Introduction: Three Kinds of Engagement

To change the course of the unsustainable trends of American Prosperity, we must change the social climate of injustice that allows it to continue. This change entails three operations: create an interpretive framework that covers the key components of our living systems, tell coherent stories that include past injustices and places to repair them, and create a civic space that enables us to create a climate of justice. The four components of the interpretive framework are the Earth, our humanity, the social, and the civic. The historical narratives are stories guided by the principle of coherence, which reveal opportunities to change the current course of history. Making such changes involves civilians entering civic spaces where they can invite citizens to care for justice and for future generations.

The Citizen’s Role in Creating a Climate of Justice

In the civic space, citizens with access to resources must learn how to respond to the civilians who need them in such a way that it changes the unjust social climate to a climate of justice. This Chapter explores three options of citizens responding to civilians: empathy, a commons approach, and the ethics of care. Jeremy Rifkin has argued that we have evolved to “the age of empathy,” but this approach ignores the difference between those who are privileged and those who are not. The commons approach invites all to become “commoners,” sharing and shaping a common future. This approach has attractions, but it ignores past injustices and the role of the rule of law in protecting civilians. The ethics of care does invite privileged citizens to listen to civilian claims to join them in repairing broken relationships and caring about justice.

A Suitable Place to Remember? Derelict Magdalen Laundries as Possible Sites of Conscience in Contemporary Ireland

It is less than a decade since the Irish government published the McAleese Report, which accepted the state’s role in facilitating abuse in Catholic Church-run Magdalen Laundries. At the time the then Taoiseach Enda Kenny tearfully apologizing for the state’s involvement, alongside promising redress for survivors. Although much has been achieved since that time, one aspect that has not been resolved is how we remember and memorialize that past. Of the 10 Magdalen Laundries that operated in postindependence Ireland, seven have been demolished or substantially redeveloped and three are currently in various degrees of dereliction. This article considers the potential for extant Magdalen Laundries to become sites of conscience. It will explore this potential through the lens of temporality, materiality, and spatiality and will ultimately argue for the need to explore scalar power relations if Magdalen Laundries are to truly reflect past injustices as well as become meaningful places in the contemporary.

Enabling Community-Owned Platforms: A Proposal for a Tech New Deal

At a time when regulators are seeking new responses to the dilemmas of world-spanning digital platforms, forms of community ownership such as cooperatives and trusts offer attractive benefits for workers and other users. Yet if economic democracy is to provide a counterweight to investor ownership in the online economy, it will require an appropriate policy framework. This paper argues that such a framework can come from radically generalizing and expanding on pre-digital successes in local and industry-specific policies from various countries and contexts—including policies for incorporation, financing, and coordination. Policy should use community ownership not just to solve specific problems but as a universal means of organizing innovation. It should also seek to repair past injustices to communities marginalized through under-investment. Community ownership could thereby become at least as available to the online economy as investor ownership has been.

‘Leaving a record of their coming’

Creature from the Black Lagoon (Arnold US 1954), perhaps the quintessential and most enduring atomic-age creature feature, is a rich text for ecocritical analysis. Not only does the film heavily emphasise extinction and evolution in its narration and plot line, but the film is full of tensions that both calcify problematic Anthropocenic narratives and erode them. The film offers us a way of critiquing Anthropocenic histories and ongoing narratives without erasing racial and colonial injustices. It also offers us a way to imagine other stories - other ways of writing on our world - that engage material entanglements, disorient colonial and anthropocentric perspectives and create empathy. Recognising the film’s rocky Anthropocenic and extinction narratives enables a more fluid approach. Reading through water, emphasising evolutionary entanglements, brings into high relief past injustices against humans and nonhumans, and it engages a palimpsest effect, where an awareness of our muddled materiality helps us write over hierarchical pasts. Framing the film ecocritically by reading extinction and evolution emphasises the tensions of Anthropocenic violence (through colonial science and Anthropocenic erasures) and of positive material entanglements (through empathy and disorientation).

Israeli Pre-Transitional Justice and the Nakba Law

Pre-transitional justice activities that expose past injustices during entrenched conflicts can incite strong reactions among actors who feel threatened by or dislike such activities, and who thus attempt to silence controversial truths. This article illuminates how attempts to silence controversial truths, in parallel with shutting down debate, can also have the unintended outcome of enlarging public discourse on previously marginalised issues. Thus, paradoxically, efforts to curb freedom of expression sometimes result instead in an expanded public capacity to debate previously silenced truths about the conflict. We conduct a case study of reactions to pre-transitional justice in Israeli society focusing on the so-called Nakba Law, enacted in 2011. Through interviews with members of the non-governmental organisation Zochrot, politicians, teachers and media persons, we first show the relationship between pre-transitional justice and enacting the Nakba Law. We then demonstrate that while the Nakba Law indeed aimed to hamper freedom of expression, it also enabled increased public knowledge about the meaning of Nakba. Our theoretical proposition regarding this paradox, in this case activated by instigating new memory laws, is highly relevant to other conflicts-in-resolution that experience pre-transitional justice processes.

Majorities, Minorities, and Tolerance

This chapter discusses the concepts of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ and their relationship to victimhood and tolerance. The chapter argues that one of the most important features of sectarianism is that it promotes a culture of victimhood in any group that it touches. Constant evocations of past injustices are intended to produce symbolic capital for the modern ta’ifa and emphasize its continuity with this past (its identity). This chapter also notes that the conflation of sectarian minority and majority with democratic minority and majority is one of the greatest obstacles to true democracy today. The chapter suggests that tolerance is originally a religious discourse but can be adopted to promote religious coexistence by a state with an official religion. However, it is an insufficient basis on which to establish democratic pluralism.

Paying for the Past: The Importance of Fulfilling Promises as a Key Component to Resolving Human–Wildlife Conflict

Damage-causing animals (DCAs) originating from protected areas which inflict damage on persons and property are particularly contentious when promises to satisfactorily address such conflicts, either by protected areas or other management institutions, are left unfulfilled. Human–wildlife conflicts (HWCs) of this nature can erode trust and if not adequately resolved, assure the maintenance of tense relationships between parks and neighboring communities. This paper, based on archival research, interviews and community focus groups, examines management responses to the long history of DCAs exiting the Kruger National Park (KNP), South Africa. First, I document historical promises of compensation and the subsequent responses by conservation agencies to local communities to address these past injustices. Recent strategies to the DCA problem at KNP have been multi-faceted and include a wildlife damage compensation scheme initiated in 2014 which entails financial retribution given to affected farmers who have lost, and continue to lose, livestock to DCAs originating from the park from 2008 to date. I then present livestock farmers’ recent perceptions of DCAs, the compensation scheme itself, and proposed avenues for going forward. Despite continuing challenges in the process, I demonstrate that fulfilling promises is a key step to building relational trust and legitimacy and must be considered in similar contexts where protected areas and other conservation agencies are key actors in managing HWC.

The Garden Collective : a short documentary film

This paper is written in support of The Garden Collective, a short documentary film exploring the memorialization of the former Prison for Women (P4W) in Kingston, Ontario. The film documents the P4W Memorial Collective, a group of formerly incarcerated women, activists and academics, working to establish a memorial garden to honour the many women who lost their lives inside P4W. The Garden Collective features interviews with the Collective and other former prisoners of P4W to provide insight into prisoners’ experiences and past injustices, as well as call into question the ways in which the prison is currently being remembered and historicized by the surrounding community. This paper begins with a chapter analyzing the historical and political context of P4W, followed by a chapter exploring the content within the film from an abolitionist approach. The final chapter of this paper is dedicated to the film’s methodology, visual techniques and ethical challenges.

The Garden Collective : a short documentary film

This paper is written in support of The Garden Collective, a short documentary film exploring the memorialization of the former Prison for Women (P4W) in Kingston, Ontario. The film documents the P4W Memorial Collective, a group of formerly incarcerated women, activists and academics, working to establish a memorial garden to honour the many women who lost their lives inside P4W. The Garden Collective features interviews with the Collective and other former prisoners of P4W to provide insight into prisoners’ experiences and past injustices, as well as call into question the ways in which the prison is currently being remembered and historicized by the surrounding community. This paper begins with a chapter analyzing the historical and political context of P4W, followed by a chapter exploring the content within the film from an abolitionist approach. The final chapter of this paper is dedicated to the film’s methodology, visual techniques and ethical challenges.