Aspirations For Justice Research Articles

How dignity matters for life and lifelong learning: insights from participatory story-telling by university students in South Africa

ABSTRACT The claim made is that dignity matters in both legal and recognitional aspects for flourishing and lifelong learning opportunities for young adults. Dignity is understood here as a foundational capability and functioning to be and to do in ways which matter to a person, requiring the material and non-material conditions which enable and secure equal dignity for each person. The claim is first explored drawing on both the capability approach and conceptualisations of dignity, especially the inflorescent form. Then, to empirically animate the claim, the article draws on a participatory story-telling project undertaken in a South African university in 2020 with graduate students, in which they were co-creators of knowledge. Participants were supported pedagogically in producing their own individual and collective digital stories, focusing on their lived experiences of social justice and specifically of human dignity. The project shows that dignity is an especially important capability for young people’s present and future wellbeing and their aspirations. Dignity is formed in and sustained relationally in collective spaces. Further, dignity enables repair of the injustices of the colonial and apartheid past. If dignity is not fostered in and through education in adult and higher education spaces, education will always fall short of social justice aspirations and lifelong learning conditions.

Exploring (in)congruence between academic employers and academic parents' aspirations for, and enactment of, gender justice in relation to family leave

The gender pay gap (13.7% in 2022 in the UK Higher Education (HE) sector) provides an overall snapshot of gender inequality in a specific setting. The causes of the gender pay gap are multifaceted but inextricably linked to the transition to parenthood. However, despite the transformative potential of family leave policy and practice as a strategy to progress gender equality, there has been less focus on HEIs' approaches to supporting transition to parenthood as a strategy to tackle the gender pay gap. I employ the Capability Approach (CA) combined with a discursive conceptualisation of gender to explore how gender norms shape parents' decision-making within university workplace cultural contexts. This study contributes evidence of incongruence between parents' gender justice aspirations, their experiences and HE employer gender justice strategies. The study identifies the need to explore how gender justice is framed, and translated in practice, within HE employer EDI strategies.

Techno-Rationalism and Higher Educational Law: Examining Legal Frameworks in Southern African Universities from a Freirean Critical Pedagogy Perspective

This conceptual article explores the profound impact of techno-rationalism on educational law in Southern African universities. It also examines the influence of techno-rationalism on equity, social justice and academic freedom within higher education in the digital era. The article critically analyses the reshaping of educational law in Southern Africa by considering technological advancements, economic forces, affective factors and socio-cultural dynamics. It aims to investigate whether the implementation of techno-rationalist discourses hinders social justice aspirations in universities. Additionally, the article explores how pervasive neoliberalism and market-driven logic are at universities, questioning whether these practices overshadow the institution’s core objectives and commitment to social justice. The article envisions possibilities for reconceptualising the university in the era of techno-rationalism through the critical pedagogy theory. This theory is relevant to this work because it promotes an emancipatory theoretical framework that challenges learning environments, especially higher education institutions, where people might be politically, socially and economically disempowered. It also calls for a holistic approach to knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy that recognises the university’s embeddedness in a broader ecological and socio-cultural context. Through this exploration, the article contributes to the scholarly discourse on the decolonisation of universities and seeks to inspire new lines of enquiry addressing inequality and the pursuit of social justice in Southern African higher education institutions.

Toxic mobilization: mining, pollution and power in the highlands of Peru

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes how the toxic consequences of extractive industries like mining have reconfigured both local topographies and introduced new structures and meanings regarding environmental justice and mobilization for communities living in polluted areas. Based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the case of Espinar in Peru, the paper explains how the company and the government’s management of uncertainty regarding land and water pollution have transformed the meaning of mobilization for communities and their capacities for cleaning or at least improving their environment. I argue that local and global connections and transnational support still open opportunities for meaningful local mobilization despite uncertainty and ambiguity in managing environmental pollution, which weakens social cohesion and fragments the positions of inhabitants concerning collective and political action. However, communities can unwillingly embrace toxic conflicts: low intense, fragmented, but persistent forms of mobilization to bargain for some form of partial compensation from the company and the state. This form of conflict reinforces the internal fragmentation of the overall community and runs against environmental justice aspirations.

Critical Consciousness in Vocational Psychology: A Vision for the Next Decade and Beyond

We offer a vision for a vocational psychology that places a larger focus on critical consciousness (CC) to be more responsive to marginalized communities (e.g., immigrants, low-income workers, Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color). CC describes how marginalized people analyze systems of oppression, act toward social justice, and become agentic and hopeful. In this article, we review extant theoretical frameworks that have laid a strong foundation for embedding critical consciousness in research, practice, education and training. We then offer suggestions for promoting critical consciousness within vocational psychology over the next decade. We highlight the promise of transformative, intersectional, and action research with and for marginalized communities; of career interventions that respond to oppression and liberation; and of training that prepares future vocational psychologists to engage in praxis in a complex world. We argue that a greater focus on CC is aligned with vocational psychology’s foundational social justice aspirations.

Black Consciousness, Black Nationalism and Black Theology: Is there a possibility for theology of dialogue?

This article gives some historical development of Black Consciousness, Black Nationalism and Black Theology during the colonial and apartheid eras. The three worked symbiotically to address the racial injustices of the past. Each tenet is historically explained and ideologically defined. Black Consciousness and Black Nationalism are still prevalent in the South African sociopolitical landscape. This is expressed through the current political parties that are the minorities in the National Assembly. However, the ruling party, African National Congress (ANC), as a ‘broader church’ also possesses some constituents and adherents who are the Black Consciousness and Nationalistic aspirants. South Africa is developing into a peasant society regardless of capitalistic embraces of development. Poverty and equality are visible in societal structures. Those who were formerly equality aspirants are now in sociopolitical and economic circles and had forgotten their aspirations of justice and equality. Corruption, maladministration, bad governance, etc., are the menaces that cause imbalances and create a wider gap between the rich and the poor.Contribution: Black Theology is invited to lead dialogical deliberations to assess and ascertain how to bring justice into the volatile situation where people’s security and safety is uncertain and warped ideologies such as ethnic cleansing are promoted. Black Theology should resort to the theological mandate of speaking for the poor and oppressed and promote the sense of the New Testament spirit of communality.

Rethinking the category of organic intellectual of/by Antonio Gramsci in today's world

The attempt to assess the essential functions and aspects of the intellectual establishment in the modern and contemporary world occupies a prominent place in the social sciences and in the political philosophy of the 20th century. Antonio Gramsci was undoubtedly one of the philosophers who made the most heuristic and hermeneutical contributions, from his revisionist Marxist perspective, to understand intellectuals as leading actors and active political subjects, situated in the dilemma of favoring the preservation of the established order, in the case of traditional intellectuals, or in promoting their radical transformation as a program of action of the so-called organic intellectuals, who dedicate themselves at all times to interpret the needs and aspirations of justice and equity of the time and social space of which they are part, to endow it with concrete political content. Consequently, the objective of this scientific article is to examine the role of the critical intellectual with social commitment in the current complex context, marked by the systemic crisis of the current world order. Methodologically speaking, the document presented here was developed through dialectical hermeneutics and the documentary research technique. The findings obtained allow us to conclude that critical thinking is key to revitalizing democracies.

Transparencia y Gobernanza en la Gestión de la Crisis de COVID-19

The state of emergency at COVID-19 tests the capabilities of the world's governments, in contexts of increasing political conflict, where social needs and aspirations for justice and equity grow exponentially, all which impact on the structuring of a post-coronavirus order with uncertain characteristics. In this sense, through a documentary methodology and the analysis of official government management data, the objective of the article is to describe the meaning of transparency and governance policies implemented within the framework of the health crisis of the pandemic of the new coronavirus, from the perspective of the open government with special emphasis on the cases of Chile and Colombia. The main findings of the research emphasize that open data policy is a necessary condition for qualitatively increasing the levels of governance and transparency of public management in crisis management, all of which makes it possible to conclude that the open government model makes public information available to the citizen that positions him as a watchdog for government activities but, at the same time, the data, being timely and comprehensive, promote the creation of initiatives for collective benefit.

Analisis Yuridis Perlindungan Hukum Perjanjian Dibawah Tangan Berdasarkan Putusan Pengadilan No.161/pdt.g/2011/pn-mdn. (Studi Kasus PT Merim Property dan Cv Rira Karya)

Legal protection for every Indonesian citizens without exception can be found in the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia (1945 Constitution), therefore every product produced by the legislature must always be able to provide guarantees of legal protection for all people, even they must be able to capture legal and justice aspirations that develop in society. In the Civil Code article 1233 states, "that an alliance can be formed because of agreement or law". One form of the agreement is an agreement under the hands in the form of contract work agreement. The results of the case study of PT Merim Property and CV Rira Karya can be seen the weakness of an agreement under the hands, where CV Rira Karya as the plaintiff must have concrete evidence to prove the loss that they experienced in accordance with the agreement under the hands that they agreed upon, where such evidence cannot be given CV Rira Karya so that his lawsuit was rejected by the panel of judges. The legal consequences arising related to the use of an agreement under the hands in the event of a default are that the debtor is required to pay compensation, the creditor may request the cancellation of the agreement through the court and the creditor can request the fulfillment of the agreement, or fulfillment of the agreement accompanied by compensation and cancellation of the agreement with compensation. Keywords: Analysis, Legal Protection, Agreement, Under the Hands

Developing a Poverty-Aware Pedagogy: From Paradigm to Reflexive Practice in Post-Academic Social Work Education

Abstract Social work scholars have argued that poverty reminds us of the necessary commitment to educate professional social workers. Being inspired by a conceptual framework that captures how poverty-awareness can be the subject of teaching in social work programmes, this article offers a qualitative analysis of the reflections being made by a cohort of students about their learning process in a post-academic course. Five common themes are discussed: (i) from recognising micro-aggressions to tackling macro-aggressions; (ii) poverty is an instance of social injustice and requires collective indignation; (iii) notions of commitment and solidarity are ambiguous; (iv) poverty is an instance of social inequality rather than merely social exclusion; and (v) from being heroic agents to social change ‘from within’. Based on these findings, we raise the lessons learned for social work educators. First, they should invite students to reinvigorate the social justice aspirations of social work practices and take a stance in relation to their environment and the wider historical and socio-political circumstances. Secondly, a poverty-aware pedagogy requires collective and long-lasting supervision at the frontline individual, organisational and societal/social policy level. Collective critical reflection and supervision might open up avenues to collectively challenge and change socially unjust rhetoric and practice.

AI and 'Equality by Design'

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly offered by proponents of its use as a tool for overcoming human biases, errors in judgment, and irregularities in decision-making, promising to provide a greater measure of predictability and consistency in decisions and, therefore, in the rule of law. For its critics, generating consistency in decision-making is a means of entrenching and amplifying discriminatory practices in a way that reproduces privilege and inequality in human relations through the use of pattern discrimination and predictive analytics, while simultaneously rendering these practices less transparent, explainable, and contestable. In both cases, technology is catapulted to the forefront of law as constitutive of lived realities and the governance of human relations, whether in the private or public sphere, rendering law perhaps nothing more than a technology too soon to become obsolete. Algorithms feed neural networks with neo-liberalism’s relations of power and inequality, and thus have the capacity to “bake in inequality,” to reproduce bias, and effectively to pass off the descriptive output of “code” as law, and such “law” as the normative aspirations of justice. More than ex post remedial mechanisms in law are needed to address such harms: if the rule of law is to retain its comparative advantage, an “Equality by Design” enforceable default for computer programming, consistent with the aim of a “human-centred approach” to AI governance, is required. Borrowing from well-established “Privacy by Design” principles, this chapter argues for similar, strengthened implementation in domestic law and policies for equality as the default value-based inclusive design for machine-learning algorithms and predictive analytics.

РЕЛИГИОЗНО-ФИЛОСОФСКИЕ ИСКАНИЯ ИННОКЕНТИЯ АННЕНСКОГО КАК ТЕЗА И АНТИТЕЗА ХРИСТИАНСКОЙ СОТЕРИОЛОГИИ

The article analyses the religious and philosophical search of Innokenty Annensky, the Russian poet of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. The researcher traces the evolution of the poet’s spiritual world, filled with antinomies of denial and affirmation, to the truths of the Christian soteriology and eschatology; describes the stages of the poet’s creative path, where the conceptions of death and immortality overlap into a single vector. The paper reveals the general spiritual atmosphere of the transitional epoch characterized by aspiration for justice and Beauty as an aesthetic category that promotes revival and liberation of a human being.

White Privilege and the Decolonization Work Needed in Evaluation to Support Indigenous Sovereignty and Self-Determination

Abstract: This paper builds on a keynote paper presented at the 2018 Canadian Evaluation Society annual conference by Kate McKegg, a Pākehā, non-Indigenous evaluator from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Kate reflects on the concept and implications for Indigenous people of white privilege in colonized Western nations. She discusses some of the ways in which white privilege and its consequences play out in the field of evaluation, perpetuating colonial sentiments and practices that maintain and reinforce inequities and injustice and potentially threaten the social justice aspirations of the field. Kate argues that those with white privilege have much work to do, unpacking and understanding their privilege if they are to have any chance of playing a role in deconstructing and dismantling the power structures that hold colonizing systems in place. She suggests that for evaluators to be effective allies for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, they must undertake ideological, cultural, emotional, and constitutional work. This work will be tough and scary and is not for the faint hearted. But it is vital to unlocking the potential transformation that can come from just and peaceful relationships that affirm and validate Indigenous peoples' ways of knowing and being.

The Tragedy of Ukraine: Hard Lessons to Learn from the Classics

As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, it remains mired in debt, corruption, and strife. The country seems to be caught up, again, in a vicious cycle that has been repeating itself for decades, if not centuries. Classical Greek tragedy gives us a deeper look at the reasons behind Ukraine’s persistent failure to achieve social stability, and to suggest remedies. The tragic cycle can be broken through a compromise in which individual, social and divine aspirations for justice are reconciled. As long as Ukrainian leaders seek to achieve justice without compromise, the nation’s self-destructive cycle is likely to persist.

Los trabajos de la memoria: la masacre de las bananeras y los sectores subalternos en Colombia, 1929-2008

The article examines how and under what circumstances the bananeras massacre was invoked between 1929 and 2008. The purpose is to study the role of collective memory as an articulator of justice aspirations and political practices in subaltern sectors of Colombia. During the period it was common to mention the event as an unhappy date, through acts that were mediated by the political circumstances of the time. The article concludes that the commemoration of the massacre de las bananeras served not only to remember, but also to forge and strengthen political identities in specific sectors of the population.

Governance, Innovation and Policy Change: Recali-brations of Chinese Politics under Xi Jinping ed. by Nele Noesselt

Reviewed by: Governance, Innovation and Policy Change: Recali-brations of Chinese Politics under Xi Jinping ed. by Nele Noesselt Jason Young (bio) Nele Noesselt, editor. Governance, Innovation and Policy Change: Recalibrations of Chinese Politics under Xi Jinping. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. xvi, 209 pp. Hardcover, isbn 978-1-4985-8024-3. Since Xi Jinping took his position as general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and chairman of the Central Military Commission in 2012, scholars have debated how Chinese politics are changing under his rule. This 2018 edited volume by Nele Noesselt presents a collection of chapters that attempt to answer this question. The organizing concept for the volume is "governance innovation" and the general approach institutionalism, though the three major parts, each with three chapters, in reality present an eclectic set of theoretical paradigms and approaches to the question. [End Page 95] The first part of the volume is a reflection on the field of Chinese political studies and is made up of two single-authored chapters by Suijian Guo and Jon Taylor, and coauthored chapter by Elizaveta Priupolina and Fan Yang. Guo's chapter outlines key themes and challenges in China's political science presenting some insights and raises important questions about the universality claims of political science theory in light of the China case and the response to this from the field of Chinese political science. This is a short but interesting contribution that concludes by asking where Chinese political science is heading. The next chapter argues that the rest of the world should pay more attention to the insights of China's political science in order to dehegemonize the discipline, and the following puts forward a discourse analysis methodology. The second part of the volume has three chapters on "values, norms and political culture in contemporary China" with single-authored chapters by Kent Freeze and Baogang Guo, and one coauthored by Xuedong Yang and Yan Jian. The first chapter uses public opinion data to explore pathways (inequality and cultural modernization) between economic modernization and support for political liberalization, concluding that "trends over time indicate that support for the status quo (measured by support for the current direction of the country) appears to be increasing in the past fifteen years" (p. 69). The next chapter argues that it "revealed cognitive differences between the Chinese and Western people" where "the group (family), ethical rule, and political hierarchy is to some extent inconsistent with individualism, rule of law, liberty, and equality advocated by Western liberalism" (p. 91). This is then followed by a chapter that presents interpretation of the trajectory of reform since the eighteenth CPC Party Congress and that argues China's reform process has shifted from "crossing the river by feeling the stones" to "top-level design." The chapter discusses this from the perspective of the institutionalization of central decision making and local autonomy. The third part of the volume is on "local governance reform and rule of law" with three chapters by Wei-chin Lee, Zhiyuan Zhang, and Nele Noesselt. The first chapter explores a series of judicial reforms arguing that "each reform attempt has required careful deliberation and crafty design to fulfill public aspiration for justice without seriously undercutting the party's supremacy and legitimacy in political governance" (p. 128). This chapter presents a realistic appraisal of the challenges China's judiciary faces in light of the reinvigoration of party control. This is followed by an analysis of government approaches to the implementation of environmental policy that identifies both top-down mandatory approaches as would be expected from the environmental authoritarianism literature but other approaches also, thereby questioning this literature. Zhang concludes that "the environmental performance evaluation system introduced by the central government creates powerful incentives for provincial bureaucratics and urges them to expand their policy instrument boxes by adopting more voluntary and [End Page 96] market-based instruments" (p. 168). The final chapter, "Reinventing the Chinese Leviathan," presents a very useful discussion of the debates and positions taken on the question of constitutionalism in China and illustrates the shift toward greater party control and management, thereby showing the limits of this movement. Taken together, this volume presents a good collection of...

Mob justice, corrupt and unproductive justice system in Nigeria: An empirical analysis

This study problematized the situation of justice administration in Nigeria by examining the public perception of the apparatus of justice in term of corruption, lack of equity, fairness and justice for all as a response to recourse to mob justice in Lagos state. A total of 904 respondents were selected using simple random and purposive sampling techniques. The instruments employed for data collection were questionnaire and interview. In addition, the information gathered was analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Scientists and thematic analysis. The results indicated that the increase in mob justice in Lagos state is as a result of the public dissatisfaction and loss of confidence in the institution of police and judiciary to administer justice impartially. The paper, therefore, suggests that a complete overhaul of the Nigerian criminal justice system is essential for the system to be able to fulfil public aspiration for justice.

Rising Income Inequalities in the Wake of Globalization: Emerging Challenges

Globalization, manifested by the fast growth in global trade, financial globalization and technological change, particularly ICT, is the main driving force behind rising inequalities, especially in the developing economies. Such technical changes typically raise the demand for skilled labour which is in short supply in these economies and is highly unequally distributed between different regions and social groups. Deficiency of public investment in infrastructure in India is responsible for the inability to fully benefit from the opportunities opened up by globalization, leading to growing regional and rural–urban disparities. Raising public investment in physical infrastructure, education and health care, and adequate priority to growth in agriculture, rural non-farm sector and manufacturing are essential to reduce inequalities by generating adequate employment opportunities. Inequalities have been rising even in mature democracies which had undergone radical social transformation. There is a need to redesign the existing framework of democracy so as to enable it to more adequately reflect the long-term societal aspirations for justice and fair-play.

Social work, participation, and poverty

Summary Although participatory social work approaches have been considered as a fruitful strategy, critical questions are raised in relation to the social justice aspirations of participatory social work with people in poverty. Inspired by the work of Nancy Fraser, we provide an in-depth insight in the complexities of supporting participatory parity in ‘Associations where People in Poverty Raise their Voice’. Combining semi-structured interviews and focus groups with practitioners in these organisations, we shed light on the complexities of the ‘how’, the ‘who’, and the ‘what’ of social justice that arise in such participatory practice. Findings Our findings suggest that even in practices that situate the principle of participatory parity at the heart of their fight for social justice, power asymmetries and social inequalities require attention. Exclusionary mechanisms become apparent in how practitioners try to support participatory parity of people in poverty in the different components in the organisation. When practitioners try to overcome these exclusionary effects, a sheer complexity and inescapable power struggles become visible. Moreover, the ambiguity of how practitioners attempt to empower people in poverty and enhance structural change leads to tensions between affirmative and transformative strategies in the fight against poverty. Applications Practitioners should be aware that they will never be able to resolve or escape inherent complexities in their attempts to work on a par with people in poverty. Nevertheless, it remains valuable to make continuous efforts to inform the public debate about the socially unjust nature of poverty and social inequality in our societies.

The New Forest: The Relationship between Social Work and Socially Engaged Art Practice Revisited

In 2015, Leanne Schubert and Mel Gray wrote a critical commentary in the British Journal of Social Work entitled ‘The death of emancipatory social work and birth of socially engaged art practice’. In this commentary, the authors argue that artists have moved in to fill the void that increasingly emerges as social workers vacate the public spaces of activism and social change. However, there is little consensus in the existing body of research about the so-called ‘death of emancipatory social work’ and what ‘social engagement’ in the arts precisely entails. The aim of our article is therefore to revisit the relationship between social work and socially engaged art practices. A rhetorical analysis of the differing constructions about social engagement in the case study The New Forest displays different roles of artists: (i) the artist generates change, (ii) the artist imagines, (iii) the artist researches, (iv) the artist acts as an entrepreneur and (v) the artist confirms the social order/takes advantage. Our analysis of how artists deal with the complexity of social problems and attempt to take up an explicit social engagement offers insights for a reconsideration of the emancipatory potential and social justice aspirations of social work.