Social Justice Values Research Articles

A note on ‘image’ methodology for social work qualitative research: Socially inclusive research methods for service users

Abstract: This note offers an analysis of the issues of the social contextual impact of research methodology. Here the author discusses the potential of using ‘image based’ data collection and analysis methods in social work research and in particular focuses on one possible method, ‘rich pictures’. Interest in the use of using image based methods is growing. The author considers the literature which underpins this approach, focussing on the challenges this might bring at all stages of the research process and offers a critique of the ethical and practical dilemmas involved. It will be suggested that such methods have the potential to shift the often criticised power imbalance in all research, including social work research. The author will discuss if this supplementary methodology might increase the ability of service users to participate in research. In this respect, it empathizes with service users who might prefer a non-verbal approach to research inquiry, with more of a range of responsiveness to researchers’ question. This note will argue for moving beyond only words in open-ended interviews by social workers to further explore the experiences of service users. As such its use may also be more in accord with the social work values of social justice.

Deep Critique and Democratic Lawyering in Clinical Practice

The crisis in legal education has been defined and accentuated by urgent and existential critiques. This body of complaint and suggestion—in the form of books, foundation reports, law review articles, major media entries, and blog posts—has two gaping holes that this Essay seeks to fill. First, the critiques fail to attend to the diminishing of social justice values and commitments in legal education in the period leading up to the 2008 recession, especially as clinical education—often designated as the carrier of justice values in law schools—faced generational shifts and law schools extended “practical” education to more students. Second, with the exception of the work of Robin West, there is little in the way of a forward-looking, progressive, and justice-oriented response to the crisis of legal education. The reform discourse since the 2008 recession is composed almost exclusively of proposals, such as those by William Henderson and Brian Tamanaha, undergirded by neoliberal assumptions and constructs. Leading reformers accept the accelerated disaggregation and commodification of legal practice without attention to aspects of the profession that privilege the public good over market norms and rationales. This Essay draws on clinical practice rooted in pedagogies focused on the development of critical analysis and political engagement to make the case for a progressive

Nonviolence, BDS, and the Dream of Beloved Community in Palestine/Israel

Nonviolence, BDS, and the Dream of Beloved Community in Palestine/Israel

University–community engagement: Case study of university social responsibility

Corporatisation of universities has drawn parallels between contemporary universities and business corporations, and extended analysis of corporate social responsibility to universities. This article reports on case study of university–community engagement with schools and school communities through youth engagement programmes to enhance democratic principles in student leadership and raise aspirations for university education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Data from over 1200 respondents suggest that university–community engagement produced positive outcomes for individual student participants, schools and school communities and also benefited the university in terms of brand recognition and good standing in the community. This raises questions about the social responsibility of universities as agents of change to entrench society’s fundamental values of democratic participation and social justice.

Education, Social Justice and School Diversity: Insights from the Capability Approach

This paper offers a theoretical exploration of the impact of diversity in schools on attitudes to inequality in students’ later life. Reflecting on recent changes on the school system in England, and building on work on how values are formed and how inequalities between groups may be either perpetuated or changed, it seeks to investigate the development of values and agency goals relating to the reduction of poverty and inequalities, particularly between groups. School education has the potential to foster civic participation and moral values, and formal schooling can be seen as a unique site for the development of such values at a formative period of individual development, through processes such as collective reasoning and encounters with difference and inequality. While these issues have been explored with regard to educational content, most notably through citizenship education, it is equally important to consider the social context within which formal learning takes place, particularly the diversity of the school body itself, and how this is managed. This paper draws on existing literature on education, values and school diversity to examine how the capability approach can provide insights into the development of social justice values through education.

Alice Paul: Claiming Power by J.D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry (review)

Reviewed by: Alice Paul: Claiming Power by J.D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry Alice Almond Shrock, Emerita Alice Paul: Claiming Power. By J.D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. ix + 395 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $34.95. For years, Alice Paul has been one of the most reviled and revered of American feminists. She inspired near-fanatical devotion from her sister suffragettes in the National Women’s Party (NWP). She also provoked harsh criticism and contempt from mainstream suffragists who considered her militant tactics scandalous and damaging to the cause. Such a controversial character demands a careful biography, and Paul has one in this book. Unfortunately, only one of the authors was able to complete the final text. The narrative benefits from oral history tapes collected by Amelia Fry between 1975 and 1982. But when Fry became ill her research files and partial draft were shelved until 2005 when J. D. Zahniser agreed to complete the analysis of Paul’s early life and suffrage years. Fry died in 2009. Paul was certainly not an easy subject to study. Though her suffrage campaigns thrust her into public view, she was intensely private and resisted discussing personal matters in interviews (including one attempted [End Page 46] by this reviewer). She culled NWP files to erase evidence of her life outside of suffrage. Thus, as Zahniser admits, “we will never know Alice Paul as fully as we would like.” Despite these constraints, this careful biography offers a more personal view of Paul than is available in earlier works that tend to focus on organizational strategies and leadership styles. From the first to the final paragraphs, Claiming Power clearly connects Paul’s Quaker roots to her suffrage work. Paul was reared in a Hicksite family and community that indelibly shaped her ideals. She absorbed the values of equality, integrity, simplicity, social justice and public service, and later embodied these same virtues in her steady self-sacrifice for the suffrage cause. Her notoriety as a suffragette tested the tolerance of her more conservative relatives and hometown; at the same time, she lost interest in the spiritual side of the community. Thus, “her relationship with her birthright community, and theirs with her, remained ambivalent.” Nevertheless, she remained true to core Quaker values and retained her membership in the Moorestown (N.J.) Meeting all her life. At times the dense textual details, such as information about collegiate clothing and housing, can become tedious. However, Claiming Power provides riveting and disturbing descriptions of Paul’s imprisonments, including her isolation in a psychopathic ward, forced sleep deprivation, voluntary hunger strikes, and repeated forcible feedings (at least 55 times in one month alone). Amazingly, she was willing and able to endure such brutal treatment in England, and then submit to it again in the United States. The trauma severely damaged Paul’s physical health; it took years to recover. But her determination never wavered. Paul’s political strategy and dramatic tactics revived a moribund suffrage movement in the U.S. and helped deliver the constitutional amendment formally giving women the vote in 1920, although women of color (including African-American, Native American) would be forced to wait until at least the 1960s for effective enfranchisement. This delay points to a problem in Paul’s vision: her focus on suffrage to the exclusion of all other reforms blinded her to the complexities of class and race, a subject not explored at length. Likewise, discussion of the post-1920 period is limited to a four-page epilogue, even though Paul persisted in “claiming power” for women until her death, especially through her creation and commitment to the Equal Rights Amendment. [End Page 47] Clearly, Alice Paul was a Quaker of extraordinary courage and self-will. Amelia Fry and J.D. Zahniser have provided a service for both Paul and their readers by presenting this richly detailed portrait that should be of interest to historians, political scientists, women’s studies scholars, feminists, and Quakers. [End Page 48] Alice Almond Shrock, Emerita Earlham College Copyright © 2015 Friends Historical Association

Beyond Braille on Toilet Doors: Museum Curators and Audiences with Vision Impairment

Beyond Braille on Toilet Doors: Museum Curators and Audiences with Vision Impairment

‘This is a cage for migrants’: the rise of racism and the challenges for social work in the Greek context

Greece has been an emblematic case for the European Union’s implementation of anti-immigration securitisation and externalisation. These policies have been translated into non-tolerance and intimidation towards certain populations, which, in turn, has resulted in more and more violent forms of the rejection of migration, which has become mainstream. Parallel to this are racist attacks, pogroms and acts of violence committed by neo-Nazi groups. On the other hand, a growing anti-racist movement has emerged in the form of human rights defence and solidarity networks and anti-racist resistance. This article aims to show the ways in which the rise of situations of rejection and racism have come to challenge the work of social workers and to understand how social work can be rearticulated with regard to its core values of social change and social justice, the antithesis of the profession’s traditional ‘neutrality’ and ‘culture of silence’.

Developmental Trajectories of Social Justice Values in Adolescence: Relations with Sympathy and Friendship Quality

AbstractThis study examined developmental trajectories of social justice values (SJV) in a representative sample of Swiss adolescents (N = 1258) at 15 (Time 1), 18 (Time 2), and 21 years of age (Time 3). SJV and friendship quality were measured via self‐reports. Sympathy was assessed via self‐ and mother‐reports. Latent class growth analysis revealed three developmental trajectories of SJV: high‐stable (80 percent), moderate‐decreasing (17 percent), and low‐increasing (3 percent). Adolescents with low levels of self‐ and mother‐reported sympathy were more likely to be members of the low‐increasing than the high‐stable or moderate decreasing trajectory groups. Adolescents who reported low levels of sympathy and friendship quality at 15 years of age were more likely to be members of the moderate‐decreasing trajectory group than the high‐stable trajectory group. Results are discussed with respect to the potential significance of sympathy and friendship quality for understanding the development of SJV during adolescence.

Social Justice in the Social Work Classroom: Applying a Professional Value to Social Work Education

Social justice is a primary value of social work and therefore has a place in discussions of social work education pedagogy. This is especially true for conversations pertaining to students who are underprepared, due to educational inequalities, for successful completion of writing assignments at the undergraduate level. If underprepared students are treated as equals to prepared students, then the social inequalities that contributed to or caused a student to be underprepared are perpetuated rather than challenged. The authors explore responses to underprepared students that are consistent with social work's professional value of social justice.

Countering Inequality: Brazil's Movimento Sem‐Terra

Data from a national survey of formerly landless peasants residing in federal land‐reform settlements in Brazil (Pesquisa Nacional de Educação na Reforma Agrária—) confirm that the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem‐Terra—) has been far more successful than other settlement movements in assuring a better quality of life for its members. This superior performance is attributed to an organizational structure that demands and assures membership involvement, and a commitment to participatory education in an environment that fosters and supports 's goals and objectives. 's members have higher self‐perceived social status than members of non‐ movements, have better residential environments and more material possessions, and experience an education that emphasizes the movement's principles of social justice, radical democracy, and humanist and socialist values.

“Istitutiones Iuris” of Albanian Consuetudinary Law

The custom is among the sources of law, definitely, the most distant in time. Our legal tradition has been transmitted orally from generation to generation through the centuries and it bares these language elements that are considered fundamental for our people’s identity. Our society was shaped over the centuries under secular foreign occupation, and in full lack of a state authority to be represented with. Despite this, the juridical oral tradition and this kind of peculiar language managed to cross the millennia through its customs, creating and cultivating social and juridical institutions which have served to shape a collective conscience that made it possible for the modern state to be founded. Our analysis will concentrate principally in the representative values of the social belongings, creating the legal basis of the Albanian ethos and ethnos, which are always served as an autochthonous legal source. This might dispatch social justice values and human dignity. This analysis deepens its focus mainly in the strongholds of the common law; highlighting those social and legal institutions, that on our point of view have had the greatest influence in the creation of our national consciousness. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n2p337

Participatory Democracy and Struggling Schools: Making Space for Youth in School Turnarounds

Background/Context Federal policy, as codified in Race to the Top (RTT) funding guidelines, outlines four types of intervention: turnaround, restart, closure, and transformation. RTT has embraced a technocratic paradigm for school reform that frames choice less as the opportunity for the public to deliberate about what it wants from its schools and more in terms of the freedom of individual families to choose, as customers, from a diverse array of school options. This market-based system has eroded substantive opportunities for parents and students to participate in decisions about their schools. Although scholars have developed compelling arguments about the need to involve parents and teachers in a more deliberative and democratic approach to intervening in low-performing schools, there is little scholarship focused on the role of young people in school intervention processes. Purpose There is widespread agreement among progressive critics that RTT interventions are not sufficiently democratic. More work is needed to develop participatory approaches. In some cases this may require departing from a strict “evidence-based” framework and imagining new alternatives consistent with values of social justice and educational equity. It also requires expanding existing treatments of deliberative democracy theory to include young people. Research Design & Findings: This article makes a conceptual argument rooted in theory, empirical literature, and practical experience in schools. After explaining theories of participatory democracy, youth–adult partnerships, and thirdspace, we propose five practices that should guide a deliberative, participatory approach to public decision-making about schools. These are: border-crossing facilitation, participatory research, multilingual and multicultural discourse practices, authentic decision-making, and joint work and distributed expertise. Conclusions/Recommendations The current school turnaround paradigm, embodied by closures, conversion to charters, and teacher reassignments, has left a great deal of collateral damage in its wake. Teachers work under threat of firing. We propose an alternative approach to improve struggling public neighborhood schools—not just another option in a menu of turnaround strategies, but an alternative frame and set of practices that expands the conversation about intervention. This approach encourages deliberation and communication among diverse networks of students, teachers, and families.

Research Paper 'Unless everyone's covert guerrilla-like social justice practitioners…': A preliminary study exploring social justice in UK counselling psychology

BackgroundThe discipline of applied psychology has begun to reflect more explicitly on the social justice values and practices of the profession. This paper presents the first stage of research in a larger project aiming to explore ‘social justice’ in applied psychology in the UK, and takes as its focus the branch of counselling psychology.AimTo explore how members of the UK counselling psychology profession understand social justice, and act on their commitment to it.MethodInterviews were conducted with six individuals who had at least a moderate interest in and commitment to social justice, as assessed by the Social Issues Questionnaire. Data were analysed using techniques from the grounded theory approach.FindingsThemes included participants’ understandings of social justice both on a theoretical and a personal level, and the perceived fit between social justice and counselling psychology. Participants reported a perception of a lack of social justice action and reflected on potential difficulties associated with engaging in social justice action.DiscussionImplications for the international counselling psychology profession are reflected on. Directions for further research are outlined.

‘The voice inside herself’: transforming gendered academic identities in educational administration

This paper traces the academic identity formation(s) of 10 Canadian female academics whose disciplinary knowledge is in the field of educational administration. We trace the ways in which discourses of gender, institutional power, and other cultural and social influences shaped their sense of themselves as academics in the highly patriarchal domain of the academy as an institution as well as within the discourse(s) of educational administration in faculties of education. In doing so, we discuss the ways in which these women's entry into academia transformed identity possibilities for themselves and others. We conclude that these women share a commitment to rigorous scholarship and to the values of equity and social justice. The way in which they engage with those values in their work and lives has been taken up in the particular institutional and personal circumstances of their academic lives and has been shaped by the effects of normative discourses of gender. The result, individually and cumulatively, has been transformative on the individuals, within the institutions in which they have worked, and on the scholarship of Canadian educational administration.

Putting ‘Good Society’ Ahead of Growth and/or ‘Development’: Overcoming Neoliberalism's Growth Trap and its Costly Consequences

AbstractWith the rise of neoliberalism, a corporate‐dominated state‐assisted deregulated growth strategy, which has caught most countries in the throes of what can be termed a ‘growth trap’, has indeed yielded significant economic gains for many but has also entailed inexorable social, moral and environmental adversities.This paper argues that the reason we experience the incongruities between economic growth and social nourishing is the fact that we treat economy over society as our end goal. We regard economic growth as the end‐all sum. Given the social and other costs this obsession with growth has inflicted upon societies, it is important that we escape the neoliberal growth trap and recalibrate our focus from the economy to society, to ensure that neither growth nor ‘development’, but rather formation of what this paper terms ‘good societies’, those that nurture and thrive on values of equity, empathy, social justice and environmental sustainability, should be the end goal.By drawing lessons from several philosophical and practical ideas, the paper offers policy options relevant to the implementation of the ‘good society’ concept both within and across nations. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Service learning: a vehicle for building health equity and eliminating health disparities.

Service learning (SL) is a form of community-centered experiential education that places emerging health professionals in community-generated service projects and provides structured opportunities for reflection on the broader social, economic, and political contexts of health. We describe the elements and impact of five distinct week-long intensive SL courses focused on the context of urban, rural, border, and indigenous health contexts. Students involved in these SL courses demonstrated a commitment to community-engaged scholarship and practice in both their student and professional lives. SL is directly in line with the core public health value of social justice and serves as a venue to strengthen community-campus partnerships in addressing health disparities through sustained collaboration and action in vulnerable communities.

Fossil fuel divestment in US higher education: student-led organising for climate justice

Based on over one year of participant observation within the student-led fossil fuel divestment (FFD) movement, this article contextualises the origins, successes, challenges, and inner workings of the FFD movement in US higher education. We analyse several college divestment campaigns to illuminate key factors that have contributed to wins and rejections, and explore why students continue to organise for FFD. It is our contention that such widespread mobilisation for FFD signals a sea change, from individualised sustainability efforts to youth-led collective political action, and recognition of climate change as a social justice issue. In addition to participant observation, we gathered data from 23 survey responses of organisers involved in divestment campaigns within higher education, and 40 interviews with individuals including student and professional organisers within the FFD movement, institutional decision-makers at campuses with FFD campaigns, and other experts in the area. Our analysis also reveals that relatively smaller endowments and, more importantly, institutional values of environmental sustainability and social justice played key roles in colleges’ decision to divest. Our examination of divestment “losses” illuminates common arguments administrators deploy in their rejection statements, including the perceived costs of divestment, the need to maintain fiduciary responsibility, and scepticism that divestment will have any impact on the fossil fuel industry. Finally, in spite of increasing resistance from college and university administrations, student divestment campaigns continue to escalate, and are committed to organising over the long term.

Democracy and Social Justice in Sarajevo’s Schools

After the end of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, the people of Sarajevo found themselves rebuilding their country while also learning to live with their former enemies in this developing democracy. In this study we examined the extent to which democratic practices and social justice values were being taught in Sarajevo’s schools. Using a case study method, we gathered data gathered from interviews with educators in a variety of roles in Sarajevo, observations of elementary and secondary classroom teaching, and daily reflective journal entries about living and teaching in the city during the fall of 2008. Our data analyses revealed that democratic teaching practices and multicultural values are not being taught in Sarajevo’s schools. Instead, entangled and fragmented governmental structures, lingering emotional trauma from the war, and a general sense of pessimism about the future are interfering with educational reform and movement toward a democratic and socially-just society.

Putting ‘Good Society’ Ahead of the Economy: Overcoming Neoliberalism's Growth Trap and its Costly Consequences

With the rise of neoliberalism, a corporate-dominated state assisted deregulated growth strategy, which has caught most countries in the throes of what can be termed a ‘growth trap’, has indeed yielded significant economic gains for many, but at the same time has also entailed inexorable social, moral and environmental adversities. This paper argues that the reason we experience the incongruities between neoliberalism induced economic growth and social nourishing is because we give economy primacy over society, sometimes to its cost. Given the colossal social, environmental and moral damage that the pursuit of neoliberal economic growth has caused to society, it is important that we recalibrate our focus from the economy to society and ensure that neither growth nor ‘development’, but rather formation of what this paper terms ‘good societies’ – entities that nurture and thrive on values of equity, empathy, social justice and environmental sustainability – constitutes the end goal of all public actions. By drawing lessons from several philosophical and practical ideas, the paper offers several policy options relevant to implementation of the ‘good society’ concept both within and across nations. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment