Maasai Girls' Subjectivities and the Nexus of Gender Justice and Education Rights Discourse

2018 ◽  
pp. 1265-1279
Author(s):  
Serena Koissaba

Global development discourse around the interplay between social justice and childhood issues are complicated when interpreting these ideas contextually through translocational gender and cultural lenses. This chapter attempted to address some of the following questions: How do international gender and education interventions problematize the transition for Maasai girls as they transition from childhood to adulthood? Can Amartya Sen's ‘capability framework, work effectively for African children in Kenya who by their cultural norms become adults before the age of 18? In what ways are the social justice schemes producing disaggregated cultural structures for Maasai Girls? This chapter, therefore examined how Maasai girls' subjectivities are affected by gender and education rights mediation through Amartya Sen's ‘capabilities approach' and a human rights framework. The experiences and perspectives of female subjects have seemingly been distorted within feminist and geopolitical rhetoric. Transnational feminism in this work is positioned as a postcolonial project that employs theories of human rights, capabilities, and multiculturalism as lenses in which to interrogate practices of erasures of voice and representation of active participants within the movement, but reconsider what feminist theory can do to move the conversation away from male-centric ideologies.

Author(s):  
Serena Koissaba

Global development discourse around the interplay between social justice and childhood issues are complicated when interpreting these ideas contextually through translocational gender and cultural lenses. This chapter attempted to address some of the following questions: How do international gender and education interventions problematize the transition for Maasai girls as they transition from childhood to adulthood? Can Amartya Sen's ‘capability framework, work effectively for African children in Kenya who by their cultural norms become adults before the age of 18? In what ways are the social justice schemes producing disaggregated cultural structures for Maasai Girls? This chapter, therefore examined how Maasai girls' subjectivities are affected by gender and education rights mediation through Amartya Sen's ‘capabilities approach' and a human rights framework. The experiences and perspectives of female subjects have seemingly been distorted within feminist and geopolitical rhetoric. Transnational feminism in this work is positioned as a postcolonial project that employs theories of human rights, capabilities, and multiculturalism as lenses in which to interrogate practices of erasures of voice and representation of active participants within the movement, but reconsider what feminist theory can do to move the conversation away from male-centric ideologies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002087282110200
Author(s):  
Kang Liu ◽  
Catherine A Flynn

While the environment is fundamental to humankind’s wellbeing, to date, social work has been largely focused on the social, rather than the physical, environment. To map how the broader environment is captured in the profession’s foundational documents, an exploratory sequential mixed methods study (QUAL → quan) analysed data from 64 social work codes of ethics. Findings indicate that although the environment is mentioned in the majority of these, there is a continued focus on the social, overlooking to some degree the physical, predominantly the built, environment. A more holistic understanding of the environment would enable social work to better fulfil its commitment to human rights and social justice.


Author(s):  
Penelope Weller

Contemporary mental health laws are embedded in basic human rights principle, and their ongoing evolution is influenced by contemporary human rights discourse, international declarations and conventions, and the authoritative jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECrtHR). The<em> Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities</em> (CRPD) is the most recent expression of international human rights applicable to people with disability including people with mental illness.3 It provides a fresh benchmark against which to assess the human rights compatibility of domestic mental health laws.


Author(s):  
Karen Lyons ◽  
Nathalie Huegler

The term social exclusion achieved widespread use in Europe from the late twentieth century. Its value as a concept that is different from poverty, with universal relevance, has since been debated. It is used in Western literature about international development, and some authors have linked it to the notion of capabilities. However, it is not widely used in the social work vocabulary. Conversely, the notion of social inclusion has gained in usage and application. This links with values that underlie promotion of empowerment and participation, whether of individuals, groups, or communities. Both terms are inextricably linked to the realities of inequalities within and between societies and to the principles of human rights and social justice that feature in the international definition of social work.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pratik Raghu

Abstract Since its foundation in 1993, La Vía Campesina has surged to the forefront of the global alter-globalization movement of movements, mobilizing human rights discourse to promote small-scale sustainable agriculture as a key component of social justice, equity, dignity, and autonomy everywhere. This literature review argues that food sovereignty—La Vía Campesina’s best known, rights-based innovation—inflects a range of other interrelated but distinct frames that variously foreground peasants’ rights, “peasantness,” land, cultural recognition, and collective emancipation, prefiguring an array of prospects for the expansion of human rights to peasants and other marginalized populations confronting the failures of capitalist globalization.


Author(s):  
Jay Drydyk

Responding to a call by Pierre Sané, Secretary-General of Amnesty International, for a worldwide political movement to overcome the social damage that has been wrought by economic globalization, this paper asks whether such a movement can invoke current conceptions of human rights. In particular, if human rights are Euro-centric, how well would they serve the self-understanding of a movement that is to be global, culturally pluralistic and counterhegemonic to Northern capital? I argue that it is not human rights that are Eurocentric, but only certain conceptions of human rights. Properly understood, human rights are justifiable from within all cultures. Moreover, current conceptions of human rights are not as narrow as they were in 1948, when the Universal Declaration was drafted. Nearly five decades of international dialogue have transformed human rights discourse in ways that are profoundly anti-Eurocentric, and further transformations are already underway. There are resources of moral and political experience, within all cultures, which argue strongly in favor of these transformations. Therefore, a more consistent and more complete knowledge of human rights can emerge cross-culturally if the dialogue is not abused and if the relevant moral and political experience is let into the dialogue from all quarters.


2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Burris ◽  
Evan D. Anderson

A decade ago, Jonathan Mann made a powerful case that human rights could provide a vocabulary and mode of analysis for understanding and advancing health. He made the case well, and put the idea into inspired practice, but the idea was neither new nor his alone. The idea that social justice — and henceforth in this article we will use that term loosely (and with obvious imprecision) to embrace goods like human rights, social equality, and distributive justice — was intrinsically important to health resonated with the social epidemiology already gathering force (not to mention an enduring theme running through the history of public health work). That social structure and relations of power explain a great deal about the level and distribution of population health was implicit in the work of pioneers like Geoffrey Rose, evident in Marmot’s seminal Whitehall studies, explicit in the writings of Mervyn Susser, and the main thrust of scholars like Nancy Krieger and Meredeth Turshen. Although researchers tend to avoid using a term with such normative weight, it is safe to say that Mann — and Susser, and Marmot and Krieger among others — were right: social justice is central to the proper understanding of health.


Author(s):  
Steve Rogowski

In the UK, neoliberalism and associated austerity have dominated social work and welfare provision over the last decade. Consequences include severe financial cuts to social work with children and families, as well as public services generally, and large increases in poverty and inequality. Despite increasing numbers of people in difficulty, the social work and welfare system has become more punitive and presents ongoing threats to social work’s commitment to human rights and social justice. This article examines such developments and includes the views of practitioners. Despite the strength and depth of challenges, it argues that critical/radical possibilities remain for practitioners to work both individually with service users and collectively. Such opportunities need to be taken with a view to working towards a more just and equal society, this being a much-needed antidote to the unequal neoliberal world we currently inhabit.


2008 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Crigger

Globalization, an outgrowth of technology, while informing us about people throughout the world, also raises our awareness of the extreme economic and social disparities that exist among nations. As part of a global discipline, nurses are vitally interested in reducing and eliminating disparities so that better health is achieved for all people. Recent literature in nursing encourages our discipline to engage more actively with social justice issues. Justice in health care is a major commitment of nursing; thus questions in the larger sphere of globalization, justice and ethics, are our discipline's questions also. Global justice, or fairness, is not an issue for some groups or institutions, but a deeper human rights issue that is a responsibility for everyone. What can we do to help reduce or eliminate the social and economic disparities that are so evident? What kind of ethical milieu is needed to address the threat that globalization imposes on justice and fairness? This article enriches the conceptualization of globalization by investigating recent work by Schweiker and Twiss. In addition, I discuss five qualities or characteristics that will facilitate the development of a viable and just global ethic. A global ethic guides all people in their response to human rights and poverty. Technology and business, two major forces in globalization that are generally considered beneficial, are critiqued as barriers to social justice and the common good. To turn human nature into humanity and righteousness is like turning the willow into cups and bowls. The book of Mencius


Author(s):  
Odessa Gonzalez Benson ◽  
Karin Wachter ◽  
Jessica Lee ◽  
Darlene Nichols ◽  
Erica Hylton

Abstract This scoping review identifies and analyses historical to present–day contributions of social work scholarship on forced migration, with the aim of reviewing trends and identifying priority areas for the discipline moving forward. This review examined 331 articles related to forced migration published in 40 social work journals over four decades (1978 to 2019). Findings illustrate notable trends in temporal, methodological, topical and geographical dimensions and how those vary by first authors' locations, research sites and study populations. Temporally, the number of articles has been increasing, quadrupling between 2001–2010 and 2011–2019, with 20 social work journals doubling their number of articles. Methodologically, the large majority of articles were qualitative and/or conceptual. Topically, the most common were practice, intervention, health and mental health, while the least common topics included human rights, social justice, poverty, religion, violence, history and theory. Geographically, social work scholarship was mainly focused on refugees in the Global North and third-country resettlement contexts, and authored by scholars in the Global North. Findings thus reveal critical gaps in topics and geographical biases, raising questions related to issues of ethics, power and the production of knowledge about forced migration in the social work academy.


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