Oppressive Nature Research Articles

Oppression and Resistance in Southern Higher and Adult Education: Mississippi and The Dynamics of Equity and Social Justice by Kamden K. Strunk, Leslie Ann Locke, and Georgianna L. Martin

Reviewed by: Oppression and Resistance in Southern Higher and Adult Education: Mississippi and The Dynamics of Equity and Social Justice by Kamden K. Strunk, Leslie Ann Locke, and Georgianna L. Martin Cindy Ann Kilgo OPPRESSION AND RESISTANCE IN SOUTHERN HIGHER AND ADULT EDUCATION: MISSISSIPPI AND THE DYNAMICS OF EQUITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Kamden K. Strunk, Leslie Ann Locke, and Georgianna L. Martin New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 231 pages $119.99 (hardcover) $89.99 (ebook) "Thank God for Mississippi." It is a quote that opens Chapter 1 of Strunk, Locke, and Martin's (2017), Oppression and Resistance in Southern Higher and Adult Education: Mississippi and the Dynamics of Equity and Social Justice. It is also a quote that I, having spent half of my childhood in the Mississippi Delta and the other half in rural Georgia, heard often. As someone who has studied and continues to study higher education and student affairs, I am often disappointed that so many texts fail to provide examples or cases involving the southern United States and more specifically the Deep South. Often it is considered not transferable or generalizable to other regions of the U.S., given the unique and storied past of the region. When this book became available, it immediately sparked my interest and after reading and reviewing it, I can say that it certainly did not disappoint. The authors of this text built a compelling case within this opening chapter for why Mississippi, despite usually ranking last in (all) education markers, should in fact be studied. After the introductory chapter, the book is organized into three sections: (1) Oppression in Mississippi Adult and Higher Education, (2) Resistance in Mississippi Adult and Higher Education, and (3) The Dynamics of Equity and Social Justice in Southern Adult and Higher Education. Each section consists of two to three chapters. Further, each section integrates oppression and resistance related to multiple social identities, including race, sexuality, gender identity, and social class. I outline in my review below each of the three sections, as well as the relevance of this text to student affairs practice. Oppression in Mississippi Adult and Higher Education Chapter 2, "Conditions of Oppression in Mississippi Adult and Higher Education: The Legacy of White Supremacy and Injustice," detailed the contemporary segregation present within education systems in Mississippi. This chapter provided data to suggest that schools at all levels in Mississippi are "at least as segregated as they were before Brown v. Board of Education" (p. 33). The authors used publically-available data to illustrate the pervasive nature of educational oppression within the state. The authors also described the oppression faced by low-income students and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) students. Chapter 3, "Tracing the Development and Entrenchment of Oppression in Mississippi Adult and Higher Education," provided the historical side to Chapter 2. In this [End Page 171] chapter, the authors described the ways in which Mississippi remained segregated, partially due to the creation of White-flight private K-12 academies in protest of desegregation. The authors also provided data on the disproportionate state funding of public postsecondary institutions. Chapter 4, "Oppression and Resistance Timeline" was particularly intriguing, as it provided a tangible timeline of oppression and resistance within the south. This timeline functions as a way to transition from oppression within the state to highlighting the resistance efforts, both in the past and present. This timeline has great functionality and benefit to readers of all types, including within curricular or programmatic venues involving undergraduate students. Resistance in Mississippi Adult and Higher Education Chapter 5, "Black Resistance" outlined resistance from the antebellum period to today. The authors highlighted major players in the desegregation of Predominantly-White Institutions (PWIs) in the state, community efforts, and contemporary educational organizations. The authors focus on the ways in which resistance has occurred, despite the oppressive influences within the state. One section being titled, "Resistance May Get You Killed in Mississippi" (p. 118) illustrates the risk involved with resistance movements within the state and region. In Chapter 6, "Social Class and Resistance," the authors dove deeper into the inequities by race by also considering socioeconomic factors. The authors highlighted the interconnected nature of race and class...

Sexual Politics on Stage: Sincerity, Gender, and Revolution in the Comedies of Isabelle de Charrière

In her comedies of the late 1780s and early 1790s, Isabelle de Charrière dared to question influential eighteenth-century thinkers and politicians such as Rousseau and Robespierre. She denounced their politically motivated notions of sincerity and corruption, of femininity and class, albeit in subtle, mediated, and often quite subversive ways. Eager to participate in the public debates of her day, she condemned deviousness and dishonesty not solely in aristocratic salon society but in all social classes and political camps. She fought narrow gender stereotypes and prejudice against female learning, she portrayed the dependent and oppressive nature of women's domestic lives, and she set out to teach girls survival skills in a misogynous world. Despite increasing hostility and adversity, Charrière was able to challenge dominant theories on society, education, and gender, if necessary resorting to oblique and indirect methods to advance her progressive ideas.

The Concept of the Demonic in Herkus Kunčius’s Novella A Most Loyal Metaphysical Friend and Marius Ivaškevičius’s Drama The Mistr

There are two works of contemporary Lithuanian literature that effectively explore the theme of the demonic: Herkus Kunčius’s novella A Most Loyal Metaphysical Friend (Ištikimiausias metafizinis draugas, 2010) and the play The Mistr (Mistras, 2010), by Marius Ivaškevičius. The author of this article examines how these two works modify the traditional literary concept of the demonic – both works present the demonic not in classical, transcendental terms but as an immanent force. Considering the works from the perspective of literary theology, the author asks whether, and which kind of, theological thinking they develop.Herkus Kunčius’s novella is a postmodern metafiction (a fiction about a fiction): the central character of the narrative is the legendary Transylvanian vampire Count Dracula, the main character in Irish writer Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula (1897). Kunčius’s Dracula is the creation of another character’s unhealthy consciousness – a “creation within a creation.” A parody of horror novels, films, etc. about vampires, the novella also parodies the language of psychiatrists, the characters who develop an idea about the demonic as an untreatable psychiatric illness: in the nihilistic reality of the work there simply is no one to treat it.Marius Ivaškevičius’s drama is a tragi-comical grotesque pasted together from Lithuanian historical and cultural symbols and analyzes the person of Adomas Mickevičius (1798–1855). In religious and cultural history, the prototype for Mistr in the play – Andrzej Towiański (1799–1878), a self-proclaimed prophet, “a mistr called by God” – represents the archetypical figure of the false prophet. The main meaning accorded to the demonic as represented in Ivaškevičius’s play is the demonic nature of political oppression: the work offers an original variation on the entanglement of political aggression and the demonic typically found in Lithuanian literature.

Achieving Latina students: Aspirational counterstories and critical reflections on parental community cultural wealth

ABSTRACTIn this study, six Latina students shared perceptions of their parental influence on their educational aspirations. CRT, LatCrit, and community cultural wealth provide the tripartite framework for analyzing issues of race, class, gender, language, culture, and immigration by examining their roles in society through counterstories. Learning in an after-school program about educational advancement, these participants navigated against deficit ideology. Messages of aspirational hope, navigational inspiration, Spanish language guidance, familial kinship, social networking, and resistant intelligence enabled these students to build a foundation of personal emancipation to disrupt the systemic sociopolitical and sociocultural nature of oppression.

Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction. Edited by Michael J. Mulryan and Denis D. Grélé.

This collection of five studies analyses narratives from three national contexts, with France as its principal focus. The first chapter asserts that the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey was the model for two accounts of escapes from the Bastille (those of the abbé de Bucquoy and of Jean-Henri Masers de Latude), and that of Casanova’s flight from the Piombi in Venice. It is followed by analyses of the biographies, intended for popular consumption, of the robbers Louis-Dominique Cartouche and John Sheppard in French and English respectively (Chapter 2), and of representations of the jewel thief, the comtesse de La Motte-Valois — another escapee from the Bastille — who would attempt to ingratiate herself with the Revolutionary cause from across the English Channel (Chapter 3). The last two contributions study prison as a refuge from immorality in the form of the novel (Manon Lescaut), and the theme of the escape from an ‘oppressive’ utopian society (Tyssot de Patot’s Les Voyages et avantures de Jaques Massé). An Introduction explores some of the commonalities in these diverse escape narratives, such as their potential to act as a ‘threat to the status quo’ (p. xix), or their role in the creation of a mythology surrounding individual prisoners or prisons (most obviously, the Bastille). There is no denying the interest of these varied narratives, and their capacity to reflect such aspects of eighteenth-century thought as the place of the individual in society, the ‘force’ of the passions (p. xvi), or even (in the account of Massé’s Voyages) the oppressive nature of organizing time itself. Two escapees also vividly illustrate how individuals attempted to reposition themselves for their own ends during the turmoil of the Revolution. La Motte-Valois, as Claire Trévien writes, was ultimately unable to ‘rebrand herself’ through her memoirs (p. 54), whereas Latude, after the storming of the Bastille, ‘wandered around the worksite, sharing his life story with whoever would listen to him’ before finding himself ‘paraded through the streets as a revolutionary hero’ (editors’ introduction, p. xxiv). Chapter 4 strikingly illustrates another facet of thinking about space in the Ancien Régime, with the Americas, as Rori Bloom writes, becoming a vertiginous ‘world without walls’ for the two central protagonists of Manon Lescaut (p. 67). This is quite a concise volume, and its overall conclusions are based on a relatively wide geographical range, and a comparatively limited number of case studies. The editors posit a wide-ranging transformation in thinking about imprisonment according to which ‘prison becomes the main punishment’ in itself, but one might expect more sustained critical engagement with, for example, the Foucauldian model (and which might nuance the idea, put forward in the closing lines, that ‘at the dawn of the nineteenth century’, ‘royal power’ was compelled to ‘[implement] better justice for all’, p. 84). There are several instances where greater attention to copy-editing might be wished for (for example, ‘tempting the feat’, p. 8; ‘receiving his last rights’ p. 37). Nonetheless, this book offers a range of new perspectives about the strategies employed by marginalized individuals to criticize society, and, when the occasion arose, to negotiate a new place for themselves within it.

Our Lives Matter: The Racialized Violence of Poverty among Homeless Mothers of Color,

Intimate partner and community violence are an unrelenting presence in the lives of homeless Latina and African American women and their children. Impoverished neighborhoods are inundated with public acts of violence that impact daily life in profound ways. Sexual violence, drug use, gang violence, child abuse, and hypermasculinity are enacted visibly for all to see. Based on a four‐year ethnography of homeless families in San Francisco, this research examines the gendered and racialized violence of poverty experienced by homeless mothers in San Francisco. Women in this research have endured physical and sexual violence as children and are typically victims of adult intimate partner violence. This research presents the excruciating narratives of violence and degradation suffered by homeless women of color. Their lived experiences illustrate that for many women of color, becoming homeless is a direct result of racialized poverty and chronic family violence. Framed within the intersectionality perspective, these women's stories advance our understanding of the interlocking nature of race, gender, and class oppression.

The Impact of Authoritarian Regimes on Families … and on Therapists

Repressive powers require not only obedience on the part of the oppressed but also denial of the oppressive nature of their submission. While authoritarian governments are the focus of this article, this applies to any oppressive relationship. There is a slippery slope from experiencing the imposed nature of the oppressive rules to adapting to them to denying both internal and external evidence of their existence. To prevent that declining process becomes an urgent priority when totalitarianism appears on the political and interpersonal horizon, as it is to help people coming out of tyranny – therapists included – to recover the words and the agency lost in their previous experiences.

At the Postnational Table: Food, Fantasy, and Fetishism inTastes Like Cubaby Eduardo Machado

This article explores the transition from nationalism to postnationalism through food inTastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home(2007), by playwright Eduardo Machado. The framework used is Sigmund Freud’s narrative of the Oedipus complex. I suggest that the exilic condition of Oedipus and his rebellious behavior make the Oedipal narrative a useful tool for approaching the postnational rejection of the oppressive nature of the nation. I replace the phallus as the source of pleasure with food, and argue that the memories that ensure the continuity of the nation are largely alimentary. A study of what Eduardo Machado eats or refuses to eat to keep recognizing himself as Cuban leads me to explore ways in which the nation shapes subjectivity and the subject informs the postnation, adding to the scholarship on Cuban American literature.

AFRICA'S NATURAL HERITAGE AND ECOLOGICAL VISION IN THE WORK OF BART WOLFFE

In this paper I use postcolonial ecocriticism to show that, although Bart Wolffe laments en­vironmental injustice in his writing, he embraces a contradictory ecological vision and fails to expose and tackle the entangled nature of oppression. Wolffe says almost nothing about injustices amongst humans in the postcolonial context within which his work was written. He fails to acknowledge that injustices amongst humans lead to injustice against nature. He also depicts an imperialist outlook that either sees Africa as a blank space ready for occupation or sees Africans as a blemish on apristine and unspoiled landscape untouched by westernisation and industrialisation.

The Oppressive Nature of Admission Tests to Public Higher Education

Las pruebas estandarizadas al igual que otros elementos de opresión nacen, se desarrollan y se mantienen en una matriz de dominio (Collins, 2009). Debido a que el uso de las pruebas estandarizadas reproduce las jerarquías sociales y la inequidad, en este artí­culo analizo cómo las tres funciones de la educación democrática propuestas por John Dewey (Bowles & Gintis, 2011) se contradicen y revelan la naturaleza anti-dialógica del proceso de admisión a la universidad pública. Para el desarrollo de este argumento, incluyo una breve revisión de los orí­genes de la evaluación estandarizada y discuto cómo las funciones de integración, igualdad y desarrollo no se enlazan en el discurso del sistema nacional de evaluación.

Wasatiyyah Values Appreciation in the Syariah Governance as Consumer Understanding Education Mechanisme towards Islamic Banking System

The concept and values of wasatiyyah are fundamental in Islamic banking practice as the syariahlaw has delineated basic muamalat principles as an operation guideline for the banking industry.So that, all kind of extreme characteristics may be prevented. The principles of wasatiyyah prohibitany element which overlooks the permitted limit namely gambling, uncertainty (gharar), usury,fraud and so on. These elements have to be avoided in life because they were clearly prohibited byAllah SWT due to their oppressive nature especially towards the unfortunate such as the poor orlow-income group. This prohibition is also attached with the heavy intimidation in the hereafter.The Islamic banking system upholds the concept of wasatiyyah through the values of fairness,trust, transparency and accountability which are instilled through the syariah governance system.The appreciation of these values is proposed to be a part of the new curriculum for the financialawareness subject has been presented by the Malaysia government in the 13th Parliamentarysession. It is important to educate and enhance the understanding of the public especially the youngabout the Islamic banking system as an alternative to avoid the prohibited conventional bankingsystem.

Critical Theory in the Postmodern

Whether there is such a thing as humanity, for whose better future condition the youth of today, or of any day, for that matter, ought to, or are able to, be educated, is something that has been called into question by theoretical developments in the past few decades. Philosophers as varied as Althusser, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Derrida, inter alia, espousing a theoretical anti-humanism, have taken exception to the claim that there is something that can even be called humanism, and even if there was, that it was oppressive, unhelpful, and should be combated, or that it was something that would be erased “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of a sea” (Foucault 1971). The aforementioned authors, if one is still allowed to call them that in an age of the trace, simulacra and simulation, hyperreality, intertextuality, and the creation of subjectivity by complexes of power and knowledge, could certainly not be called apologists for the existing order, since they were, and are still, seen as radical, critical, and concerned with liberation from subjugation in their varied ways. Though they are all, other than Althusser, who is labeled a structural Marxist, brought into any discussion having to do with postmodernism or poststructuralism, and their theories are by any account critical of existing society and its oppressive nature, other authors, who carry the flame of critique, have nevertheless labeled them as young conservatives, who, “emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness, and with modernistic attitudes...justify an irreconcilable anti-modernism (Habermas and Ben Habib 1981). While Habermas strives to complete the unfinished project of modernity, which could still perhaps be salvaged by a Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1981), he dismisses postmodern or poststructural approaches as liquidating any hope of ever completing this project, thus diametrically opposing himself, as the heir of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, against more recent theoretical developments. Whether it is fair to call an aspect of French philosophical thought post les evenements des Mai 1968 conservative is not exactly clear, as postmodern approaches are able to be interpreted as radical, concerned with liberation, anti-establishment, and, above all, critical. Althusser was a convinced Marxist; Lyotard was a member of socialisme ou barbarie before becoming the founder of postmodern discourse; Foucault famously fought for the rights of prisoners and against institutions such as psychiatry; Baudrillard (1995) thought that existing society was not even real; and even Derrida came around to see Spectres of Marx (Derrida 1994) in his later years. Nevertheless, it can be discerned that postmodern or poststructural theoretical developments can be appropriated by conservative forces, as poignantly pointed out by Karl Rove, the presidential aide, who infamously stated that the Empire created its own reality. One of the difficulties postmodern approaches pose is the lack of foundation and thus, at first glance, the validity of any approach being as good as any other. The lament of progressives is exactly that by destabilizing philosophy, postmodernism has opened the door to equivocation by vested interests. Thus the question poses itself, whether a critical theory of society is still possible in the postmodern world, or whether any reality is as good as any other reality, and one should consequently abide to the power of those who have the ability to create it.

Unveiling Muslim Women in Socialist Yugoslavia: the Body between Socialism, Secularism, and Colonialism

The creation of the second Yugoslavia (1943–1992) heralded the legal and economic emancipation of women, a social change deeply indebted to the role of female combatants in the Partisan army, and catalyzed by post-war state-building. The Anti- Fascist Women’s Front (AFŽ) was a primary agent in rapid social changes that followed. Along with education and literacy campaigns, from 1947–1950 local chapters of the AFŽ organized campaigns to unveil Muslim women in Yugoslavia, as the practice was deemed incompatible with economic and political participation as well as multiethnic unity. This paper focuses on the Bosnian case, though unveiling also took place in Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro. This paper investigates how state secularism put women’s ‘emancipated’ bodies to the fore as signifiers of progress and modernity. The process of unveiling in Yugoslavia is analyzed both within the context of the reconstruction and the consolidation of the socialist state, and the nexus of ideological conflicts in the region. Unveiling drew on Orientalist discourses, as well as the promise of a radical socialist future and an indigenous Yugoslav feminism, while popular support for the AFŽ problematizes notions of the oppressive nature of state-sanctioned feminism. The paper interrogates the discourses surrounding these campaigns of unveiling, as they draw on and confound various dichotomies.

Black Romanticism: A Manifesto

PAUL YOUNGQUIST Black Romanticism: A Manifesto When we reflect on the nature of these men, and their dissimilarity to the rest of mankind, must we not conclude, that they are a different species of the same genus? —Edward Long, History ofJamaica, 2:356 P AUL O’NEAL, KORRYN GAINES, PHILANDO CASTILE, ALTON STERLING, Freddy Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Gamer, Rekia Boyd, Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Amodou Diallo. You know what I’m talking about. All these black people, men mostly, killed at the hands of law enforcement in the US. “The Counted,” a webpage the UK news source The Guard­ ian opened to track these killings, notes that, for 2015, “the rate of death for young black men was five times higher than white men of the same age.”1 How do we as contemporary Americans account for this pattern of institutionalized violence against blacks? How might Romanticists respond, from our positions of relative security and prestige in the academy, to the thread of state sponsored killing that runs through the fabric of our public lives? It isn’t enough to chant, in chorus with the community directly af­ fected, that “black lives matter.” Those who believe otherwise, please raise your hands. And the killing continues. What are we going to do? What can we do? In From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for more than sympathy or even solidarity with activism that aims to restore or maybe just attribute social value to black lives: “The struggle for Black liberation requires going beyond the standard narrative that Black people have come a long way but have a long way to go—which, of course, says nothing about where it is that we are actually trying to get to. It requires understanding the origins and nature of Black oppression and racism more generally.”2 While I’m aware that I’m not part of the “we” she invokes, Taylor opens a door for people belonging to another I. “The Counted,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-uspolice -killings, accessed 26 November 2016. 2. Taylor, From ttblacklivesmatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2016), 194. SiR, 56 (Spring 2017) 3 4 PAUL YOUNGQUIST “we,” say “we” mostly white middle-class Romanticists, through which to enter into her project ofBlack liberation. Perhaps we can speak to “the ori­ gins and nature of Black oppression and racism.” Perhaps our dislocation from the direct effects of their deadly force offers an opportunity to exam­ ine their motivations in longstanding histories ofsubjection or transnational structures of thought, feeling, and desire. Perhaps as cultural and literary critics we can examine how black lives have—or haven’t—mattered, or for whom, toward the end of advancing the struggle Taylor exhorts for Black liberation. The stakes are nothing less than the world to come. Black liberation, Taylor writes, needs a “strategy, some sense of how we get from the cur­ rent situation into the future.”3 Here too we Romanticists might have something to offer. Hear, for instance, what’s familiar in Taylor’s summa­ tion of the goal of struggle: “While it is true that when Black people get free, everyone gets free, Black people in America cannot ‘get free’ alone. In that sense, Black liberation is bound up with the project of human liber­ ation and social transformation.”4 5 For Romanticists of a certain vintage, Taylor’s language here sounds, well, romantic. It seems to chime with the revolutionary language of Blake, the early Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and maybe Keats too, not to mention that of the French Republi­ cans. The two centuries that separate Taylor from these social reformers, suggests that, however revolutionary their hopes, the project of human lib­ eration failed to materialize in any future that includes our present. For Taylor the measure of that failure is the little word “black.” Human lib­ eration cannot occur without full black participation. So what about Romanticism remains uncongenial to black freedom? Another way to raise that question would be to ask, with Sylvia Wynter, what sort of “man” inhabits Romanticism? Wynter consistently indicts European modernity and its now global avatar with instituting a descriptive statement of the...

The Application of Ar-Rahan-Based Microcredit Facility as an Alternative Instrument for Poverty Alleviation in Nigeria

One of the major challenges facing developing nations like Nigeria is the continuous increase in the level of poverty, which widens the gap between the rich and the poor amidst increasing population and economic growth. In Nigeria, there are scores of microfinance outlets but their operational products are yet to stem the tides of people falling into the poverty bracket. UNICEF reported that about 70.8% of Nigerians live on less than a dollar per day amidst the country’s growing GDP. This rise in the level of poverty culminating from the uneven distribution of the national wealth continue to exacerbate economic instability and social insecurity in Nigeria. Government and other relevant bodies have continued to explore different kinds of solutions to minimize the multifarious challenges posed by the exponential rise in income disparity that has eating deep into the fabrics of the national economy. The micro financing structure has been proven to be helpful to stimulate greater financial inclusion of the low-income groups especially in developing economies. Focal among the many factors responsible for this challenge is the issue of interest charged by the banks to small and medium enterprises despite the rising rate of inflation. Meanwhile, the issue of transacting in riba is prohibited in Islam and some other religions because of its oppressive nature. This paper therefore proposes Ar-Rahn based credit facility aimed at ensuring that the unemployed, the poor and low income earners have access to non-interest based micro financing in Nigeria to aid their financial inclusion and achieve the broader objectives of microfinancing in Nigeria.

Women And The Victorian Values In Fire On The Mountain

Women And The Victorian Values In Fire On The Mountain Sanjaleen Prasad The University of Fiji, Saweni, Lautoka ABSTRACT: Simone de Beauvoir (1949) made a claim that the “representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. “A woman is constructed by the society and from a young age, she is molded to behave as the patriarchal society expects her to. This silently leads to gender oppression especially when the woman is not able to speak for herself or realize that she is being denied of her rights. Gender oppression cuts through all other forms of domination and exploitation in human societies. In particular, it does not only extend beyond class conflicts, but it also cuts through all collective social realities – ethnic, national, religious, local. It is closely linked to the private sphere, individual and daily life. This paper deliberates on how women are shaped or affected by men as suggested in Desai’s Fire on the Mountain. Men’s shaping of women does affect women’s living. This paper also gives some history of the Victorian Period, taking into consideration the novel is set during this period. Additionally, some ways in which these oppressed women try to challenge men’s oppressive nature, whether they succeed or not is discussed.

Understanding the persistence of caste: A commentary on Cotterill, Sidanius, Bhardwaj and Kumar (2014)

We contextualise Cotterill, Sidanius, Bhardwaj, and Kumar’s (2014) paper within a broader literature on caste and collective mobilisation. Cotterill and colleagues’ paper represents a fresh and timely attempt to make sense of the persistence of caste from the perspective of Social Dominance Theory. Cotterill and colleagues, however, do not examine caste differences in the endorsement of karma, and take behavioural asymmetry among lower castes for granted. Cotterill and colleagues also adhere to a Varna model of the caste system that arguably is simplistic and benefits the upper castes of Indian society. We caution that emphasising behavioural asymmetry and endorsing the Varna model might further stigmatise lower castes, especially Dalits, and feed into a conformity bias already predominant in caste-related psychological research. We argue that the conceptualisation and operationalisation of Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and legitimising myths in the Indian context needs to take into account the particular meaning and functions of these constructs in specific intergroup contexts, and for identity positions salient within these contexts. We contend that any examination aimed at better understanding the nature of social hierarchy and oppression within the caste system and Indian society in general remains inconclusive without including a focus on the construction and contestation of social categories and social identities.

Social Work Practice in an Economic Downturn: Understanding Austerity Through an Anti-oppressive Framework

Human rights and social justice have been the traditional mission of social work. In 2008, social workers in Ireland began operating within the greatest period of economic recession since the 1930s. This recession poses a serious threat to the human rights of conventional social work clientele. Simultaneously, a dearth of articles has been published which address the topic. The present paper provides a focused commentary on the literature through the application of an anti-oppressive framework (AOF). The tripartite framework is constructed based upon demarcationist, incorporationist and egalitarian agendas, and was selected for its capacity to address the multifaceted nature of social oppression as identified within the literature. The paper begins with an overview of the impact of the recession on social work practice and its conventional clientele. It then provides a justification and explanation of the elected AOF. Each agenda within the framework is critically evaluated in terms of its broader expression both during and post recession. This evaluation is then used to inform a critical discussion on what lessons may be learned for social work policy and practice moving forward.

From Oppression to Empowerment

This article discusses the Bahá’í understanding of the nature of oppression. The first section identifies and discusses four main contemporary types of oppression involving the international political order, forms of the state, economic structures, and forms of cultural identity. The second section explores Bahá’u’lláh’s personal response to oppression in the form of His three historic declarations. The final section draws implications from the previous discussions in order to identify features of a Bahá’í approach to empowerment and liberation from oppression.

Begging Letters: Tin Trunk Literacy and the Empathy Economy of Tristan da Cunha, c. 1909–39

ABSTRACTEuropean colonialism fostered ‘radically constrained’ literacies in the global south dominated by the epistolary form produced by ‘tin trunk literati’ frequently scribing as amanuenses for collectives. Literacy on the British mid-South Atlantic island colony of Tristan da Cunha was marginal to the nineteenth century male exchange economy and consequently relegated to the female domestic sphere. With the shift from sail to steam in trans-oceanic shipping at the turn of the twentieth century the male exchange economy vanished and female literacy acquired a vital new importance in the creation and maintenance of an empathy economy with the Atlantic mainlands generating the manufactured imports essential to the colony’s survival. The low literacy level and new dependence for subsistence on writing undermined the patriarchal authority of ‘headmen’ and gave a small group of female amanuenses effective political power on the island. The latter worked hard to maintain their newfound power by thwarting repeated metropolitan attempts to spread literacy or socialise the island economy and fostering fear and ignorance of the outside world among the islanders. The profoundly conservative and even oppressive nature of ‘functional literacy’ on Tristan da Cunha in the first half of the twentieth century provides a corrective to the emancipatory claims made for ‘tin trunk literacy’ elsewhere in the global south.