ethics of international research cannot satisfy some of the requirements that its proponents advocate.

Mixed Methods, Ethnography, and Criminology/Criminal Justice Research

This chapter provides an overview of the historical dimensions of ethnographies using mixed-methods approaches, supported by examples from selected landmark works within this tradition. It presents the epistemological assumptions about knowledge production, positionality, and the types of questions typically asked by a criminologist using mixed methods and makes clear how they differ from ethnographies using other approaches and traditions. The chapter considers what ethnographies using a mixed-methods approach can produce that other approaches may not be able to. It then details how ethnographies using mixed methods can contribute to policy development, framing this against the perspectives and needs of policymakers. The chapter concludes by assessing the potential future contribution of ethnographically grounded mixed-methods research to crime and criminal justice issues.

Language and Social Psychology Approaches to Race, Racism, and Social Justice: Analyzing the Past and Revealing Ways Forward

Issues of race, racism, and social justice are under-studied topics in this journal. This Prologue, and our Special Issue (S.I.) more broadly, highlights ways that language and social psychology (LSP) approaches can further our understanding of race, racism, and social justice, while suggesting more inclusive directions for their theoretical development. Acknowledging the inspiration from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, we begin by discussing our deeply-held personal and emotional connections to recent societal events, including police violence against innocent Black civilians and the prevalence of anti-Asian hate. What follows, then, is: a historical analysis of past JLSP publications on these issues, a proposal for more intersections between LSP and communication social justice research, and an overview of the BLM movement together with the four articles that follow. We conclude by advocating for individual and institutional practices that can create socially-just changes by LSP scholars in the academy.

Environmental Justice and its geographical aspects in Hungary

In recent decades, environmental justice has become a defining concept in socio-spatial inequality research, political debates, and activism. Environmental justice research, which is essentially based on theories of social and spatial justice and providesa normative framework for thinking, focuses on the unequal distribution of environmental harms and risks and their social consequences. Environmental justice research aims to explore the economic, social, health, and legal differences that individuals and groups face in their environment as a result of environmental processes, decision making, power relations, and law enforcement practices. This is largely related to the subjective perception of individuals and the perception of injustices by different actors. In the vast majority of environmental justice studies, spatiality provides a framework for interpreting and understanding environmentally unjust situations and processes. Environmental justice is therefore not only a natural, but also a socially dependent phenomenon, in which the key element is nevertheless the non-human factor (e.g. environmental events such as floods), which affects individuals and groups indifferent ways. As a result, an environmentally unjust state and situation may occur. The evolved injustices also interact with inherited spatial inequalities, existing socioeconomic systems, and the institutional structures that originally shape them. This paper summarizes the theoretical framework of environmental justice in geography and spatial sciences. The study adapts the theory of justice to post-socialist and Hungarian specificities and forms of environmental injustice, and examines decision-making processes and the perception of risks. In Hungary social problems and differences have been increasing in recent decades, and marginalisation and polarisation processes have added new spatial patterns to existing inequalities, directly and indirectly affecting environmental processes as well. Attempts at eliminating environmental injustices have resulted in new injustices, or deepened existing ones, due to the lack of a complex socio-environmental spatial approach of interventions. The solution to these injustices presupposes the effective and meaningful involvement of the affected people in policy-making and implementation processes, regardless of gender, age, origin, identity, or income. Otherwise, the unjust situation will persist and crisis areas affected by environmental injustices may develop.