Forms Of Privilege Research Articles

‘Just leader? No, lideresa!’ Experiences of female leaders working in climate change disaster risk reduction and environmental sustainability in the global south

Abstract As environmental disasters disproportionately affect women, international guidelines to address the disparity focus on the inclusion of women in disaster risk reduction programs. While inclusion is a noble pursuit, it may fall short of equitable outcomes and instead lead to tokenization. Drawing on standpoint feminism and intersectionality, the goal of this study was to investigate tensions between inclusion and equity for women working in disaster risk reduction. We interviewed women from Ecuador and Tajikistan and asked them about the ways that gender shapes their experiences working in disaster risk reduction. We found that the women reflect upon themselves as agents with various forms of privilege and disadvantage, based on their multifaceted identities and differing levels of perceived discrimination within their professions. The findings suggest that inclusion, while necessary, can fall short of its promises. We recommend that organizational guidelines make everyone responsible for fostering equitable workplaces for disaster risk reduction.

Intersectionality as emergence

Intersectionality is the notion that concerns the complexity of the experiences of individuals in virtue of their belonging to multiple socially significant categories. One of its main insights is that the way society is structured around categories such as gender, race, sexuality, class, etc., produces distinctive and specific forms of discrimination and privilege for groups in the intersections. In this paper, we suggest conceiving intersectionality as a general metaphysical framework wherein specific claims to the effect that the experiences of discrimination of Black women, among others, can be fruitfully formulated and examined. The main claim is that intersectional experiences emerge from the conjunction of social categories when social structures make them relevant vis-à-vis discrimination and privilege. We then argue that our view has three main virtues: metaphysical neutrality, explanatory flexibility and methodological openness. Explaining these virtues will allow us to contrast our proposal with alternatives from the recent literature.

Feeling lucky: young adults, housing struggles, and the neoliberal politics of entitlement

This paper critically examines why young adults characterize themselves as ‘lucky’ when describing their housing experiences, often when those experiences reflect considerable struggle. We explore this narrative as it emerges in conversation with 29 young adults living in Toronto, Canada. Results of the analysis indicate that some young adults employ the narrative of luck to describe structural forms of privilege they experience within the housing system, while others make use of this narrative in ways that reflect their sense of disentitlement to housing. A critical interpretation of these findings suggests that these two narratives, while used by different groups of individuals, both reflect and reinforce a broader discourse of neoliberalism within the housing system. Specifically, our analysis highlights how the narrative of luck obscures structural inequalities that condition access to safe, secure and suitable housing, while simultaneously reinforcing a neoliberal ideology of (dis)entitlement to housing. We conclude our analysis by considering the implications of this narrative for the immediate- and long-term housing struggles of young adults.

Participatory action research and intersectionality: a critical dialogical reflection of a study with older adults

PurposeResearchers who work in partnership with older adults in participatory studies often experience various advantages, but also complex ethical questions or even encounter obstacles during the research process. This paper aims to provide insights into the value of an intersectional lens in participatory research to understand how power plays out within a mixed research team of academic and community co-researchers.Design/methodology/approachFour academic researchers reflected in a case-study approach in a dialogical way on two critical case examples with the most learning potential by written dialogical and via face-to-face meetings in duos or trios. This study used an intersectionality-informed analysis.FindingsThis study shows that the intersectional lens helped the authors to understand the interactions of key players in the study and their different social locations. Intersections of age, gender, ethnicity/class and professional status stood out as categories in conflict. In hindsight, forms of privilege and oppression became more apparent. The authors also understood that they reproduced traditional power dynamics within the group of co-researchers and between academic and community co-researchers that did not match their mission for horizontal relations. This study showed that academics, although they wanted to work toward social inclusion and equality, were bystanders and people who reproduced power relations at several crucial moments. This was disempowering for certain older individuals and social groups and marginalized their voices and interests.Originality/valueTill now, not many scholars wrote in-depth about race- and age-related tensions in partnerships in participatory action research or related approaches, especially not about tensions in research with older people.

Adaptation at whose expense? Explicating the maladaptive potential of water storage and climate-resilient growth for Māori women in northern Aotearoa

Drawing on ethnographic research with Indigenous Māori women in northern Aotearoa (New Zealand) we challenge the presumed benefits of neoliberal, infrastructural-focussed climate adaptation, and advocate for far greater engagement with multiple subjectivities and intersecting inequalities in the design of climate adaptation in Global North, settler colonial contexts. Focussing on a government-led water storage project that aims to enhance local communities’ economic wellbeing through climate-adapted horticulture, we demonstrate how interlinked forms of marginalisation and privilege mediate the distribution of benefits from climate adaptation and decrease rather than increase wellbeing for multiply marginalised subjectivities. Combining the concept of racial capitalism with intersectionality we advance a novel theoretical framework to advance insights about more equitable and nuanced adaptation in an under-researched, settler colonial context. Using this framework, we explore the maladaptive potential of the water project which grows regional economic resilience through violent climate-related alterations to low-income, single and/or older Māori women’s bodies. We demonstrate how settler colonial legacies, structures, and intergenerational traumas are lived through and collide with intersecting racial, class, gender, and age-based disadvantages, that together mediate local labour relations and decision-making processes that ultimately exacerbate climate vulnerability for particular groups of Māori women in the region.

Failure Privilege in Policymaking: Exploitation, (In)visibilization, and Future Projection in Abortion Policy in Poland

Who gets to benefit from failure is a hot topic in recent research on science and innovation. This article articulates the phenomenon of failure privilege on the terrain of public policy, that is, circumstantial and institutionally ingrained dispositions to use policy downfalls, derailments, and crises as resources of policy action, tools of integration, and dynamism. Building on analyses of policy failures, the article advances a typology of three forms of privilege: exploitation, (in)visibilization, and projection of policy futures. It brings illustrations from abortion policymaking in Poland. Here, failure privilege interacts with a bio-political and culturally polarized setting that further blends neoliberal mechanisms of failing with post-Communist transformation of cultures of failure. This leads to the argument that exploitation and controversial interventions in public policy demand legitimacy that is today constructed by advancing imaginaries and models of failure that allow actors to both visibilize new futures and advance a policy stalemate. Failure is a powerful resource of integration and even surveillance, as well as a factor furthering the politics of waiting. Redefining it is a crucial policy win and entails complex and implicit mechanisms impacting policy agendas.

:Studying While Black: Race, Education and Emancipation in South African Universities

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Webs of oppression: An intersectional analysis of inequalities facing women activists in Palestine

How can we understand the multiple, intersecting webs of oppression that Palestinian women activists face in their everyday organizing? With a long tradition of counter-hegemonic organizing, the Palestinian context presents opportunities and challenges for women pursuing activist causes in the public domain. Adopting an intersectionality framework, we uncover how gender, class and settler-colonized domination interact, engendering dynamics of oppression differentiated by activists’ social positions. Activists’ stories captured at interview reveal they were not victims across all categories of difference, experiencing forms of relative privilege, characterized as safeguarded, secured and sheltered. We connect relative privilege to the patchwork nature of Palestinian institutions, whereby women’s agency intermingles with a patchwork of historically constituted structures and conditions. Our fine-grained study contributes to literature on feminist and activist organizing and to theorizations of intersectionality by identifying forms of relative oppression and privilege as women actively resist hegemonic gendered structures in Palestine.

Spatiotemporal accessibility by public transport and time wealth: Insights from two peripheral neighbourhoods in Malmö, Sweden

This paper contributes to the understanding of spatiotemporal accessibility inequalities by exploring how the current public transport (PT) provision affects the time wealth of PT users living in two peripheral neighbourhoods in Malmö. The paper investigates time-related resources and constraints that concur in defining accessibility inequalities, identifies forms of temporal disadvantage and privilege and addresses the relevance of recognizing and meeting the multiple time-related needs of (potential) PT users. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the study integrates results from a thematic analysis of interviews and from a GIS spatiotemporal accessibility analysis of PT schedules to understand whether and how the current PT provision (a) allows users to carry out the desired or needed activities by PT in the time available to them, (b) is harmonized with their spatiotemporal access needs and (c) supports or hinders the users’ ability to control their travel time. The paper suggests that, in the observed cases, the PT provision provides unequal opportunities for faster connections and information, exposing some users to time-related transport disadvantage. Also, the current PT provision does not always seem to be harmonized with the participants’ access needs, especially during off-peak hours. The findings highlight the importance of taking into consideration the time wealth of (potential) PT users with different access needs, resources, and constraints, with the aim to both tackle transport disadvantage and support the adoption of sustainable modal choices. The study provides directions for further spatiotemporal accessibility research and for urban time and mobility policies.

Examining awareness of privilege among midwestern college students: An analysis of race/ethnicity, gender, and religion.

Dominant group members often are not aware of the privileges they benefit from due to their dominant group membership. Yet individuals are members of multiple groups and may simultaneously occupy multiple categories of dominance and marginality, raising the question of how different group memberships work in concert to facilitate or inhibit awareness of multiple forms of privilege. Examining awareness of privilege is important as awareness may be linked to action to dismantle systems of privilege that maintain oppression and inequality. Grounded in intersectional scholarship, in this study we examined how occupying intersecting categories of race/ethnicity, gender, and religion corresponded to an awareness of White, male, and Christian privilege. In a sample of 2321 Midwestern college students, we demonstrated that students from marginalized groups broadly reported greater awareness of all forms of privilege than students from dominant groups, and the difference between marginalized and dominant groups was most pronounced when the specific group category (e.g., gender) aligned with the type of privilege (e.g., male privilege). We also tested interactions among race/ethnicity, gender, and religion, only finding an interaction between race/ethnicity and religion for awareness of White and male privilege. These findings helped to clarify that multiple group memberships tended to contribute to awareness as multiple main effects rather than as multiplicative. Finally, we examined mean differences among the eight intersected groups to explore similarities and differences among groups in awareness of all types of privilege. Taken together, these findings quantitatively demonstrate the ways in which group memberships work together to contribute to awareness of multiple forms of privilege. We discuss study limitations and implications for community psychology research and practice.

Bangkok electric

Visitors to the city of Bangkok are often struck by the sight of exposed, dangling, and dangerous electrical wires and a multitude of inconveniently placed utility posts that impede pedestrian circulation. This article argues that the city's seemingly dysfunctional electric power infrastructure is not a failure of modernisation but the outcome, or ‘style’, of a socio-technological system built by and operated for a narrow set of interests. To demonstrate this, the article presents a history of the electric power system that shows how its initial development in the early twentieth century produced new forms of privilege and disenfranchisement that are now the basis of social division in the city. By approaching the study of Bangkok's electric power system in terms of equity, the article offers a framework for evaluating how infrastructure shapes cultural practice, social relations, and political authority.

Remote Reproductive Rights.

In July 2020, a federal district court lifted the U.S. Food & Drug Administration's ("FDA") restriction requiring patients to pick up the first drug of a medication abortion-mifepristone-at a healthcare facility. Soon after, an ongoing experiment with remote care for abortion expanded, as telemedicine did in other areas, and virtual clinics began offering no-touch abortions. Growth of virtual care stalled in January 2021 when the Supreme Court stayed a district court's order pending the appeals process. But in April 2022, persuaded by the evidence of remote abortion's safety and efficacy, the FDA suspended enforcement of the in-person rule for the course of the pandemic. On December 16, 2021, the FDA lifted the requirement that patients pick up mifepristone at a healthcare facility, clearing the way for supervised mail delivery and pharmacy dispensation.The expansion of virtual clinics, however, is not without significant limitations. First, questions remain about how to implement the new FDA regulation, specifically regarding certified pharmacies, and several FDA restrictions on mifepristone remain in place. Second, about half the country prohibits telehealth for abortion by either banning all abortion or by requiring the physical presence of a healthcare professional. Third, participation in telemedicine depends on various forms of privilege. Patients must have a stable internet connection or smartphone as well as an uncomplicated pregnancy, which, in part because of U.S. health disparities, is more likely for wealthier and white people. Even with the expansion of remote care, the need for clinical spaces will not disappear; in fact, it will come under increasing pressure.This Article maps the emergence of virtual abortion care and analyzes the potential trajectory of medication abortion access, given that the Supreme Court has overturned constitutional protections for abortion. It considers the limits of telehealth for abortion-who telehealth can reach and who it cannot. Those living in states that permit abortion will have new options for ending early pregnancies. Those residing in states hostile to abortion will have to seek cross-border care, carry pregnancies to term, or find other avenues to end pregnancies. But the portability of abortion pills, when mailed by prescribers or dispensed by certified pharmacies, will test how closely states officials (or anyone else) can police or impede access to medication abortion.

Reimagining Agricultural Embodiment with Feminist Foundations

Reimagining Agricultural Embodiment with Feminist Foundations

Taking back taste in food bank Britain: on privilege, failure and (un)learning with auto-corporeal methods

Food banks are a growing feature of austerity Britain. Despite this, little research has focused on the object central to their operations: the food they provision. In charting an attempt to “open” food bank parcels to greater scrutiny, this article highlights the need to take back taste from predominantly nutritionist framings of food. Drawing on recent work in more-than-representational and visceral geography, it is argued that taste must be understood as an embodied, sensorial and social phenomenon. However, this article highlights the ethico-political dilemmas that accompany such an undertaking, and the wider implications raised by studying the tastes of socially and economically marginalised groups. These tensions are explored through recourse to the political, ethical and epistemological stakes of auto-corporeal methods – in this case, employing my own tasting body in consuming a “food bank diet.” In arguing that such an approach is necessarily wedded to forms of failure and privilege, this undertaking reveals the need to scrutinise the more-than-tasted features of power and space that shape the relational landscapes of Food Bank Britain. By working with these failures, this article concludes that the potential of such corporeal methods lies not in producing “data,” but instead in unlearning and scrutinising one’s embodied privileges in the face of poverty.

Precarious privilege in the time of pandemic: A hybrid (auto)ethnographic perspective on COVID-19 and international schooling in China.

Although the impact of the global COVID‐19 pandemic in terms of school closure and the sudden shift to online learning has started to be explored, little has so far been written about the impact on teachers. This paper addresses this gap by drawing on the first author's autoethnographic experiences of working in the growing body of ‘non‐traditional’ international schooling in Shanghai, China, during the first wave of the pandemic in early 2020. These experiences are complemented by insights from other teachers from the author's school site, leading to a hybrid (auto)ethnographic perspective. By utilising and developing the emergent concept of ‘precarious privilege’, we can see that whilst the pandemic has restricted teachers' movements and agency in a physical sense through lockdowns and travel restrictions, this immobility also fosters new symbolic and physical spaces, which in turn give rise to new forms of privilege. The privilege in this context is not financial, as is often the case, but rather existential (reclaiming a more authentic self) and spatial (the school offers teachers security) in nature. This fresh, nuanced approach to discussing precarity is timely and necessary. Given the novelty of the situation we now find ourselves in, new positionings are required to orient the individual and the researcher to a post‐pandemic world. This paper offers one such positioning in the form of autoethnography for (re)imagining precarity and privilege in international schooling within the context of an emerging new world.

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

“Suspect-Proof”? Paranoia, Suspicious Reading, and the Racial Passing Narrative

Abstract This short essay considers racial passing narratives in relation to the “postcritical turn,” highlighting the proliferating reappraisals of the practices of “suspicious” or “symptomatic” reading in literary studies and the extent to which passing narratives offer an opportunity to test some of the claims of this body of scholarship. The utility of the passing narrative for this critical project lies in its persistent, self-conscious foregrounding of reading practices. Revisiting passing narratives in light of postcritique reveals that symptomatic reading is not a monolithic practice; rather, there are multiple ways of reading suspiciously. Moreover, and more importantly, passing narratives disclose that what has now become an orthodoxy in postcritique—that attitudes such as “paranoia,” “suspicion,” and “vigilance” profoundly limit “the thickness and richness of our aesthetic attachments”—ignores contexts, like that of a passer in a white supremacist society, in which such strategies are not a choice but are essential for survival (Felski 17). The key question posed herein is: What forms of privilege enable a reader to relinquish her attachment to paranoia, suspicion, and vigilance; to opt for openness rather than guardedness, submission rather than aggression (21)? Narratives of racial passing provide one answer to that question. The key question posed herein is: What forms of privilege enable a reader to relinquish her attachment to paranoia, suspicion, and vigilance; to opt, as Rita Felski advocates, for openness rather than guardedness, submission rather than aggression?

COMMENTARY: THE GREAT DIVIDES

Democracy is unstable as a political system as long as it remains a political system and nothing more, instead of being, as it should be, not only a form of government but a type of society, and a manner of life which is in harmony with that type. To make it a type of society requires an advance along two lines. It involves, in the first place, the resolute elimination of all forms of special privilege which favour some groups and depress others, whether their source be differences of environment, of education, or of pecuniary income. It involves, in the second place, the conversion of economic power, now often an irresponsible tyrant, into a servant of society, working within clearly defined limits and accountable for its actions to a public authority.R. H. Tawney, Equality, 1931.

Fostering the Success of Working-Class Latina Doctoral Students at Predominantly White Institutions

Aim/Purpose: Latina doctoral students’ educational experiences are often mediated by their social class status, race, and gender. Latinas have sustained an increasing presence in doctoral programs at various colleges and universities across the United States; yet, they are continually underrepresented in doctoral programs at predominantly White institutions. The author identifies evidence-supported, personal and institutional factors that may contribute to working-class Latina doctoral students’ successful persistence at predominantly White institutions. Background: The tension between personal identities versus academic capability can make the doctoral education experience academically, socially, emotionally, and financially challenging for Latinas from low-income backgrounds. Latina/Latino Critical Race Theory and Multiracial Feminist Theory are introduced as lenses to examine aspects of the doctoral education experience that may impede or support Latina students’ retention. Methodology: As a conceptual article, this paper is an examination of research regarding the experiences of doctoral students of color at predominantly White institutions in the United States and summarizes how Latina doctoral students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds can succeed in these environments. Contribution: This article outlines evidence-supported strategies that may influence working-class Latina doctoral students’ successful persistence at predominantly White institutions. Findings: The research highlighted in this article emphasizes how factors such as embracing familismo, increasing faculty diversity, establishing peer networks, and creating inclusive class-concious academic programs and new student orientations, may contribute to the doctoral persistence of Latinas from economically disadvantaged backgrounds attending predominantly White institutions. Recommendations for Practitioners: Personal and institutional factors are recommended for faculty and student affairs professionals to support the doctoral persistence of Latina students such as embracing personal agency and academic efficacy, embracing familismo, recognizing the myth of meritocracy, establishing peer support networks, creating inclusive academic environments, establishing formal faculty mentorships, and fostering class conscious faculty. Recommendation for Researchers: The literature presented in this paper provides ideas for future research opportunities that could further examine how supportive relationships and inclusiveness promote Latina doctoral students’ educational success. Impact on Society: Latinas experience overlapping forms of privilege and subordination depending on their race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and academic setting. Future Research: Further development of transformative research on this topic may improve inclusive educational practices and potentially increase access to doctoral-level education for Latinas and other economically disadvantaged students of color.

Too Rich to Care? Southern African (SADC) International Students Navigating Transnationalism and Class at South African Universities

The 2015–16 fallist student protests across South African university campuses highlighted the shortcomings of the post-apartheid political system in resolving persistent inequalities based on race, class and gender. However, the experiences of Southern African Development Community (SADC) international students at South African universities have received little attention. Using qualitative interviews with SADC students studying at Rhodes University in Makhanda during the campus protests, this article argues that the protests also created new forms of exclusion. The protest movements adopted identity politics that attacked all perceived forms of privilege, and SADC students on South African campuses felt excluded from the protests because they were described by the protesters as ‘too rich to care’. SADC students themselves rejected this assumption and instead emphasised their specific challenges regarding their status as immigrants, and the precariousness of the middle classes in southern Africa. By drawing together the concepts of migration, social class and higher education, this article addresses the important subject of transformation at South African universities through the intersections of transnationalism and class.