Beyond Divisive Categorization in Young Adult Fiction: Lessons from Divergent

Veronica Roth’s Divergent is a young adult fiction and movie franchise that addresses issues of political power, social inequity, border control, politics of fear, gender, ethnicity, violence, surveillance, personal authenticity and mind control. It is possible a large part of the popularity of the series is its attention to these issues which young Western audiences are concerned about. The narrative makes heroes of protagonists who become activists for justice and struggle against oppressive social-political systems. What follows is a literary analysis of Divergent, evaluating its treatment of public theology and social justice themes, and discussing implications for Christian activism, especially for youth and young adults. It affirms the ethos in the books of resisting oppression, and questions assumptions about gender and abuse, violence and imperial control, personal authenticity and categorization, and difference and sameness.

Decolonizing regional planning from the Global South: Active geographies and social struggles in Northeastern Brazil

This paper addresses the engagement of critical geographers from Northeastern Brazil with regional planning, aiming at transforming society by acting on their region’s spaces. Extending and putting in relation literature on planning theory in the Global South and geographical scholarship on decoloniality, I explore new archives showing how the planning work that these geographers performed from 1957 to 1964 was an example of the ‘South’ re-elaborating and putting into practice notions arising from ‘international’ literature, such as that of ‘active geography’, and pioneering critical uses of instruments, such as mappings and statistics, that have often been associated with technocracy and political conservatism. Connected with peasants’ struggles and with a theoretical framework that is cognisant of the colonial histories and insurgent Black and indigenous traditions in the Northeast, these geographers’ works show that there is no ‘Southern Theory’ without a concrete engagement of scholars with social and political problems, one which is not limited to ‘participation’, but aims at challenging the political powers in place. Although not devoid of contradictions that are analysed here, the experiences of these Southern geographers acting in and for the South can provide precious insights into current (Northern or Southern) scholarly programmes aimed at resisting oppression.

I’m Every Woman: Advancing the Intersectional Leadership of Black Women School Leaders as Anti-Racist Praxis

The rallying, clarion call to #SayHerName has prompted the United States to intentionally include the lives, voices, struggles, and contributions of Black women and countless others of her ilk who have suffered and strived in the midst of anti-Black racism. To advance a leadership framework that is rooted in the historicity of brilliance embodied in Black women’s educational leadership, and their proclivity for resisting oppression, we expand on intersectional leadership. We develop this expansion along three dimensions of research centering Black women’s leadership: the historical foundation of Black women’s leadership in schools and communities, the epistemological basis of Black women’s racialized and gendered experiences, and the ontological characterization of Black women’s expertise in resisting anti-Black racism in educational settings. We conclude with a four tenet articulation detailing how intersectional leadership: (a) is explicitly anti-racist; (b) is explicitly anti-sexist; (c) explicitly acknowledges the multiplicative influences of marginalization centering race and gender, and across planes of identity; and (d) explicitly leverages authority to serve and protect historically underserved communities.

The Morality of Resisting Oppression

This paper reconsiders the contemporary moral reading of women’s oppression, and revises our understanding of the practical reasons for action a victim of mistreatment acquires through her unjust circumstances. The paper surveys various ways of theorising victims’ moral duties to resist their own oppression, and considers objections to prior academic work arguing for the existence of an imperfect Kantian duty of resistance to oppression grounded in self-respect. These objections suggest (1) that such a duty is victim blaming; (2) that it distorts the normative direction of self-regarding duties; and (3) that consequentialist reasons are inapt for justifying self-regarding ethical responsibilities. The paper then argues that the need for normative coherence in our very concept of a moral duty is of paramount importance, and especially so in the fight against patriarchal oppression. Accordingly, we should acknowledge the salient differences between pro tanto or defeasible moral reasons and fully fledged moral duties identifying agent-relative obligatory action. The paper concludes that we better respect and defend women’s rights when first we understand them as having, at best, defeasible moral reasons to oppose their oppression; and second, ensure that we make adequate allowance for a woman’s interpretative right to choose how to respond to her oppressive circumstances.

Epilogue

Weaving together the chapters in Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color and Indigenous Women on Graduate School is a commitment to demonstrate how women of color cultivate community and a sense of self, while simultaneously resisting oppression and microaggression in order to survive and thrive in a space that was never meant for them to succeed. The Epilogue calls attention to how the contributors exist in conversation with one another, unleashing their inner feminist killjoy as they speak to the sense of alienation experienced as a result of lack of understanding faced within cohorts, departments, and families. At the same time, these women reveal the mechanisms that allowed them to find support in friends, colleagues, and mentors in order to negotiate imposter syndrome and develop a sense of belonging in the academy. The conclusion illuminates strategies that women of color employ as they resist attempts of further marginalization within the academy.

Healing the Hurricane in Our Chest

Healing through the stories we rescue and the history we make is what Aurora Levins Morales's Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals is about. The author, a historian curandera, compiled a series of twenty-eight essays in this second edition, published twenty years after the first. Levins Morales theorizes movements for social justice and how to overcome challenges faced by activists and all those fighting and resisting oppression. She does this through accounts of her studies, personal experiences, and social conditions, providing a view of the world that allows collective healing and encourages it in others through a comprehensive understanding of history.

Solidarity, Universal Unfreedom, and You

What should be our main reason for resisting oppression? In answer, chapter 9 argues that the universal unfreedom caused by oppression should be that reason, because we should seek a reason that will maximally appeal to the oppression’s non-victims, inducing them to resist and challenge it. For robust solidarity among a critical mass of the victims, the bystanders, and the perpetrators is necessary for abolishing systematic injustice and thus also for ending universal unfreedom. And because of the suspicion and mistrust that are likely to obtain in such a mixed resistance, we need a reason for challenging injustice that describes a shared harm the injustice does them all. The reason is that only a sense of such a shared harm could underwrite the robust and mutual solidarity needed to abolish oppression. Hence those non-victims who join in such solidarity are not allies but rather fellows who are also harmed: they are the scathed.