Teaching Collective Action: Strategies for Fostering Racial and Social Justice

2022 ◽  
pp. 65-96
Author(s):  
Aaron Schutz
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
Civic Agency ◽  
Action Strategies ◽  
Do So

Universities teach students about social problems but provide few concrete tools for acting to promote social change. Teaching about challenges but not about possible solutions can be potentially disempowering and may reduce civic agency. This chapter discusses the development of a required class on community organizing and civil resistance that provides students with specific strategies for engaging in collective action. The author explores a range of tensions involved in teaching this class: making it experiential without forcing students to work on issues or take steps they might not agree with, providing multiple traditions of social action so they do not get the sense that there is one “right” way, working with students whose perspectives might differ from ones he sees as legitimate, and teaching a class that some outside the institution might see as beyond the purview of a university. Ultimately, he argues that it is incumbent upon universities to provide concrete skills for social action, because failing to do so restricts their capacity to become effective civic actors in our democracy.

scholarly journals Exhaustion and possibility. The wor(l)dlyness of social work in (G)local environment worlds during a pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 54-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona B Livholts
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Writing Genres

Exhaustion is not about being tired. It is an intense feeling of restlessness, of insomnia, and awakening when I ask myself: have I exhausted all that is possible? Such a state of restlessness and wakefulness represents a turning point for having enough, and opens for new possibilities to act for social change. This reflexive essay departs from the notion that the language of exhaustion offers a wor(l)dly possibility for social work(ers) to engage in critical analytical reflexivity about our locations of power from the outset of our (g)local environment worlds. The aim is to trace the transformative possibilities of social change in social work practice through the literature of exhaustion (eg. Frichot, 2019 ; Spooner, 2011 ). The methodology is based on uses of narrative life writing genres such as poetry, written and photographic diary entrances between the 4th of April and 4th of June. The essay shows how tracing exhaustion during the pandemic, visualises a multiplicity of forms of oppression and privilege, an increasing attention and relationship to things, and border movements and languages. I suggest that social work replace the often-used terminology of social problems with exhaustive lists to address structural forms of racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, which has been further visualized through death, illness, violence, and poverty during the pandemic. I argue that the language of exhaustion is useful for reflexivity and action in social work practice through the way it contributes to intensified awareness, attention, engagement, listening, and agency to create social justice.

scholarly journals Towards a Social Justice Disposition in Communication and Sport Scholarship

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 435-451
Author(s):  
Daniel Jackson ◽  
Filippo Trevisan ◽  
Emma Pullen ◽  
Michael Silk
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Sport Communication ◽  
Sports Communication

In this introduction to a special issue on sport communication and social justice, we offer some reflections on the state of the discipline as it relates to social justice. We bring attention to the role of sport communication scholars in the advancement of social justice goals and articulate a set of dispositions for researchers to bring to their practice, predicated on internalizing and centralizing morality, ethics, and the political. Identifying the epistemological (under)currents in the meaningful study of communication and sport, we offer a set of challenges for researchers in the contemporary critique of the communication industries based on “sensibilities” or dispositions of the research to those studied. We then introduce and frame the 13 articles that make up this double special issue of Communication & Sport. Collectively, these articles begin to demonstrate such dispositions in their interrogation of some of the most important and spectacularized acts of social justice campaigns and activism in recent decades alongside investigations of everyday forms of marginalization, resistance, and collective action that underpin social change—both progressive and regressive. We hope this special issue provides a vehicle for continued work in the area of sports communication and social justice.

scholarly journals Finding Human Rights in Library and Information Work

2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 527-540
Author(s):  
Toni Samek
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Ethical Aspects ◽  
Discussion Paper ◽  
Information Work

This discussion paper touches on aspects of the philosophy of librarianship, moral and ethical aspects of librarianship, human rights, social action, social justice, citizen participation in social change, and professional ethics of librarianship.

The Spiritual Journeys of an Abolitionist: Amy Kirby Post, 1802–1889

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy A. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The World ◽  
Spiritual Journeys ◽  
Do So

This chapter presents an analysis of Amy Kirby Post, an antislavery Quaker who quit her meeting in the mid-1840s to pursue “worldly” efforts to end slavery. It seeks to explore what led an individual whose Quaker coworshippers already accepted the wrongs of slavery to seek nonetheless a different path, one that she felt offered her a deeper bond between faith and action. What is clearest in examining the life of Post is that she was committed to finding a spiritual home that not only allowed her to pursue social justice on this earth, but also required her to do so. For her, faith had to demand, not simply permit, efforts to build a better world on earth as well as beyond it. During the first four decades of her life, witnessing against social ills in Quaker meetings seemed to satisfy her need to improve the world. But beginning in the 1840s, she embraced a more active sense of religious and political agency, which drew her into the Progressive Friends, spiritualism, and Unitarianism, as well as into an astonishing range of movements for social change.

Multicultural Competence, Social Justice, and Counseling Psychology: Expanding Our Roles

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Vera ◽  
Suzette L. Speight
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Multicultural Competence ◽  
Multicultural Counseling ◽  
Counseling Psychology ◽  
Counseling Competencies ◽  
Multicultural Counseling Competencies ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
Psychology Literature

The construct of multicultural competence has gained much currency in the counseling psychology literature. This article provides a critique of the multicultural counseling competencies and argues that counseling psychology's operationalization of multicultural competence must be grounded in a commitment to social justice. Such a commitment necessitates an expansion of our professional activities beyond counseling and psychotherapy. While counseling is one way to provide services to clients from oppressed groups, it is limited in its ability to foster social change. Engaging in advocacy, prevention, and outreach is critical to social justice efforts, as is grounding teaching and research in collaborative and social action processes.

“Proclaiming Together”? Convergence and Divergence in Mainline and Evangelical Evangelism, 1945-1967

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-76
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Berg
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Relative Priority ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Mainline Denominations ◽  
Convergence And Divergence ◽  
Protestant Christians ◽  
Dividing Line

By now, it is a commonplace of the American religious scene that the majority of the nation's white Protestant Christians are split into “two parties.” The ideological dividing line runs between “mainline” denominations—Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians—and a bevy of conservative denominations and groups, but it also cuts through the mainline itself, which contains a substantial contingent of conservatives.Among the two parties' numerous disagreements, theological and political, few have run deeper and longer than their difference over the meaning and importance of evangelism, the activity of “proclaiming the gospel” to those outside the Christian community. Is the church's prime call in this regard to seek conversions to the Christian faith, or is it to show the love of Christ by working for charitable goals and social justice? A well-known 1973 study of Presbyterian clergy found that the greatest polarization between self-described “conservatives” and “liberals” came over the relative priority of evangelism and social action. Indeed, the fight over these goals was an important (though by no means the only) factor precipitating the “split” early in this century.

Reinforcing Criticisms of Civil Resistance: A Response to Onken, Shemia-Goeke, and Martin

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110282
Author(s):  
Alexei Anisin
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Ideological Bias ◽  
Resistance Literature ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
Resistance Strategies ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Policy Suggestions

This article reinforces the criticisms I cast on civil resistance literature in my study “Debunking the Myths Behind Nonviolent Civil Resistance” through addressing issues on how scholars code violence, unarmed violence, and nonviolence. It justifies studying unarmed violence as a sole category and explicates the pathways through which unarmed violence can lead oppositional campaigns toward success. In responding to Onken, Shemia-Goeke, and Martin, the article demonstrates that the dichotomization of nonviolence and violence is not premised on analytical equivalency and should be avoided if the study of resistance strategies is to progress onward and step away from the literature's intrinsic ideological bias. There is nothing idealistic about seeking to improve how we operationalize concepts to study resistance strategies, but if scholars in the civil resistance literature fail to move away from universalistic assumptions about nonviolence and social change, they will continue to misinterpret historical processes and produce policy suggestions that are neo-colonial in nature.

scholarly journals Whites for racial justice: How contact with Black Americans predicts support for collective action among White Americans

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 893-912 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hema Preya Selvanathan ◽  
Pirathat Techakesari ◽  
Linda R. Tropp ◽  
Fiona Kate Barlow
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Intergroup Contact ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Group Efficacy ◽  
Total N ◽  
Group Members ◽  
White Guilt

Advantaged group members have an important role to play in creating social change, and intergroup contact has tremendous implications in shaping intergroup relations. However, little research has examined how intergroup contact predicts advantaged group members’ inclinations toward collective action to support the interests of disadvantaged groups. The present research investigates how contact with Black Americans shapes White Americans’ willingness to engage in collective action for racial justice and support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Three studies of White Americans (total N = 821) consistently reveal that positive contact with Black Americans predicts greater support for collective action through a sequential process of fostering greater feelings of empathy for Black Americans and anger over injustice. These findings hold even when taking into account other relevant psychological factors (i.e., White guilt and identification, negative contact, group efficacy, and moral convictions). The present research contributes to our understanding of how advantaged group members come to engage in social change efforts.

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