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.

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 Critical Literacy: A Universal Tool to Empower English Teachers and Learners

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Adaninggar Septi Subekti
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Critical Literacy ◽  
English Teachers ◽  
Language Teachers ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Language Class ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The World ◽  
Language And Education ◽  
Do So

Language teachers should not only facilitate learners to learn the language but also facilitate them to realize that every day’s discourses, including language and education, are socially constructed. This is where critical literacy (CL) plays its role as a frame through which teachers can actively and autonomously participate in the world around them and facilitate learners to be able to do so through learning instructions. CL functions as a universal tool, like bricoleur, one can use to see numerous social phenomena from a critical stance. It is a different way, lens, or teaching framework, believing that one should question every day’s discourses instead of just accepting them as they are, with the ultimate goal of promoting social justice. Hence, this paper explains the importance of CL in empowering both teachers and learners, how it works to serve this purpose, and some practical strategies of its implementation in a language class.

scholarly journals Theories on Peacebuilding and Social Change

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Dinda Dinda
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Attitude Change ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Commitment To Change ◽  
The World ◽  
Structural Roots ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
Bridge Building ◽  
Critical Social

When pursuing social change, questions about what should be the first priority have been a long-standing matter of philosophical interest and debate. What is more important? Is it efforts that expand individual and personal capacities? Or, is it efforts seeking to redress systems and structures? Do we start with the world out there— focusing on the distribution of power and resources within and between societies—or the world within—aiming to develop awareness, growth, and commitment to change on a personal level? While various approaches to peacebuilding and social justice can be located along the full range of this spectrum, conversations about how to approach these endeavors in a complimentary, integrated way are fairly new. Consequently, tensions do exist around how to set priorities. For instance, those committed to promoting attitude change must contend increasingly with critical perspectives which prioritize and address the structural roots of social conflict. On the other hand, those that pursue strictly the structural roots at the heart of a conflict situation—often the tactics and goals of critical social movements—are at risk of polarizing and enflaming conflict in ways that do not easily lead to constructive resolution. In other words, the bridge building skills of the peacemaker are key to conflict transformation work. At the same time, bridge building skills devoid of a critical social justice perspective are arguably shallow at best.

scholarly journals Reflexive discourse analysis: A methodology for the practice of reflexivity

2020 ◽  
pp. 135406612096978
Author(s):  
Audrey Alejandro
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
The World ◽  
Theoretical Premise ◽  
Do So

How to implement reflexivity in practice? Can the knowledge we produce be emancipatory when our discourses recursively originate in the world we aim to challenge? Critical International Relations (IR) scholars have successfully put reflexivity on the agenda based on the theoretical premise that discourse and knowledge play a socio-political role. However, academics often find themselves at a loss when it comes to implementing reflexivity due to the lack of adapted methodological and pedagogical material. This article shifts reflexivity from meta-reflections on the situatedness of research into a distinctive practice of research and writing that can be learned and taught alongside other research practices. To do so, I develop a methodology based on discourse: reflexive discourse analysis (RDA). Based on the discourse analysis of our own discourse and self-resocialisation, RDA aims to reflexively assess and transform our socio-discursive engagement with the world, so as to render it consistent with our intentional socio-political objectives. RDA builds upon a theoretical framework integrating discourse theory to Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus for reflexivity and practices illustrated in the works of Comte and La Boétie. To illustrate this methodology, I used this very article as a recursive performance. I show how RDA enabled me to identify implicit discriminative mechanisms within my discourse and transform them into an alternative based on love, to produce an article more in line with my socio-political objectives. Overall, this article turns reflexivity into a critical methodology for social change and demonstrates how to integrate criticality methodologically into research and writing.

Blue-Collar Writing for Fruitful Dialogue?

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 510-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Francis Badley
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Paulo Freire ◽  
Blue Collar ◽  
The World ◽  
Do So

Norman Denzin has called for a reformed discourse to enable qualitative researchers to achieve a fruitful dialogue about democracy and social justice throughout the world. In this essay, I endorse Denzin’s emancipatory project which uses a critical framework modeled on writers such as Wright Mills, Paulo Freire, bel hookes, and Cornell West. I use material from Freire and Mills especially to suggest that fruitful dialogue also requires us as researchers and writers to become simpler, even “blue-collar,” in our own craft-writing. I do so in the hope that we can learn to speak and write “human” and move away from what Mills called the “academic pose.”

Social Justice and Critical/Performative Communicative Pedagogy

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Warren
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Classroom Interactions ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Just World ◽  
The World ◽  
Analytical Point ◽  
Embodied Pedagogy

Through narratives and critical interrogations of classroom interactions, I sketch an argument for a co-constitutive relationship between qualitative research and pedagogy that imagines a more reflexive and socially just world. Through story, one comes to see an interplay between one's own experiences, one's own desires and one's community — I seek to focus that potential into an embodied pedagogy that highlights power and, as a result, holds all of us accountable for our own situated-ness in systems of power in ways that grant us potential places from which to enact change. Key in this discussion is a careful analytical point of view for seeing the world and a set of practices that work to imagine new ways of talking back.

Engaging Youth in Education for Sustainable Development: Strategies and Interventions

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khushgeet Kaur
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Education For Sustainable Development ◽  
Development Strategies ◽  
Children And Youth ◽  
Opportunities To Learn ◽  
The World

Although youth are often thought of as targets for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) programmes, they are also active partners in creating a more sustainable world and effective ESD programmes. Today, more than ever, young women and men are change-makers, building new realities for themselves and their communities. All over the world, youth are driving social change and innovation, claiming respect for their fundamental human rights and freedoms, and seeking new opportunities to learn and work together for a better future. The education sector is generally seen as the most appropriate forum for involving children and youth in sustainable development, and initiatives to this end have been adopted in many countries. The present paper puts forth such initiatives, interventions and strategies that can be undertaken to engage youth in education for sustainable development at the global as well as the local level.

“Jumble Sales Are the Same the World Over”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Watson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
West African ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Lesbian Relationships ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
The World ◽  
Female Headed Households

This chapter analyzes the novels of the British writer Barbara Pym, which are often read as cozy tales of English middle-class postwar life but which, I argue, are profoundly influenced by the work Pym carried out as an editor of the journal Africa at the International African Institute in London, where she worked for decades. She used ethnographic techniques to represent social change in a postwar, decolonizing, non-normative Britain of female-headed households, gay and lesbian relationships, and networks of female friendship and civic engagement. Pym’s novels of the 1950s implicitly criticize the synchronic, functionalist anthropology of kinship tables that dominated the discipline in Britain, substituting an interest in a new anthropology that could investigate social change. Specific anthropological work on West African social changes underpins Pym’s English fiction, including several journal articles that Pym was editing while she worked on her novels.

The Challenge of Sustaining Peace

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Necla Tschirgi ◽  
Cedric de Coning
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Original Design ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
The World ◽  
Effective Instrument ◽  
International Peacebuilding ◽  
Do So

While demand for international peacebuilding assistance increases around the world, the UN’s Peacebuilding Architecture (PBA) remains a relatively weak player, for many reasons: its original design, uneasy relations between the Peacebuilding Commission and Security Council, turf battles within the UN system, and how UN peacebuilding is funded. This chapter examines the PBA’s operations since 2005, against the evolution of the peacebuilding field, and discusses how the PBA can be a more effective instrument in the UN’s new “sustaining peace” approach. To do so, it would have to become the intergovernmental anchor for that approach, without undermining the intent that “sustaining peace” be a system-wide responsibility, encompassing the entire spectrum of UN activities in peace, security, development, and human rights.

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