scholarly journals Reflections on Conducting Community-Engaged Research During COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Duker
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Men ◽  
Master's Program ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Community Engaged Research ◽  
International Borders ◽  
Graduate Research ◽  
Praxis I ◽  
Epistemological Violence

As an emerging scholar committed to social justice and anti-oppressive praxis, I entered my master’s program in Geography at York University, Toronto, with the goal of contributing to new theoretical insights and meaningful outcomes for research participants in Thailand. While initially the concept of communityengaged research appeared to alleviate the tensions between these two goals, the realities of the university’s constraints on graduate student research coupled with those of the COVID-19 pandemic have made it clear that this endeavor would not be straightforward. The inherent messiness of balancing academic matters (e.g., contributing to new theory and demonstrating an adequate level of rigor) with social justice concerns (e.g., eliminating epistemological violence and contributing meaningful outcomes for research participants) in community-engaged research has only intensified as COVID-19 has reconfigured our social relations, exacerbating existing inequities and restricting our social mobility, particularly across international borders. In this reflection, I consider how remotely collaborating with local research assistants in my own graduate research project typifies these tensions. More specifically, I posit that the COVID-19 pandemic has further underscored the importance of researchers, particularly white men researchers such as myself, to be willing to consistently re-evaluate our projects, and embrace flexibility, accountability, and the removal of ego from our work.

A Conceptualization Framework of Allyship: Bidirectional Allyship Between Black Heterosexual Women and White Gay Males

2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862110353
Author(s):  
Peter Scaramuzzo ◽  
Michael Bartone ◽  
Jemimah L. Young
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Black Women ◽  
White Men ◽  
Gay Males ◽  
Social Justice Movements ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Heterosexual Women ◽  
Complex Dimensions ◽  
Justice Movements

Allyship is a complicated idea laden with multiple, layered assumptions. One should not presume that allyship conceptually permeates all social justice movements. One should not presume that allyships develop to combat or dismantle a predefined socially constructed ism. A critical interrogation of allyship and allyship constructions necessitates recognition of broader, universal tenets of allyships anywhere. This must go further to embrace the nuanced, situated, dynamic, critically problematic, and complex dimensions rooted in individual lived experiences intersecting multiple marginalizations which contribute as praxis toward an actualizing of individual allyships. Although we will blur constructed distinctions as we progress, here, we endeavor to surface and deliberate upon the derivations and functions and shapes of allyships between two demographic categories, made arbitrarily distinct here for the purposes of engaging in discursive analysis: cisgender heterosexual Black women and cisgender gay White men. In short, we are proposing a way to view this allyship as bidirectional allyships, grounded in social justice frames of existing: a way to see each respective group as traveling within their own lane down a collectively traveled highway. Each traverses the space along their own course, traveling down “their own road.”

scholarly journals Narrating technonatures: discourses of biotechnology in a neoliberal era

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economic

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.

scholarly journals The hidden injustices of advancing solar geoengineering research

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennie C. Stephens ◽  
Kevin Surprise
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
White Men ◽  
Climate System ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Elite Institutions ◽  
Global North ◽  
Solar Geoengineering

Abstract Advancing solar geoengineering research is associated with multiple hidden injustices that are revealed by addressing three questions: Who is conducting and funding solar geoengineering research? How do those advocating for solar geoengineering research think about social justice and social change? How is this technology likely to be deployed? Navigating these questions reveals that solar geoengineering research is being advocated for by a small group of primarily white men at elite institutions in the Global North, funded largely by billionaires or their philanthropic arms, who are increasingly adopting militarized approaches and logics. Solar geoengineering research advances an extreme, expert–elite technocratic intervention into the global climate system that would serve to further concentrate contemporary forms of political and economic power. For these reasons, we argue that it is unethical and unjust to advance solar geoengineering research.

Citizenship Across the Life Course

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
International Borders ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
The Way

Analyzing emigration, immigration, and re-migration concurrently, under the framework of contemporaneous migration, directs us toward evaluating what it means to stake claims to different components of citizenship in more than one political community across a migrant’s life course. This chapter examines the way the Mainland Chinese migrants negotiate social reproduction concerns that extend across international borders, their multiple national affiliations, and aspirations for recognition and rights as they journey between China and Canada across the life course. Patterns of re-migration are transforming the social relations of citizenship, re-spatializing rights, obligations, and belonging. Source and destination countries are also reversed during repeated re-migration or transnational sojourning. Transnational sojourning forges citizenship constellations that interlink how migrants understand and experience citizenship across different migration sites.

Selling diversity to white men: How disentangling economics from morality is a racial and gendered performance

Organization ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 135050842093034
Author(s):  
Luzilda Carrillo Arciniega
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Human Resource ◽  
White Men ◽  
Business Case ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Economic Rationality ◽  
Human Resource Professionals ◽  
Management Consultants ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Economics And Morality

Diversity professionals include business scholars, management consultants, diversity officers, and human resource professionals, who claim that the business case is about economics, not about morality or social justice. Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research, this paper finds that diversity professionals sell diversity to white men—literally to obtain new clients and, metaphorically, to gain supporters for their practices—by performing economic rationality. In examining the intersection of economics and morality through the business case, this article argues that economic rationality itself is a racial and gendered performance. Moreover, insofar as diversity is a managerial discourse that employs ideas and models of the economy to design organizational techniques that improve business, it claims that through the business case, diversity professionals perform the economy itself. Thus, this research unsettles pervasive scholarly and popular assumptions that capitalism is intrinsically amoral. Finally, it characterizes organizational practices wherein diversity professionals perform economics as amoral and unracial as white economics. White economics, in other words, reproduces the everyday operation of neoliberal organizations as purportedly amoral, and hence, unracial and ungendered.

Social justice for sex workers as a ‘politics of doing’: Research, policy and practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-279
Author(s):  
Sharron FitzGerald ◽  
Maggie O’Neill ◽  
Gillian Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Research Policy ◽  
Red Light ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Sexual Offences ◽  
Republic Of Ireland ◽  
The Republic

The Republic of Ireland is a good case study to highlight the problems associated with uncritical appeals to criminal law as the only appropriate tool to tackle demand and protect sex workers from harm. In 2017, the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act came into force in the Republic of Ireland (hereafter Ireland) making it a criminal offence to purchase sex in the jurisdiction. Ireland’s decision to introduce Swedish-style laws followed a protracted public campaign instigated in 2009 by the Irish and radical feminist inspired neo-abolitionist organisation, Turn off the Red Light. In this article, we confront and de-centre the Turn off the Red Light campaign’s hegemonic narrative that the criminal rather than social justice responses provide a more effective vehicle for sex workers’ empowerment. Undertaking our intervention in Irish feminist prostitution politics as a ‘politics of doing’ social justice through our separate and combined research, we extend our analysis by invoking Nancy Fraser and Barbara Hudson’s theoretical work on social and restorative justice. We wish to develop a theoretical framework that can serve as a roadmap for restorative social justice – the process of achieving rights, recognition and redistribution through relational, reflective and discursive interventions in sex work research, policy and practice. We argue that by ‘thinking’ sex workers’ positionality in social relations differently, the ‘doings’ of restorative social justice for sex workers can begin or take place.

Doing Justice in Aesthetics

2006 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK CANUEL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations

ABSTRACT This essay argues that recent attempts to celebrate the aesthetics of beauty because of its privileged connection to equitable or just social relations are misguided; such accounts——by Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, and Peter de Bolla——continue to be conditioned by the normative inclusions and exclusions that have characterized writing on beauty at least since the eighteenth century. The essay also argues for a reconsideration of Kant's sublime in order to arrive at a more convincing connection between aesthetics and social justice.

scholarly journals A “Great” Large Family: Understandings of Multiculturalism among Newcomers to Canada

Refuge ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Fries ◽  
Paul Gingrich
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Large Family ◽  
Canadian Society ◽  
The Public ◽  
Relational Processes ◽  
Multicultural Policy ◽  
Canadian Multiculturalism

Analysts have taken positions either supporting or attacking multicultural policy, yet there is insufficient research concerning the public policy of multiculturalism as it is understood and practiced in the lives of Canadians. This analysis approaches multiculturalism as a text which is constituent of social relations within Canadian society. Data from the Regina Refugee Research Project are analyzed within Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework to explore the manner in which multiculturalism and associated policies are understood and enacted in the lived experience of newcomers. Newcomers’ accounts of multiculturalism are compared with five themes identified via textual analysis of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act—diversity, harmony, equality, overcoming barriers, and resource. Embedded within the accounts newcomers offered of Canadian multiculturalism are relations of ruling that can be understood within the context of struggles for recognition and social justice. Further research is needed to investigate the relational processes in which differing perceptions of and experiences with multiculturalism are embedded and to compare the present accounts with those of other groups of immigrants and Canadian-born.

scholarly journals The case against alternative currencies

2021 ◽  
pp. 1470594X2110657
Author(s):  
Louis Larue
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Geographic Area ◽  
Purchasing Power ◽  
Local Economies ◽  
Local Exchange ◽  
Trading Systems ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
New Social Movement

Local Currencies, Local Exchange Trading Systems, and Time Banks are all part of a new social movement that aims to restrict money's purchasing power within a certain geographic area, or within a certain community. According to their proponents, these restrictions may contribute to building sustainable local economies, supporting local businesses and creating “warmer” social relations. This article inquires whether the overall enthusiasm that surrounds alternative currencies is justified. It argues that the potential benefits of these currencies are not sufficient to justify the restrictions they impose on money's purchasing power. Turning these currencies into effective channels of change, by increasing their scope and their strength, could severely hinder the pursuit of social justice, in a way that is probably not even necessary for achieving their objectives. The paper concludes that large-scale limitations of money's purchasing power are, therefore, undesirable.

The foundational economy and the civil sphere

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Filippo Barbera ◽  
Ian Rees Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
Civil Sphere ◽  
Innovative Solutions ◽  
The Commons ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter focuses on the relationship between FE, citizenship, democracy and social justice. We outline the scope of the Foundational Economy and proceed to focus on the importance of Foundational thinking for critiques of capitalist formations that involve financialization and extraction. We then discuss the relationship between the Foundational Economy and human needs and capabilities before developing an argument for a moral basis to the Foundational Economy and how this links to civil society, citizenship and the commons focusing in particular on the potential for developing democratic governance and public action. We conclude by arguing that Foundational thinking provides a means of linking citizenship to attempts to manage the commons and, if social relations and institutional arrangements vary contextually across space and time, this requires innovative solutions based on experimentation at different scales.

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