Social Justice Groups Research Articles

Correcting the democratic deficit in the CETA negotiations: Civil society engagement in the provinces, municipalities, and Europe

The federal government claims that the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) negotiations have been the most transparent and participatory in Canadian history. Labour, environmental, social justice, and other civil society groups that are critical of the proposed agreement for various reasons would argue that their perspectives have been excluded from the official federal dialogue. This article looks at some of the efforts of non-governmental (civil society) actors, and in particular the Trade Justice Network and its member organizations, to affect the CETA negotiations in other ways, with an emphasis on contact with provincial governments, municipalities, European decision makers, and other non-governmental groups in Canada and Europe. It is argued that the exclusion of critical views shows an inherent democratic deficit in the CETA negotiations that privileges corporate insiders at the expense of civil society, the public, and even elected officials. Notwithstanding this deficit, the success of the civil society campaigns can be seen in the problem areas delaying a successful conclusion of negotiations, including new public procurement restrictions for Canadian municipalities and pharmaceutical patent term extensions. For the Trade Justice Network, these areas also help explain how the agreement narrows the fields of economic, environmental, and social governance in Canada.

“Honk Against Homophobia”: Rethinking Relations Between Media and Sexual Minorities

The theory of “symbolic annihilation” or “symbolic violence” has been used in academic literature to describe the way in which sexual minorities have been ignored, trivialized, or condemned by the media. This article aims to de-center research from issues of media representation to consider the capacity for minority groups to proactively use new media and its various avenues for interactivity, social networking, and feedback to fight social exclusion. This work suggests that new media has become a space in which the nominally marginal in society may acquire “social artillery”—a term used to describe how sexual minorities utilize their expanding and more readily accessible social connections in digital space to combat instances of homophobia. The research draws on the results of an inquiry into the relation between media and a regional youth social justice group in Australia tackling homophobia. The research demonstrates that the group is becoming increasingly adept and comfortable with using a cross-section of media platforms to fulfill their own objectives, rather than seeing themselves as passive subjects of media representation. This article argues that this sets an example for other socially excluded groups looking to renegotiate their relation with the media in regional areas.

Social Accountability as an Innovative Frame in Civic Action: The Case of Rede Nossa São Paulo

In the past three decades, Brazil’s state and civil society have undergone a transformation. Non-profit organizations have proliferated, revealing new opportunities for participation, while sustainability and corporate social responsibility have produced new agendas for corporations. Against this background, accountability has emerged within the debate, particularly with regard to governmental transparency and efficiency. This paper examines the Rede Nossa Sao Paulo movement, which pledges social justice and sustainability and promotes social accountability as its main strategy to achieve its mission. Thus, the main objective of this study is to understand social accountability; more broadly, the goal is to examine governmental accountability in the mobilization process developed by Rede Nossa Sao Paulo by referring to the framing perspective as a core aspect in the understanding of social movements. Social accountability is presented as a frame that is composed of the union between movements that are historically bonded by the motto of social justice and other groups that are related to urban development and social and environmental responsibility.

The Messy Politics of “Clean Coal”

Clean coal is a widely used and highly contested term in debates over energy policy and climate change in the United States. While the discourse of “clean coal” originated in industry and government circles, it has been debated, shaped, and contested by a wide range of players, including environmental and social justice groups. In this article, I examine how different local, regional, and national environmental and social justice groups participate in debating and defining these technologies and their implications for the energy future of the region.

Teacher Activism: Enacting a Vision for Social Justice

This qualitative study focused on educators who participated in grassroots social justice groups to explore the role teacher activism can play in the struggle for educational justice. Findings show teacher activists made three overarching commitments: to reconcile their vision for justice with the realities of injustice around them; to work within their classrooms to create liberatory space; and to work collectively against oppression as activists. To enact these commitments, they engaged in particular practices common across the teachers despite their years in the classroom or their geographic location. A framework of teacher activism is revealed through the commitments and practices of the teacher activists, which can help support other teachers who are interested in working toward equity and justice in their classrooms and in the streets.

Community Organizing for Social Justice: Grassroots Groups for Power

Social justice, community organizing, and task-oriented groups are inextricably connected. Collective action through community organizing can generate the requisite power to overcome unjust social relations and achieve changes that further human rights, participatory democracy, and distributive justice. Most community-organizing work is conducted through task-oriented groups that enable organizational activists to engage directly in collective action for social change. This article presents examples of the use of task groups by a variety of constituencies, in multiple arenas, employing citizen participation, community development, and social action community-organizing approaches and strategies.

The Olympics as a platform for protest: a case study of the London 2012 ‘ethical’ Games and the Play Fair campaign for workers’ rights

The Olympic Games, with its distinctive ethos and reach, offers a valuable opportunity for those able to mobilise it as a platform for their own purposes. This paper focuses on how global social justice groups are pursuing this goal. It is argued that the types of protest utilising the Olympic platform change over time and reflect distinct historical phases of the Games. Contemporary anti-Olympic and Olympic watchdog campaigns are characterised by contestation over the prioritising of corporate interests, so contribute to wider critiques of globalising capitalism. The Play Fair campaign for the rights of workers making official Olympic merchandise and supplies exemplifies this, as it mobilises the Olympic platform to question and influence working practices within transnational supply chains. A case study of the campaign is presented, drawing on documentary analysis, interviews and participant observations undertaken since the launch of PlayFair 2012 in February 2010. It was found that by targeting London 2012 corporate discourses of ‘ethics’ and ‘sustainability’ in its campaign to ensure a ‘sweat free’ Olympics, Play Fair connects the production of major sporting events to wider issues of global inequality, poverty and structural problems in transnational labour markets.

Breaking Silence, Building Solutions: The Role of Social Justice Group Work in the Retention of Faculty of Color

In spite of their many diversity initiatives, predominantly White colleges and universities have a poor track record in the recruitment and retention of faculty of color. This article unpacks the White privilege inherent in barriers to retention by focusing on three standards commonly used to make promotion and tenure decisions: teaching, service, and scholarship. A story of two Native American women faculty members denied academic advancement at a predominantly White university 30 years apart illustrates the White racism that underscored these decisions. Approaches to social justice group work are suggested for addressing the retention of faculty of color in the future.

Working the Streets of Post-Katrina New Orleans: An Interview with Deon Haywood, Executive Director, Women with a Vision, Inc.

While most people living in the United watched, with sympathy and horror, the dismantling of New Orleans s infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the levee breaks displacing nearly all its residents and killing nearly sixteen hundred people, leaving behind those without even the most basic necessities, few are aware of the seismic shifts the city has undergone during the recovery process. Activist and political journalist Jordan Flaherty succinctly expressed what many of us felt during the initial recovery period, following the storm: There were practically no conversations that didn't reference Katrina. The storm defined every aspect of life in the city, not just the large-scale damage done but also in the small details. Traffic lights hadn t been fixed. Street signs were gone. Packs of abandoned dogs roamed the streets. . . . Walking in your own neighborhood in those initial few months, you couldn't believe you were in New Orleans. You couldn't believe you were in the United States (2010, 54). As residents who were able to return to their homes focused on managing the day-to-day challenges that the storm engendered, city officials began the arduous process of resto ring basic civil services such as housing, education, and care at health facilities, in addition to tackling the mountains of debris that lined the city streets. At main thoroughfares, plastic signs were crowded together at intersections, advertising any kind of imaginable service, from tree cutting to legal services to gutting houses. Out-of-towners, primarily men - manual laborers, contractors, and white-collar professionals - descended on the city, camping out in abandoned parking lots or squatting in neglected houses, taking up residence in hotels in Baton Rouge or towns across Lake Pontchartrain. Neighborhood associations became more active as residents united to have basic utilities restored, street lights fixed, and debris removed. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hosted town hall-style meetings, addressing questions and comments from agitated crowds; high-profile urban planners, hired by the city, developed a rash of visionary plans for the city's future; and law enforcement officials (with the help of the National Guard) imposed a mandatory curfew, attempting to curtail the rampant theft occurring in the city's most desolate and destroyed neighborhoods. All this was occurring as people mourned the dead and still missing in neighborhoods that looked as though they had been blasted by bombs. Between 2006 and 2010, a new political, social, and economic landscape emerged in Katrina's aftermath, affecting every aspect of urban life, including the replacement of nearly all public housing with mixed-income developments, the firing of thousands of unionized teachers and subsequent emergence of a charter school system, and the return of violent crime in abandoned, largely low-income African American neighborhoods. These issues became hot topics for New Orleans's activist groups, many of whom created alliances that would protect the city's most vulnerable populations and neighborhoods. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the hard work of rebuilding social and political networks carried out by social justice groups such as Critical Resistance, Common Ground, and People's Hurricane Relief Fund and women's groups such as INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, the Women's Health and Justice Initiative, and Women with a Vision (WWAV) went unnoticed in the mainstream media.1 More than five years later, problems surrounding the recovery persist, as activists and legal and social justice advocates continue to organize around issues related to police brutality, high incarceration rates for young African Americans, sexual violence, and housing discrimination based on race, gender, and economics. In August 2010, 1 attended the event Community and Resistance: Five Years After Katrina at the Community Book Center, a hub of African American activism and resistance in the city's Seventh Ward, to hear grassroots activists, artists, and journalists speak about the pressing social problems still facing New Orleans. …

Implementing a Community Intervention to Promote Social Justice and Advocacy: Analysis of a Town Hall Meeting on Race, Justice, and Peace

A diverse team of counselor educators used a phenomenological qualitative research method to analyze a social justice group intervention—a town hall meeting among a group of students, educators, and mental health professionals that focused on race, justice, and peace. Participants described forms of oppression in their personal and professional lives and strategies to combat them.

Post-Disaster Social Justice Group Work and Group Supervision

This article discusses post-disaster group counseling and group supervision using a social justice orientation for working with post-disaster survivors from underserved populations. The Disaster Cross-Cultural Counseling model is a culturally responsive group counseling model that infuses social justice into post-disaster group counseling and group supervision. The importance and the methodology for incorporating ongoing intensive group supervision to support group counseling social justice interventions and related countertransference issues that emerge in traumatic situations will be presented.

The Platform of European Social NGOs: ideology, division and coalition

This paper explores the role of ideological division in complicating collaboration between third sector organizations working to influence European Union (EU) policy processes. The Social Platform, the largest alliance of social justice groups working at EU level, is studied to illustrate how a coalition of ideologically disparate organizations cope with internal tensions that are often exacerbated by external shifts in the political opportunities available for mobilization. The alliance is successful at mediating the most significant sources of ideologically based division. However, the external political context for mobilization requires coalition members to compete for recognition and resources available at EU level. The reordering of EU equality legislation and initiatives has most recently exacerbated a series of competitive dynamics in play across the EU third sector and has stretched the ability of the coalition to maintain unity among member organizations.

Process and Action in Social Justice Group Work Practice, Training, and Supervision: Introduction to the Second Special Issue

We are pleased and honored as guest coeditors to introduce the second of two consecutive special issues of The Journal for Specialists in Group Work (JSGW) on Social Justice Issues in Group Work. W...

Using Social Justice Group Work With Young Mothers Who Experience Homelessness

Research indicates (e.g., Bassuk et al., 1997) that women and children make up a large percentage of the total number of individuals living without permanent shelter. This article represents a reflective analysis of our work as group facilitators who conducted a series of personal growth groups for young mothers living in a residential facility located in a Midwestern city in the United States. We discuss our role as group facilitators who infused social justice principles in our group work, share challenges we experienced along the way, and offer suggestions for facilitating group counseling interventions.

Six Considerations for Social Justice Group Work

This article describes “courageous conversations” in social justice group work and a continuum of action for social justice interventions. It analyzes themes from 20 contributions to 2 consecutive special issues of The Journal for Specialists in Group Work on social justice group work. Implications for future development in group leadership and areas for further exploration are offered.

Process and Action in Social Justice Group Work: Introduction to the Special Issue

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself. ∼Jane Addams It is our pleasure and honor as guest coeditors to introduce the first of two con...

The Experiences of School Counselors-in-Training in Group Work With LGBTQ Adolescents

This article describes an ethnographic study that explored the effectiveness of integrating training in social justice group work within an existent school counseling course. This research supported that school counseling trainees expanded their knowledge, awareness, and skills related to both lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) adolescents and psycho-educational group work in schools. Limit setting was one skill that remained under-developed for trainees at the conclusion of this project. Implications for training and future research are discussed.

Climate is growing health threat.

Nurses will have to cope with a rising number of people with illnesses related to climate change over the next 50 years, according to a coalition of leading environmental and social justice groups.

The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average?

The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average?

The Heterogenous Citizen

The Heterogenous Citizen