Agents of change: the Gaston Labat awardees past, present, and future—the 2021 Gaston Labat Award lecture

2021 ◽  
pp. rapm-2021-103116
Author(s):  
F Kayser Enneking
Keyword(s):  
Change Agents ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Meaningful Change ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
The Status ◽  
To Come

The prior recipients of the Gaston Labat Award can be thought of as change agents because of their driving desire to challenge and improve the status quo. All of us are interconnected and should seek to collectively work toward meaningful change in our communities. The 2021 Gaston Labat lecture pays tribute to past agents of change and inspires those to come by urging everyone to become involved in the solution.

Accommodations

Outsiders ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 111-134
Author(s):  
Zachary Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Meaningful Change ◽  
Common Experience ◽  
Exchange Of Information ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
Vexing Problem

Accommodations are a common feature of life, but a vexing problem in civil rights law. To accommodate is to disrupt the status quo, to regard another, to recognize one’s needs and humanity. Accommodations can be a powerful thing. Even brief accommodations are an exchange of information, which become crucial experiences, as they force us to reckon with a harsh truth: The idea that all people are created equal is a legal command, not a practical description. We all have different needs and capabilities, different beliefs and wants. We accommodate not to erase these differences but to respect them. As a vehicle to realize our ambitions, and a functional means to make equality real for everyone in need of respect, accommodations are a way to bring outsiders in. As a result, accommodation is the antidote to modern discrimination. As we turn inward, as individuality becomes the common experience, accommodation is the right tool for our time. It is a means of making meaningful change.

Austrian election could herald radical change

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
General Election ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Political Force ◽  
People's Party ◽  
The Status ◽  
To Come

Subject Profile of Sebastian Kurz. Significance Rising political star Sebastian Kurz is using his position as foreign minister as a springboard in a bid to become chancellor after the October 15 general election. The 31-year-old Kurz has reinvented the Austrian People’s Party (OeVP), a leading political force since 1945 and junior partner in a coalition led by Chancellor Christian Kern’s Social Democrats (SPOe), to create a challenge to the status quo. Impacts A Kurz-led coalition would seek sweeping changes, cutting taxes and cracking down on welfare abuse to increase individual initiative. If Kurz fails, the OeVP will plunge into chaos and internal disputes. Kurz could become a victim of his own success and prompt rival parties to come together despite their differences, in an effort to stop him.

scholarly journals Think Piece: Learning, Living and Leading into Transgression – A reflection on decolonial praxis in a neoliberal world

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Injairu Kulundu ◽  
Dylan Kenneth McGarry ◽  
Heila Lotz-Sisitka
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Sustainability Education ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
To Come ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
Embodied Practice

Three scholar activists from South Africa reflect on what it means to transgress the limits of a neoliberal world and its crisis times, particularly considering transgressions in the service of a decolonial future. The authors explore three questions: i) What kind of learning can help us transgress the status quo? ii) How do we extend this learning into a commitment to actively living in transgressive ways? iii) What does it mean to lead in ways that re-generate a transgressive ethic in a neoliberal world? In a dialogical conversation format, the authors outline nine different but interconnected perspectives on learning, living and leading into transgression, with the aim of concurrently revealing the multiple layers of work that a decolonial future depends on, while demonstrating the ambitions of a pluriversal decolonial future through their writing. The intertwined narrative is not conclusive, as the processes marked out in brief are experiences that still need to be fully practised in new relations in times to come within academia-in-society-and-the-world with human and more-than-human actors. However, they do offer a generative set of questions, concepts and metaphors to give courage to boundary-dwelling scholar activists attempting transgressive research. These reflections seek to regenerate the transgressive ‘decolonial gestures’ (decolonialfutures.net) that we can undertake in a neo-liberal world, as an important part of environment and sustainability education practices. It draws out what an embodied practice of transgressive learning can entail when we become discerning of hegemonic discourses that reproduce the status quo. We pay homage to those decolonial scholars in the field of environment and sustainability education as we traverse this terrain, recognising their imagination and the transgressive movement that has come before us, but importantly we seek to also open pathways for those yet to come.

The violence of ideology

2018 ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Anthony Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Meaningful Change ◽  
The Status ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
As If

This chapter asks a simple question – if we know the problematic nature of capitalism and its attendant harms and inequalities, why can’t we fix it? The answer lies in an account of ideology which lies in action, not thought – we know there are problems but act as if we do not. The disavowal of problematic working conditions – and other significant issues such as environmental harm, migration and automation – makes it difficult to challenge the status quo and enact meaningful change. The search for human recognition and flourishing is hampered by the progressive search for change within the existing system rather than contemplating a different set of social relations and structures. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for ‘fixing the harms of work’ which centre around the need for social science to reconnect with analysis of political economy and problematise capitalism in a way that demands consideration of alternatives.

Challenges to the Judiciary

2020 ◽  
pp. 80-104
Author(s):  
Duncan McCargo
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
Double Standards ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
To Come ◽  
Public Criticism

This chapter looks at the struggles of the judiciary to come to terms with its critics after 2006. Given judges' intense loyalty to the monarchy, they were unable publicly to question the burdens that had been placed on them by the King: yet they struggled to formulate convincing answers to those who disputed their evenhandedness. The death of lèse-majesté prisoner Amphon Tangnoppakhun (colloquially known as Akong, or Uncle Kong) in 2012 illustrated many of the latent contradictions in Thai judicial thinking. Deference to the monarchy and an excessive enthusiasm to protect the status quo could encourage a punitive attitude towards defendants, especially after the royal speeches of 2006 that asked the judiciary to help solve the nation's most severe political problems. The resulting perception of double standards further alienated the courts from much of the populace; at the same time, the judiciary often seemed overly defensive in the face of unfamiliar levels of public criticism. Generalizing about the worldviews of Thai judges is difficult; the Thai judiciary is a diverse group, not all judges think alike, and those with less mainstream opinions often prefer to keep those views to themselves. However, a number of recurrent themes emerge from conversations with Thai judges and from the work of those who study them.

scholarly journals A White Counselor in a Multicultural World: Understanding the Need for a Spiritual, Multicultural Counseling Course

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-218
Author(s):  
Kate Walsh Soucheray
Keyword(s):  
Therapeutic Relationship ◽  
Multicultural Counseling ◽  
Multicultural Training ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
White Counselors ◽  
Knowledge And Skills ◽  
The Past ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
The Status ◽  
Therapeutic Services

Multicultural counseling must be seen a significant factor in today’s multicultural world as therapists provide therapeutic services offered to clients, especially clients who have immigrated from one country to another within the past 50 years. Multicultural counseling refers to the preparation and practices that help White counselors learn to integrate multicultural and culture-specific awareness, knowledge, and skills into counseling interactions into their practice with multicultural clients. White counselors who work with multicultural clients have the choice to either remain handmaidens of the status quo or transmitters of society’s values or become agents of change. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that White counselors who have participated in a multicultural training program have greater therapeutic skill to offer their multicultural clients. Furthermore, when multicultural counseling is incorporated in a spiritually-enriched therapeutic relationship, White counselors are able to relate more effectively with their multicultural clients. A spiritually-enriched therapeutic relationship offers counselors the opportunity to work with their multicultural clients and incorporate the vital aspect of spirituality, because it is universal to human existence. Therefore, through the use of spirituality in multicultural counseling, White counselors must have the desire to understand their multicultural clients’ worldview, which incorporates the view these clients have of their spirituality. Counselors must understand the importance of developing a curiosity to understand how spirituality influences the lives of their multicultural clients and use this new awareness to help facilitate healing and wholeness for their clients.

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