Concern For Social Justice Research Articles

Two dual language preschool teachers’ critical consciousness of their roles as language policy makers

ABSTRACT This paper explores how two dual language preschool teachers demonstrated critical consciousness in their dual language education (DLE) classroom in Arizona. DLE has historically been grounded in equity for language minoritized students and promises to support students’ bilingualism, biliteracy, sociocultural competence, and academic achievement. However, inequities within DLE have been a social justice concern hindering DLE’s goals. Arguing the role of teachers’ critical consciousness in addressing inequities in DLE, we used Spolky’s language policy theory to understand teachers’ language policies in their classroom. In this ethnographic study, data was collected through interviews, participant observation, and recording classroom instruction. Utilizing the constant-comparative method, we identified two themes—critical reflection and action—exhibiting the teachers’ critical consciousness as language policymakers in their classrooms. The teachers reflected on the DLE’s value for students and the power hierarchies among English and Spanish and the speakers of those languages. Their actions were toward promoting bilingualism, challenging English hegemony, and creating an inclusive and social justice-oriented learning community. Our study contributes to preschool DLE literature by documenting the teachers’ challenges regarding how larger oppressive beliefs related to language and race influenced students’ language use and the teachers’ actions to dismantle such challenges.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Hashtag #WeAreAllIsraaGhrayeb on Twitter: An Exploration of Honor Killing Crimes in Palestine

AbstractThis research investigates a crucial social justice concern “honor killing” that are affecting women worldwide especially in Palestine. Feminist theory and critical theory provide a lens to explore issues of gender inequality, patriarchy, and oppression. The researcher utilized qualitative research method based on critical discourse analysis of the Twitter hashtag #WeAreAllIsraaGhrayeb between August 22 – September 22, 2019. Analyzing the tweets identified three themes: tweeters' anger and frustration against the killing of Israa Ghrayeb, the impact of honor killing crimes within the Palestinian community, and an urgent call for justice by action. The author is a participatory action researcher (PAR) who gained an experiential understanding and deeper insights of cultural relevance to address contemporary issues and to contextualize a cultural reality to benefit stakeholders (i.e., entities or individuals who witnessed the horrors of honor killing) by developing a strategic action plan that can bring social change leading to a just society.

We Still Have to Eat: Communication Infrastructure and Local Food Organizing as Public Health Responses to COVID-19 in Greensboro, North Carolina

Food insecurity remains a pervasive and persistent social justice concern, both locally and globally–a concern that was heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay focuses on three short case studies around local food organizing, communication, and community in Greensboro, NC. Partners across three separate but related interventions leveraged their community and communication resources through listening sessions, surveys, and stories to ensure that individuals and families could continue to access food during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. By offering these case studies as an example of organizing (and reorganizing) during COVID-19, the analysis also opens up a conversation about power, resistance, and change at the intersections of poverty and access. Scholarly discussions of food insecurity continue to reinforce the need to address both food access and poverty in attempts to build resilient food systems. We take a community-engaged approach that emphasizes the importance of communication infrastructure to illustrate both the simple and mundane resources as well as the creative and innovative interventions that communities and their partners implemented during the initial onset of COVID-19 in the United States.

Critical infrastructure literacies and/as ways of relating in big data ecologies

In response to the numerous ethical issues involving big data, this article positions the infrastructural dynamics of big data storage and circulation as a concern for social and environmental justice. After identifying how big data accumulate in place-based ecologies that are made vulnerable to sustain ever-increasing quantities of data, the author explains how most, if not all, digital writing practices are relationally tethered to often distant places. In response, the author argues for developing and sustaining critical infrastructure literacies where big data infrastructures are not perceived as ethereal, cloud-like entities, but as materialities with relations to place, land, water, history, climate, culture, nation, and much else. Attending to infrastructure with a cultural rhetorics orientation attentive to relationality, accountability, and story, the article details four critical practices that place digital citizens within relational matrices where they are asked to account for how data practices affect a constellation of people, places, and environments.

Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible

Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible

FRONTLINE: Jill Emberson: A lifetime of bearing witness to help others

Jill Emberson, an award-winning Australian journalist of Tongan heritage died in 2019. She achieved national attention for her campaign to provide a voice for all women suffering from ovarian cancer and for more and fairer funding for ovarian cancer research. Through an analysis of her programmes and interviews with colleagues, this article focuses on Emberson’s journalism from daily news coverage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander protests in 1982 for public radio to her Meet the Mob podcast series in 2014. It focuses on her significant radio documentaries on women in the Pacific for the ABCs’ feminist Coming Out Show (1986) and Ties that Bind, which was about Tonga, including the Tongan diaspora in Australia (2009). It argues that Emberson’s own journey to discover her cultural identity shaped her as a reflective journalist whose work was underpinned by a concern for social justice, marginalised communities, the impacts of colonisation and gender discrimination.

Laudato si’ – A Macromarketing Manifesto for a Just and Sustainable Environment

This paper posits that Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on environmental climate change, Laudato si’ (“Praise be to you, my Lord”), or LS for short, provides a compelling and multi-faceted framework for co-creating a just and sustainable environment. LS includes considerable commentary about how markets and marketing impact the physical and social environment. Additionally, the document provides religion-inspired ethical norms for market conditions, actions, and performance that reflect both (a) the social teachings of the Catholic Church as they have evolved over the past 125 years and, as we will explain, (b) a foundational predicate of macromarketing scholarship – that is, a recognition of market systems as the primary mechanism for effectively and efficiently provisioning goods and services in contemporary society. The intent of this paper is also to harmonize two perspectives of business purpose regarding ecological issues (i.e., ethical efficacy vs. economic efficiency), commonly seen as conflicting and mutually exclusive. Absent that harmonization, those perspectives appear to force a choice between “social values and norms” and “economic incentives and circumstances” – a dichotomy that is neither optimal nor practical. Rather, we recognize that key themes in Laudato si’(LS) - environmental stewardship, concern for social justice, and a “common good” orientation that supersedes economic advantage - also correspond to issues addressed by macromarketing scholars since that sub-discipline emerged. LS is foremost a powerful “Call to Action” for those who care about protecting the ecological environment. However, LS is intentionally vague about specific solutions. It defers to analysts, academics, and policy experts to provide those. This paper outlines how macromarketing researchers are powerfully positioned to suggest the specific market and policy adjustments called for in LS.

Leveraging Attitudes, Motivations, and Values from Farmers’ Market Managers in Florida: An Opportunity to Improve Nutritional Outcomes Through Extension

Increasingly, farmers’ markets in the United States offer nutrition incentives to help limited-resource shoppers afford fresh fruits and vegetables and support local farmers. Despite increased attention to these efforts, there has been less focus on the market managers and staff members responsible for implementing and administering incentive programs. Using qualitative data collected from semi-structured phone interviews, we explore the attitudes, motivations, and values of farmers’ market managers in relation to their efforts to administer and promote a nutrition incentive program at their respective markets in Florida. Results demonstrate that program adopting managers: 1) express concern for inclusivity, social justice, and equity; 2) sympathize with the economic pressures their produce grower-vendors face; 3) are motivated to provide locally grown foods to all shoppers; 4) take pride in ethical standards and transparency protocols; and 5) value loyalty between themselves, their vendors and their customers. We believe Extension professionals can leverage prevailing attitudes among market managers to improve manager engagement with nutrition incentive programs and ensure expanded nutritional access outcomes at farmers’ markets for limited-resource shoppers.

Low Birth Weight and Psychoeducational Outcomes: Investigation of an African American Birth Cohort

African Americans experience more than double the prevalence of low birth weight (LBW)/premature birth compared to their Caucasian counterparts, reflecting a public health crisis and a significant social justice concern. However, there is a paucity of LBW outcome studies in African American samples. There are even fewer that investigate developmental outcomes within the moderately LBW range (i.e., 1500–2500 g), the most prevalent category of LBW births. This study investigates the relationship between LBW and various psychoeducational outcomes in a prospectively designed African American birth cohort. Multivariate logit analyses of the Johns Hopkins University Pathways to Adulthood study compared LBW children with normal birth weight children on a number of outcome measures at seven and 8 years of age. Results revealed that children born within the lowest birth weight category produced the most adverse findings, from both a statistical and clinical standpoint, on measures of cognitive ability, academic achievement, speech, language, auditory processing, and visual–motor integration.

Institutionalising global health: a call for ethical reflection.

We describe a global health course and pedagogy that highlights the moral ambiguity and many ethical compromises that have emerged as the discipline has increasingly become institutionalised. We encourage students to reflect on how the oft-declared aspiration for global health equity still remains seriously contested as a normative and political matter, especially in settings like the USA. We further encourage students to reflect on how authentic concern for social justice, health equity and human rights are consistently undermined by unconscious and/or intentional fealty to standard operating procedures within hierarchical structures and systems. Lastly, we encourage students to openly question and critique the dominant socioeconomic and institutional paradigms that influence practitioner ways of thinking about global health. Our aim is to provide a learning space for students to at least imagine, if not demand, more daring modes of engagement. We also encourage our colleagues in the global health education community to be forthright that the process of institutionalising global health reliably favours our own interests more than those we claim to be most concerned about. If the ideal of global health is to build a bridge to human solidarity, we see substantial risk that current popularised approaches might never yield a structural tipping point.

The Salween River as a transboundary commons: Fragmented collective action, hybrid governance and power

Viewing the Salween River as a transboundary commons, this paper illustrates how diverse state and non‐state actors and institutions in hybrid and multi‐scaled networks have influenced water governance in general, and large dam decision‐making processes in particular. Putting power relations at the centre of this analysis and drawing on the conceptual lenses of hybrid governance and critical institutionalism, we show the complexity of the fragmented processes through which decisions have been arrived at, and their implications. In the context of highly asymmetrical power relations throughout the basin, and the absence of an intergovernmental agreement to date, we argue that hybrid networks of state and non‐state actors could be strategically engaged to connect parallel and fragmented decision‐making landscapes with a goal of inclusively institutionalising the transboundary commons and maintaining connected local commons throughout the basin, foregrounding a concern for ecological and social justice.

Moved to Justice: The Effects of Socially Conscious Films on Social Justice Concerns

ABSTRACT The unique blend of fun entertainment and social relevance in socially conscious films, e.g., Black Panther (2018), appeals to viewers’ pleasure-seeking motives while it delivers social commentary. The present study examines the impact of pre-screening expectations and post-screening reflections on concerns for social justice. A two-stage 2 × 2 experiment was conducted to test the potential main effects and interactions of film expectations (socially conscious vs. fun expectations) and reflection (socially conscious vs. fun reflection) on social justice concerns, and meaningful affect. Results showed that socially conscious expectations increased social justice outcomes and meaningful affect. Mediation tests revealed that meaningful affect and threat-to-freedom explained the link between expectations and social justice concerns. Further, when conservative and some moderate viewers expect the film to be “socially important,” their perceptions of affirmative action policies become less negative. The present research provides initial evidence for the positive effects of popular, socially conscious films toward raising concerns for social justice.

The Conceptualization of Energy Justice: The EU Sphere

Abstract The regulation of the energy sector in the EU adresses different challenges in pursuance of ensuring the functioning of the energy system. One of the most pressing current energy issues in the EU is household access to energy services, which is acknowledged as social justice concern. Provided that access to universal service in the EU is recognised as a right of households, the article aims to introduce the advanced concept of energy justice desiged for the investigation of households’ ability to access sufficient energy service in the EU. The article is organized in three parts. The first part specifies the roots of energy justice. The second part assesses whether the constituent elements of energy justice comply with EU fuonding values. Lastly, the more comprehensive concept of energy justice is presented with underlying rationale.

Refining Value Sensitive Design: A (Capability-Based) Procedural Ethics Approach to Technological Design for Well-Being

Fundamental questions in value sensitive design include whether and how high-tech products/artefacts could embody values and ethical ideals, and how plural and incommensurable values of ethical and social importance could be chosen rationally and objectively at a collective level. By using a humanitarian cargo drone study as a starting point, this paper tackles the challenges that VSD’s lack of commitment to a specific ethical theory generates in practical applications. Besides, it highlights how mainstream ethical approaches usually related to VSD are incapable of solving main ethical dilemmas raised by technological design for well-being in democratic settings. Accordingly, it is argued that VSD’s ethical-democratic import would substantially be enhanced by the espousal of a procedural ethics stance and the deliberative approach to value and welfare entailed by Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Differently from rival ethical–political theories, its normative and meta-ethical foundations better handle human diversity, value-goal pluralism, conflicting vested interests as well as the epistemic-moral disagreements typical of contemporary complex democracies. Particularly, Sen’s capability approach procedural-deliberative tenets result in an “objective-impartial” choice procedure selecting a “hierarchy” of plural incommensurable values and rational goals thus, suitable to validate an applied science such as welfare-oriented technological design in concrete social environments. Conclusions suggest that refining VSD with a capability-based procedural approach to ethics fosters the concern for democracy and social justice while preserving vital scientific-technical standards. Major advantages are at an applied level to delivering ethically and socially justified, but yet highly functional technologies and high-tech products/artefacts.

Deconstructing Dominant Narratives of Urban Failure and Gentrification in a Racially Unjust City: The Case of Detroit

AbstractIn Detroit, pockets of gentrification can be found amid larger processes of neighbourhood decline. Emerging gentrification is rapidly shifting the city’s dominant narrative from one of urban failure, to a comeback city. Both these interpretations, however, are problematic. In Detroit, race is central to understanding these narratives and the different meanings of gentrification. In this paper, I draw on in‐depth interviews with key visionaries and community leaders, all of whom share a broad concern for social justice. Two narratives that both challenge the dominant perspectives on Detroit become clear. The first sees gentrification is a necessary evil whose negative effects need to be carefully managed. The second is the perspective from many African American activists that gentrification is part of a continuum of racial discrimination. An analysis of these narratives helps to expose injustices, propose socially‐just solutions and politicise gentrification and its consequences, key elements of critical urban planning.

Fairness of AI for people with disabilities

There are several respects in which recent developments in machine learning-based artificial intelligence pose challenges of fairness for people with disabilities. In this paper, some of the central problems are identified, and briefly reviewed from a philosophical perspective motivated by a broad concern for social justice, emphasizing the role of ethical considerations in informing the problem analysis.

Suva Residents’ Views on Cancer, Diabetes and HIV in The Fiji Times

The burden of preventable diseases is increasing in the South Pacific Island Countries and Territories. In Fiji, significant media attention and national finances are spent on public dissemination of the modifiable risk factors of chronic illnesses. However, little is known about lay societal perceptions of chronic illnesses and of people living with these illnesses. This preliminary study takes an area-situated approach to lay knowledge and examines Suva residents’ moral evaluations associated with socially significant health concerns in Fiji. Using the case studies of HIV, cancer, and diabetes, the research employs content analysis to examine 144 Suva residents’ Letters to the Editor, published between 2000 and 2019 in The Fiji Times. The findings indicate that letter writers on chronic illnesses are power sensitive, interested in governmental responsibility, and aware of the role of stigma in creating inequitable health outcomes. The study’s findings locate chronic illness as not only a medical responsibility but also a social justice and human rights concern that requires a multisectoral approach, with community-tailored responses at the heart of all discussions. The lay-societal recognition of the three illnesses as being socially relevant suggests grassroots support for policies directed towards structural reforms for the prevention and management of these illnesses.

Thomas Paine: Britain, America, & France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution by J. C. D. Clark

Reviewed by: Thomas Paine: Britain, America, & France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution by J. C. D. Clark Thomas W. Merrill (bio) Keywords Thomas Paine, American Revolution, Enlightenment, Age of Revolutions, political thought Thomas Paine: Britain, America, & France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. By J. C. D. Clark. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2018. Pp. 485. Cloth, $40.95.) This book reinterprets Thomas Paine and his significance through the close study of Paine's contexts in the familiar fashion of the Cambridge school of the history of political thought. Clark argues against schools of thought that see Paine as an agent in an unambiguous narrative of the development of liberal democratic modernity. He identifies three such schools of thought: one that sees Paine as a progenitor of working-class politics in England (E. P. Thompson); a second that sees him as an advocate for a worldwide tide of democratic revolution (R. R. Palmer); and a third that sees him as an exemplar of "Enlightenment" discourses of human rights (Robert Lamb). Clark has a fourth set of interlocutors, who are focused less on the interpretation of modernity than on the meaning and scope of political theory itself: those scholars (here unidentified) who think that political theory is best understood as a set of "perennial problems." To this list one may add one more interlocutor: Paine himself. The man who asserted that "the cause of America is the [End Page 144] cause of all mankind" and that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again" invited his readers to see him as an agent of a grand narrative, articulating a universal, presumably perennial truth. The drama of this book, then, is the confrontation between the Cambridge school approach, with its skepticism of universal claims and its focus on particularistic contexts, and a thinker whose claim of universalistic, revolutionary significance was a defining feature of his self-presentation. Clark's thesis is as follows. Readers after Paine's time have tended to see him as the proponent of a universal democratic revolution premised on natural rights and continuous with causes we now associate with the left: universal suffrage, workers' rights, the welfare state, secularism, etc. But despite appearances to the contrary, this is not accurate. Paine did not anticipate movements asserting the rights of enslaved persons in America, the rights of women, or even universal manhood suffrage. Nor was Paine an atheist or a secularist in the way that some French revolutionaries or English Utilitarians became. Paine's frame of reference was in the past, in English discontent with the Hanoverian monarchy, not forward-looking toward ideological developments of the nineteenth century. Paine was moved more by a desire to negate monarchy and aristocracy (the hereditary principle) than he was by any well-deliberated positive picture of the world to come. Even Paine's advocacy of state assistance to the poor, often interpreted as anticipating the welfare state, has more to do with the English poor law, Clark thinks, than it does with a progressive concern for social justice. Clark does not deny that these social movements had roots in Paine's time, but he denies that Paine had much to do with them. One of the contributions of this book is an appendix in which Clark "de-attributes" to Paine texts that he thinks have been wrongly attributed to him (most notably a long passage in the Rights of Man, Part First that Clark thinks Paine got from Lafayette). Yet the purpose of the work can be said to be de-attribution in a broader sense as well: Clark aims to cut away misleading opinions we have formed about Paine by reading him in the light of our own preoccupations, leaving behind a somewhat homely figure whose universalist claims mask particular and now largely forgotten concerns. Clark thinks that Paine actually did not know much about America or France and that Paine's revolutionary writings have more to do with England than they do their ostensible subjects. He also thinks that it is incorrect to see the American and French Revolutions as motivated by a common belief in a doctrine of natural rights. The advocacy...

Barriers to Calling 9-1-1 during Overdose Emergencies in a Canadian Context

Research has shown there are notable barriers to calling 9-1-1 during accidental overdose emergencies. Overdose is a significant health and social justice concern, yet Canadian researchers have not explored the existence or prevalence of these systemic obstacles. The current case study examines the barriers to calling 9-1-1 that people face in Southern Ontario when confronted with accidental overdose incidents. The locality of this study is particularly suitable as Wellington County, that is, Waterloo Region and Guelph are socio-demographically similar to Ontario and Canada. Barriers were assessed by surveying individuals that have or currently use drugs (n=291) and are clients of local methadone clinics or outreach services. Data were explored using frequency tables and then compared using crosstabulations. The findings of this case study suggest there are multiple barriers to calling 9-1-1 during accidental drug overdoses. Similar to previous studies, the most common barriers cited were fear of being arrested (53%), breaching probation or parole (30%), and fear of losing custody of children (24%). Lowering the barriers to calling 9-1-1 may help to forge the path necessary to improved health care and access to resources. Ultimately, and most importantly, lives may be saved.

Social cohesion in rural Australia: Framework for conformity or social justice?

AbstractWhile social cohesion has become a commonly accepted policy goal and framework in many ethnically diverse societies, there is a general concern in some academic literature that it can be a form of governmentality that constructs manageable subjects and communities, represses diversity and distracts attention from the social, political and economic production of inequalities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two rural Australian towns with ethnically diverse populations, this article engages with these criticisms of social cohesion while simultaneously asserting that social cohesion is viewed by local practitioners as a desirable objective for both strengthening intercultural community and addressing issues of social justice and inequality. We also aim to bring some needed clarity to relevant debates in the literature in distinguishing between social cohesion discourses used for normative and/or homogenising purposes versus frameworks developed in the academic literature with a concern for social justice and equality among diverse populations.