Public Testimony Research Articles

Speak About It, Be About It: Spoken-Word Poetry Communities and Transformative Social Justice

“Spoken-word poetry” and the knowledge we can gain from the poets who perform it are integral to the successful recovery of members of oppressed communities. Also known as “performance poetry,” these powerful testimonials often mirror oral traditions, such as speaking circles from the African diaspora, Indigenous oral traditions in the Americas, and the spoken-word poetic communities of color and marginalized peoples. Poets within the spoken-word poetry communities of San Diego, California, who have been oppressed by interpersonal and state violence, mass incarceration, militarized policing, poverty, racism, sexism, the War on Drugs, and other systemic inequalities, learn from and support one another. This article views spoken-word poetry as public testimonials that may add to transformative social justice models for structurally-oppressed communities. It seeks to understand critical criminological approaches and analysis that add to the growing scholarship centering structurally-oppressed communities without pathologizing them in order to inform programming, policy and funding toward transformative social justice initiatives focused on healing communities and their members.

Redefining refugee: white Christian nationalism in state politics and beyond

ABSTRACT Although immigration is the domain of the federal government, recently there has been a movement to introduce anti-refugee legislation in state legislatures across the country. In 2017 and 2018 there were 86 anti-refugee state-level bills introduced to limit refugee resettlement in the US. We examine public testimony from South Carolina’s 2016 anti-refugee bill, S-997. Building upon the literature on racist nativism, we find those who sought to eliminate refugee resettlement reconstructed the meaning of a legal status, refugee, to be synonymous with Brown, Muslim, Terrorist, Third World, by presenting these population categories as unified in a legal status in opposition to the white, Christian, civilized, United States. We show how even those who supported refugees and refugee resettlement engaged in and supported the logic of white Christian nationalism.

Nicodemus. A Disciple Liberated by the Cross of the Christ from the Darkness of Fear and Disbelief

Nicodemus, a Pharisee and one of the Jewish leaders, appears only in the Fourth Gospel. Three events in which he participates—a night meeting with Jesus (John 3:1-21), a verbal clash with members of the Sanhedrin (John 7:50-52) and a funeral, performed for Jesus together with Joseph of Arimathea (John 19:38-42)—are perceived negatively by numerous exegetes, and Nicodemus’s attitude is (sometimes harshly) criticised. However, taking into consideration the significance of all the details of the current narrative and the context of the occurring events, one should be led to the conclusion that this man, nowhere explicitly referred by the Evangelist with the term μαθητής, deserves to be called “a disciple of Christ,” who passed through the three-stage process of maturation in faith. Gradually he began to gain courage in advocating for Christ, and at the decisive moment—during Jesus’ death on the Cross—he definitely stepped out of hiding and gave a public testimony of his adherence to the Master of Nazareth. His person, through a gesture shown to the Crucified, became the locus theologicus in which Jesus revealed himself as the immortal Messiah, Prophet, and King.

Violence

Violence

The formerly incarcerated, advocacy, activism, and community reintegration

ABSTRACT Restorative, or strength-based, reentry has been advanced as an alternative to the far more common risk-based or needs-based approaches to assisting in the reintegration of prisoners back into society. Drawing from restorative justice principles of repair, including key stakeholders, and transformation, this perspective illustrates how formerly incarcerated people work toward destigmatization and redemption by helping others (going the ‘second mile’ in the transformation process). Further, the formerly incarcerated lead and participate in social and political activism (the ‘third mile’) which provides them space to ‘make good’ and practice sharing their narratives as public testimonials. Using in-depth interviews with nine formerly incarcerated advocates and activists in Michigan, this study describes forms of (1) helping others and (2) participation in activism among the formerly incarcerated, and (3) blends theoretical analysis about how these actions affect the formerly incarcerated themselves.

Networked feminism: counterpublics and the intersectional issues of #MeToo

ABSTRACT In October 2017, millions of people shared public testimonials of sexual abuse and harassment in an expression of global vulnerability using the hashtag #MeToo. While #MeToo was triggered by Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano, the phrase can be traced back a decade earlier to when African-American activist Tarana Burke said “me too” in a private exchange of solidarity with young black girls who were survivors of sexual assault. This study examines over 200,000 tweets from the first three days of #MeToo to understand how the meaning and narratives of the feminist hashtag were discursively negotiated. Combining social network analysis and discourse analysis, the paper draws attention to the exclusivity of popular and networked feminism and elevates the voices of the multiply marginalised survivors who were erased from the dominant narratives of #MeToo. It is a call to white feminist researchers and activists to be mindful of the voices that are excluded when examining popular feminist actions. The study contributes an understanding of the power dynamics within digital feminist networks that reproduce colonial violence and oppression within mainstream neoliberal feminism and academia, and extends support to the existing research that documents how digital networks do not empower marginalised voices equitably.

History of Forestry of the Mari Region in Written Sources of the Second Half of XIX—Early XX Centuries

The article analyzes the information potential and source value of various types of written sources on forestry of the Mari region in the second half of XIX—early XX centuries. These include legislative acts, office records of public institutions, statistical materials, periodical printing, testimonies and memories of contemporaries of the period under review. These historical sources contain valuable information on the state and development of forestry in the Mari region, changes in the natural environment, state forest policy, timber industry, timber trade and the functioning of the Kozmodemyansk forest fair, which was of all-Russian importance.

Capturing stakeholder perspectives through a collaboration with a commercial fishing cooperative

Fisheries management should account for the tradeoffs associated with regulatory options to minimize unintended consequences and undue impacts on stakeholder communities. Importantly, these assessments necessitate the inclusion of the perceptions of resource users to help anticipate consequences. While stakeholder involvement is a central tenet in federal fisheries management, managers are faced with many challenges such as those associated with collecting perspectives from diverse groups and the potential biases associated with public testimony. Here we demonstrate the strength of a collaborative approach to generating social information from a commercial fishing cooperative (i.e., an association) by partnering with the Pollock Conservation Cooperative, a fishing cooperative for the Bering Sea pollock Catcher/Processor fleet in Alaska. To understand how the fleet may respond to hypothetical regulatory and environmental changes, we collaboratively designed a survey and applied a novel participant-selection strategy that focused on personnel involved in decision-making at the corporate and vessel levels. Our findings revealed that respondents from separate companies and with different performance histories had different perceptions, suggesting that broad fleet-level analyses are critical for management strategy evaluations that seek to understand the impacts of environmental change and regulatory decisions on a fishery. As such, establishing lines of applied sociological research could benefit from a collaborative approach that accounts for the fishery's organizational structure.

North Koreans’ public narratives and conditional inclusion in South Korea

ABSTRACTThis article draws on the public testimonies of North Koreans living in South Korea (t’albungmin) and analyzes the role that these narratives play in South Korean society as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. North and South Korea technically remain at war, with South Korea claiming sovereignty over the entire Korean peninsula. While t’albungmin are eligible for South Korean citizenship, they describe feeling excluded from full social membership. Although some t’albungmin seek anonymity, this paper considers those who gain social status by speaking publicly about their lives and denouncing the North Korean regime. In so doing, they distance themselves from North Korea and align themselves with the “good” discourse of human rights. However, their actions reinforce a logic of exclusion, implying that t’albungmin who prefer anonymity are “sympathizers” of the North and consequently restricting their access to social benefits and resources. This case of conditional inclusion illuminates tensions that arise when a sovereignty claim entails the incorporation of people from an enemy state. It also highlights the carefully delineated boundaries of publicly acceptable behavior within which “suspect” citizens must remain as a condition for positive recognition.

It Had to Be a Matter of Public Concern: Expanding & Codifying the Connick Test for Private Matters

Public employees, as citizens in many other respects, may be compelled to testify on private matters unrelated to and outside the scope of their job duties. However, this distinction requires reconsideration of the threshold public concern standard, as explained in Connick v. Myers. By challenging how courts apply the factors through inclusion of express government interest statements in statutory and constitutional language, parties’ agency connections for context, and applying free speech time, manner, and place considerations to the form of the speech, courts should find that some private matters may actually relate to public concern and policy. Even where courts may be hesitant to adopt such analytics, Congress and state legislatures have incentives to codify protection of public employee testimony on private matters which touch public concern, due in large part to the significant state and federal public employee populations. Through flexible standards and case-by-case analyses, courts and legislatures can fairly protect employee speech where private matters and public concern converge.

Emancipatory voice and the recursivity of authentic silence: Holocaust descendant accounts of the dialectic between silence and voice

ABSTRACT This study traces the trajectory of Israeli grandchildren of Holocaust survivors (GCOS) as they give voice to their parents’ and their own previously silent embodied memory. Impacted by the pedagogic experience of state-engineered high school trips to sites of Holocaust atrocity and the promotion of GCOS testimony, ethnographic interviews disclose GCOS critique of parental silence. GCOS aim to usurp their parents’ role as ‘authentic’ carriers of memory by salvaging the silenced past and performing state-enlisted public testimony. The GCOS trajectory from familial silence to publically enlisted and performed voice is for some however contingent upon GCOS ‘authentic’ embodied memories of silent Holocaust-related relations with their parents – children of survivors (COS) or with grandparent-survivors. Other GGOS warn of the ‘flattening effect’ of public voice on the authenticity and emotional complexity of familial silent memories. Moving beyond unidirectional relations between voice and silence, where voice emancipates silenced pasts or silence absences voice, GCOS accounts reflexively depict the complex bidirectional and mutually qualifying trajectories between testimonial voice and familial silence. Descendant accounts permit for a deconstruction of the binary and univocal reading of embodied silence and voice and a reconceptualization of survivor/descendant authenticity. Implications regarding the inherent limits of silence and voice and the related challenges facing the subfield of Anthropology of Silence are considered.

Future of Nursing 2020-2030 Philadelphia Town Hall: Lessons Shared From a Relentless School Nurse.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in partnership with the National Academy of Medicine held Town Meeting discussions the summer of 2019 at three sites across the country on the Future of Nursing 2030. Included in the testimony were both invited presentation and public testimony. This article is the transcript of the invited testimony of Robin Cogan, a school nurse who has established a voice for advocacy and the creator of the blog titled The Relentless School Nurse and is one of four presentations featured in this issue of the NASN School Nurse. In her January 2020 letter, NASN's President Laurie Combe discussed the Future of Nursing 2030 and the importance of school nurse advocacy.

Entangled Encounters: The Transcultural Counterwitness and Implication in Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’s Situations

Drawing on current definitions of public testimony, this study turns to the work of Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’s Situations to explore how video poems challenge the pervasive stereotyping of black Americans in mainstream journalism and implicate viewers, particularly white ones, into the everyday and historical traumas of racial violence. Video poems, such as Situations, take advantage of multimodal channels to move viewers beyond spectator guilt to introduce a more nuanced understanding of American and global racism. Through an investigation of three of their video poems, “Stop and Frisk,” “In Memory of Trayvon Martin,” and “World Cup,” this study explores how Rankine and Lucas’s work opposes, and engages with, the pervasive stereotyping of black Americans presented in mainstream news media; how the multimodal nature of video poetry problematizes the viewers’ relationship with American and global racism; and how acts of counterwitnessing implicate viewers into distant histories of racial trauma.

The Great Texas Social Studies Textbook War of 1961–1962 by Allan O. Kownslar

Reviewed by: The Great Texas Social Studies Textbook War of 1961–1962 by Allan O. Kownslar Angela Valenzuela The Great Texas Social Studies Textbook War of 1961–1962. By Allan O. Kownslar. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Pp. 338. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.) The focus of this important text by Allan O. Kownslar is the momentous debate over social studies textbooks that took place in Texas from 1961 to 1962. Unprecedented, the fiery exchange took place before the Texas State Textbook Committee, the State Board of Education (SBOE), and the Fifty-seventh Texas Legislature's House Textbook Investigating Committee over fifteen texts under consideration for adoption by the SBOE. The argument pitted conservatives who staunchly opposed adoption against liberals, who provided unequivocal support. Making use of numerous resources, including newspaper clippings and editorials, archival data, and transcripts of public testimonies that were delivered throughout the battle, Kownslar successfully resurrects an important story that reveals deep ideological contours in Texas politics that continue to reverberate. His purpose is to lay bare a treasure trove of evidence for an audience of "serious readers who wish to examine objectively the various sides of this textbook issue" (5). I commend Kownslar for helping to describe the foundation for Texas's subsequent textbook and curriculum battles, including the monumental social studies standards debate in 2010 and a more recent textbook battle over the place of Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies in the state curriculum that played out on televisions in living rooms throughout the country. In Kownslar's book, conservatives largely consisted of organizations like Texans for America, the Minute Women, the Texas Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the John Birch Society. The best-known figures to emerge in this movement were Mel and Norma Gabler, whose nonprofit interest group, Educational Research Analysts, claimed to find errors, secular humanism, and censorship in textbooks and achieved national and international celebrity as a result. At the other end of the spectrum were high-profile liberals like attorney Maury Maverick Jr., folklorist J. Frank Dobie, historian Paul F. Boller, and Bexar County State Representative John C. Alaniz. Conservatives sought to preserve a world view critical of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry Truman's Fair Deal, school integration, civil rights, and educator John Dewey's movement to make the curriculum relevant to children's lives through interdisciplinary approaches. Quick to call unpatriotic those who disagreed, conservatives took issue with texts that provided any treatment or mention of communism or required students, in a point-counterpoint fashion, to compare it to America's form of government. Not only did conservatives believe that students' minds were impressionable and ill-equipped for critical thinking, they also believed [End Page 239] such content could sway students toward communist or socialist ideals. They further presumed that teachers' lack of expertise on communism was an insurmountable hindrance, making the subject unviable as K–12 curriculum. Fearful of societal decay, the Gablers, in particular, wanted texts that extolled the virtues of the American, nuclear family in conventional, patriarchal terms, while they opposed pay equity, women's rights, homosexuality, and gay marriage. Conservatives also targeted libraries with an attempt to ban not only nationally recognized writers like William Faulkner, Carl Sandberg, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, and Willa Cather and the scientist Albert Einstein, but also Texas authors like Dobie and Boller. Conservatives called for special emphasis being paid in history textbooks to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which asserted rights for the people and the states, and opposed placing educational emphasis on the United Nations, which they considered unduly influenced by the Soviet Union. In contrast, liberals sought to incorporate critical histories, addressing "the role of the Muckrakers or the Progressive era, massive unemployment during the Great Depression, [and] the denial of rights to racial minorities" (89). Maury Maverick Jr. meanwhile asserted that the state must not adopt the conservatives' "censorship tactics of a Fascist Spain or a Communist Russia" (138). All of the debated textbooks were ultimately adopted by the State Board of Education. The battle nevertheless brought to light a deep clash of values between those fearful of democracy, equating it to "mob rule" (88...

Using African Truth and Reconciliation Commission documentation for truth telling and reconciliation

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are established to document violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in post-conflict societies. The intent is to excavate the truth to avoid political speculations and create an understanding of the nature of the conflict. The documentation hence results in a common narrative which aims to facilitate reconciliation to avoid regression to conflict. TRCs therefore do a tremendous job and create compound documentation that includes written statements, interviews, live public testimonies of witnesses and they also publish final reports based on the accumulated materials. At the end of their mission, TRCs recommend the optimal use of their documentation since it is of paramount importance to the reconciliation process. Despite this ambition, the TRCs’ documentation is often politicized and out of reach for the victims and the post-conflict societies at large. The TRCs’ documentation is instead poorly diffused into the post conflict societies and their findings are not effectively disseminated and used.

Razões para usuários com depressão da comunidade slowly se envolverem com informação tecnológica

This research aimed to investigate the reasons for users with depression in the Slowly community to get involved with technological information, starting from two hypotheses: null (H0) and alternative (H1). The survey data were collected by accessing the public testimonials page registered on Slowly's official website, indexed under the term depression. Regarding the methodological procedures, the Categorical Analysis technique of the Content Analysis method was applied. The hypotheses were tested using the chi-square test. The first hypothesis (H0) was not rejected, because users with depression in the Slowly community do not wish to obtain only sentimental support from other members of the community. It concludes with the expectation that future studies shall investigate solutions for people with depression and those more likely to relate to others via the Internet to achieve more life quality. It is also desirable that further studies can investigate the mental health of regular users in virtual/online communities, in order to verify whether there are behavioral-depressive trends in users who are intensely involved with the use and production of technological information in virtual spaces.

Using African Truth and Reconciliation Commission documentation for truth telling and reconciliation

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are established to document violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in post-conflict societies. The intent is to excavate the truth to avoid political speculations and create an understanding of the nature of the conflict. The documentation hence results in a common narrative which aims to facilitate reconciliation to avoid regression to conflict. TRCs therefore do a tremendous job and create compound documentation that includes written statements, interviews, live public testimonies of witnesses and they also publish final reports based on the accumulated materials. At the end of their mission, TRCs recommend the optimal use of their documentation since it is of paramount importance to the reconciliation process. Despite this ambition, the TRCs’ documentation is often politicized and out of reach for the victims and the post-conflict societies at large. The TRCs’ documentation is instead poorly diffused into the post conflict societies and their findings are not effectively disseminated and used.

Food democracy, health disparities and the New York City trans fat policy.

To investigate food democracy and health disparities in the New York City (NYC) trans fat policy process. Texts from semi-structured interviews, public testimony and comments on the policy were analysed using categorization and thematic coding. A priori content analysis for themes of food democracy was followed by open, axial and selective coding for sub-themes on health disparities. Data and method triangulation and respondent validation were used to establish data dependability, trustworthiness and representativeness. NYC. Interviews from a purposive, snowballed sample of thirty-three participants included restaurateurs, scientists, health and consumer advocates, consumers and policy makers. Additionally, 261 pages of transcript from public testimony of fifty-three participants and a purposive sample of public comments on the policy from a pool of 2157 were analysed. Principles of food democracy involving inclusive citizenship, access to information, collaborative participation and focus on collective good were well represented in the data. Additionally, sub-themes linked to health disparities included: government responsibility for fairer access to healthier foods; recognition that people made choices based on circumstances; concern for vulnerable groups; and outrage with a food industry viewed as unconcerned for public health. Principles of food democracy present in the successful process of adoption of the 2006 NYC trans fat policy addressed nutrition-related health. Food democracy is a contemporary food system and policy approach with potential for public health benefits in reducing nutrition-related health disparities.

The Secret Testimony of the Peel Commission (Part I): Underbelly of Empire

The Peel Commission (1936–37) was the first British commission of inquiry to recommend the partition of Palestine into two states. The commissioners made their recommendation after listening to several weeks of testimony, delivered in both public and secret sessions. The transcripts of the public testimony were published soon afterward, but the secret testimony transcripts were only released by the United Kingdom's National Archives in March 2017. Divided into two parts, this article closely examines the secret testimony. Part I discusses how the secret testimony deepens our understanding of key themes in Mandate history, including: the structural exclusion of the Palestinians from the Mandate state, the place of development projects in that structural exclusion, the different roles played by British anti-Semitism and anti-Arab racism, and the importance of the procedural aspects of committee work for understanding the mechanics of British governance. Part II extends this analysis by focusing on what the secret testimony reveals about how the Peel Commission came to recommend partition.

Witnessing in crisis contexts in the social media age: the case of the 2015 Tianjin blasts on Weibo

This study explores how the act of witnessing takes distinctive discursive shape in social media in the context of large-scale disasters or crisis events. Drawing upon a set of microblogs posted on China’s most widely used social media platform, Weibo, immediately after one of China’s most serious industrial accidents, this study shows how witnessing manifests itself through individual eyewitness accounts foregrounding personal experience but constrained within Weibo’s standard protocol of 140 Chinese characters. Often blending word and image, these accounts are examined using methodologies drawn from discourse analysis. On this basis, we argue that witnessing in social media in China not only demonstrates strong participatory, connective, and self-reflexive characteristics. It also opens up new possibilities for various patterns of meaning, which, when appropriated by other social media users, constitute a public testimony that can challenge official discourses of crisis in China.