Linking Environmental Sustainability and Consumption

2018 ◽  
pp. 576-591
Author(s):  
Amanda M. Dewey ◽  
Dana R. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
The United States ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Justice Movements ◽  
Trump Administration

What is the connection between environmental sustainability and consumption? This chapter focuses on how consumption has been employed as a tactic for social change that is meant to improve the natural environment. Although consumption is a central way that society contributes to and responds to concern about environmental degradation, it has received limited attention in the research on sustainability thus far. This chapter focuses specifically on the ways that consumption has been addressed by researchers focusing on sustainability, paying particular attention to the environmental and environmental justice movements and the recent wave of contention in the Resistance, a political movement in the United States that is challenging the Trump administration and its policies, more specifically.

scholarly journals Walls and Cows: Social Media, Vigilante Vantage, and Political Discourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512092851
Author(s):  
Megan Ward
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Trump Administration

Vigilante groups in the United States and India have used social media to distribute their content and publicize violent spectacles for political purposes. This essay will tackle the spectacle of vigilante lynchings, abduction, and threats as images of vigilante violence are spread online in support of specific candidates, state violences, and election discourse. It is important to understand the impact of not only these vigilante groups, but understand the communicative spectacle of their content. Using Leo R. Chavez’s understanding of early 2000s vigilante action as spectacle in service of social movements, this essay extends the analysis to modern vigilante violence online content used as dramatic political rhetoric in support of sitting administrations. Two case studies on modern vigilante violence provide insight into this phenomenon are as follows: (1) Vigilante nativist militia groups across the United States in support of border militarization have kidnapped migrants in the Southwest desert, documenting these incidents to show support for the Trump Administration and building of a border wall and (2) vigilante mobs in India have circulated videos and media documenting lynchings of so-called “cow killers”; these attacks target Muslims in the light of growing Hindu Nationalist sentiment and political movement in the country. Localized disinformation and personal video allow vigilante content to spread across social media to recruit members for militias, as well as incite quick acts of mob violence. Furthermore, these case studies display how the social media livestreams and video allow representations of violence to become attention-arresting visual acts of political discourse.

Dismantling White Privilege: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Environmental Justice in Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Teelucksingh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Jim Crow Era

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.

Lawyers as Activists

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Dorf ◽  
Michael S. Chu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Court Action ◽  
The Government ◽  
Trump Administration

Lawyers played a key role in challenging the Trump administration’s Travel Ban on entry into the United States of nationals from various majority-Muslim nations. Responding to calls from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which were amplified by social media, lawyers responded to the Travel Ban’s chaotic rollout by providing assistance to foreign travelers at airports. Their efforts led to initial court victories, which in turn led the government to soften the Ban somewhat in two superseding executive actions. The lawyers’ work also contributed to the broader resistance to the Trump administration by dramatizing its bigotry, callousness, cruelty, and lawlessness. The efficacy of the lawyers’ resistance to the Travel Ban shows that, contrary to strong claims about the limits of court action, litigation can promote social change. General lessons about lawyer activism in ordinary times are difficult to draw, however, because of the extraordinary threat Trump poses to civil rights and the rule of law.

scholarly journals Environmental justice, settler colonialism, and more-than-humans in the occupied West Bank: An introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Irus Braverman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
West Bank ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The West ◽  
The Core ◽  
Waste Concrete

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and disruptions among lives and matter in the West Bank, interpreting these through the lens of environmental justice. We finally ask what forms of ecological decolonization might emerge from this landscape of accumulating waste, concrete, and ruin. Such alternative visions that move beyond the single axis of settler-native enable the emergence of more nuanced, and even hopeful, ecological imaginaries that focus on sumud, dignity, and recognition.

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