Social Justice Work Research Articles

Directionality: Unifying Psychological and Social Understandings of Well‐Being and Distress Through an Existential Ontology

A conceptual framework rooted in existentialism is presented to unify psychological and sociopolitical perspectives. Human beings are directional, with well‐being the actualization of highest order directions. Distress emerges through external blocking of directions, or through dysergetic or ineffective internal configurations. Hence, social justice work and counseling have essential, and integrated, roles.

Exhaustion as Affective Alignment: Social Justice Work in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven

Abstract This article uses Denise Giardina’s 1987 novel, Storming Heaven, as a case study to look at how labor is represented aesthetically in fiction for political ends. The narrative depicts the theft of an Appalachian pastoral scene, which quickly devolves into mine work, abuse, and death. Mine labor is described vividly, and it is performed under the steady eye of mine guards who use threats, intimidation, and weapons to quash strikes, kill strikers, and keep miners working and living in fear. Giardina’s novel is a political novel that challenges unfair working conditions and neoliberal exploitation. She uses her work to create a sense of exhaustion through aesthetic and narrative choices. Exhaustion, with its resonances of hard work and honest labor, helps Giardina shift the Southern Appalachian structures of feeling from past political and social loss toward an alignment of political activism and futurity. Excerpts from reviews of the novel show how readers process their sense of exhaustion and the novel’s political aims. Giardina’s style is effective for getting readers to sympathize with her labor politics by using a familiar, anti-cathartic staying-power, although this style seems to lack a sense of sustainability and risks making readers feel manipulated or politically fatigued.

Exploring student teachers’ ‘stuck moments’: affect[ing] the theory-practice gap in social justice teacher education

ABSTRACT This article attends to student teachers’ ‘stuck moments,’ or emotional moments of crisis, in a social justice-oriented teacher education program (SJTE). It seeks to problematise the familiar tendency of viewing student teachers’ stuck moments as symptomatic of the theory-practice gap. By troubling both the representational logic that undergirds the theory-practice gap and its reductionist explanations of stuckness, this work conceptualises stuck moments as a fluid, moving assemblage of bodies and discursive, affective, and material forces. Informed by posthumanist theories of affect and a post-qualitative methodology, this article posits that the pressure on student teachers to achieve teaching mastery, and participants’ desire to make a discernible impact on their students, partially constitute the stuck moment assemblage. These elements illuminate the infiltration of learning discourses in stuckness. I argue that learning discourses, with their neoliberal focus on mastery, control, and measurable outcomes, collide with the uncertainty and tenuousness of social justice work. This research suggests that stuck moments have the potential to both expose and oppose the conflicting discourses, affective attachments, and intensities that student teachers encounter as they navigate their SJTE program.

Resituating Reciprocity within Longer Legacies of Colonization: A Conversation

his conversation/article resituates the concept of reciprocity, as it has been theorized and enacted in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, within a larger framework of social justice, one that recognizes legacies of struggle, survival and perseverance. When situated within the Filipinx indigenous notion of kapwa, reciprocity takes a temporal turn not only in recognizing that building trust and reciprocity happen repeatedly over time but also in recognizing how enacting reciprocity extends beyond initial research contexts, participants, and outcomes. Enacting reciprocity requires slowing down in time and working with others in social justice work strategically, tactically, and repeatedly over longer durations. To see ourselves as reciprocal beings means that we continually see ourselves as members of a larger community invested in making structural asymmetries legible and open to deep revision.

Leading from the inside Out: Contemplative Practice as Radical Self-care for BIPOC Activists

ABSTRACT This article contributes to scholarship focused on the contemplative justice movement. The study analyzes the experiences of BIPOC activists engaged in contemplative practice through the Practice in Transformative Action (PiTA) program in Oakland, California. Utilizing a Black feminist power analysis, I interpret theories of social change and organizational affiliations among these activists to speak to the utility of contemplative practice as a form of radical self-care which supports the individual and their work for social justice.

“You never stop being a social worker:” Experiences of pediatric hospital social workers during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought widespread devastation upon children and families across the United States, widening existing health disparities and inequities that disproportionately affect communities of color. In health care settings specifically, social work is the key workforce tasked with responding to patient and family psychosocial needs, both of which have increased substantially since the emergence of COVID-19. There is a need to understand ways in which hospital social workers’ roles, responsibilities, and integration within interprofessional teams have evolved in response to these challenges. In this qualitative study, focus groups were conducted with 55 social workers employed across multiple settings in a large, urban, pediatric hospital in Spring 2020. Thematic analyses revealed salient superordinate themes related to the pandemic’s impact on social work practice and social workers themselves, institutional facilitators and impediments to effective social work and interprofessional practice, and social work perspectives on future pandemic recovery efforts. Within each theme, a number of interrelated subthemes emerged elucidating nuances of telehealth adoption in the context of remote work, the salience of social determinants of health, and the critical role of social work in social justice oriented pandemic preparedness and response efforts. Implications for interprofessional practice and the profession at large are discussed.

Conflict and Care: Vietnamese American Women and the Dynamics of Social Justice Work

ABSTRACT This collection of essays explores the experiences of Vietnamese American women scholar-activists navigating the complexities of antiracist work within the Vietnamese American community. Each essay discusses the gendered and generational disciplining faced by the authors while doing social justice work and reflects on the choices they made in response. Attentive to the historical forces that have shaped the Vietnamese American community, the authors advocate for building bridges and fostering spaces of compassionate and radical care.

Latinx Teachers Advocating and Providing Support to Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students and Their Families

This study explores how Latinx teachers engage in social justice agendas for their Culturally and Linguistically Diverse students, specific barriers and support systems these Latinx teachers encounter in their social justice work, and the educational strategies Latinx teachers value in their role as advocates in their social justice work. The following three themes emerged from participant data: (a) Tesoros from students and families, (b) Advocacy for CLD students: High expectations of all students, (c) Support system as pre-service and in-service teachers: hechale ganas/work hard. We briefly formulate each of these themes, providing fragments from participant testimonios as examples. After formulation and discussion of each theme, we provided recommendations for delivering support to CLD students and their families.

Affect, Active Intolerance, and Abolition

What are the affects and transformative ways of feeling that characterize the work of social justice? What activates anger and love, courage and curiosity, in the service of resistance? What exactly does resistance to oppressive conditions feel like? And, conversely, what do oppressive conditions feel like? How are affective scripts prompted and suppressed, how are they embattled, in the work of social justice? In the collective inquiry that follows, we take inspiration from the 1970s French prison resistance network, Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons (the Prisons Information Group, or GIP), which framed resistance to oppression affectively as an active intolerance of and against the intolerable. While authors range far and wide in the archives they consult and the problematics they engage—from prisons to clinics, from coloniality to ableism, and from curiosity to the power of writing and poetry—this symposium reflects on the affective work of intolerance directed toward intolerable institutions and practices.

A Call for Enhanced Training and Action on the Intersections of Mental Health, Decent Work, and Career in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Although career is identified as a key element of counselling and counselling psychology, currently many students and professionals within these disciplines do not identify career as integral to their practice. This neglect persists despite ongoing calls for increased awareness of career development issues from scholars in the field. The authors argue that the integration of the psychology of work and career is essential to ethical practice in counselling and counselling psychology as well as a necessary area of competency in acting on fostering social justice and decent work as a human right. Recommendations for integrating career within counsellor education and counselling psychology training programs are discussed.

Queering the Co-Curricular: A Review of Progress at the First Degree Granting HBCU

Queering the Co-CurricularA Review of Progress at the First Degree Granting HBCU Melina McConatha (bio), Denise Brown (bio), Lenetta Lee (bio), and Nafeesa Muhammad (bio) Extensive opportunities for growth and learning exist beyond classroom walls. In higher education, one may argue that some of the most important lessons fall outside of the traditional curriculum. While complimentary to the curriculum, co-curricular research and programming provides key emotional, social, and physical learning opportunities for students, often shaping the campus climate. In practice, co-curricular activities highlight intrapersonal development and provide a holistic and inclusive approach to learning (Beltman & Schaeben, 2012; Elias & Drea, 2013; Foubert & Grainger, 2006; Kuh, 2001). Co-curricular work also provides a unique opportunity to support gender and sexual diversity and inclusion on college campuses. Our contribution to this collection seeks to share a brief report of our efforts exploring the possibility of "queering" the co-curricular and developing an assessment tool to evaluate gender and sexuality norms that may be pervasive and limiting at our HBCU. To become more supportive for our LGTBQAI students, this coalition of faculty, administration and students examine how these norms and hierarchies shape co-curricular activities and, as a result, the larger campus culture. We began this process with a historical analysis of gender, sexuality, and Queer scholarship at HBCUs. HBCUs are uniquely positioned to study and support LGTBQAI students of color (Williams, 2013). The modern Civil Rights Movement, which theoretically ended the Jim Crow Era, marked the path for including gender and sexuality studies in higher education (Elfman, 2015). Forty years ago, Spelman College established the Women's Research and Resource Center (WRRC). Created for Black women, by Black women, [End Page 105] the Center became the first of its kind to be housed at an HBCU. Similar institutions such as Bennett College and Morgan State University followed suit and began offering women and gender studies programs. Similar to Spelman's WRRC, women studies programs at these HBCUs provided visibility to the complexities of gender and sexuality for the Black campus community. The interdisciplinary nature of these programs opened the door for thinking about gender and sexuality in historically Black educational spaces in nuanced ways (e.g., relational navigation; identity exploration; colorism; gender expression; etc.). Today, these programs continue to provide queer students on campus support in navigating historically rigid constructs of gender and sexuality in collegiate environments. Recently Spelman College announced that it was establishing an endowed chair in Queer Studies named for Audre Lorde (2019). This opportunity was developed in her honor to provide a space for scholars to work outside of racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic discourses. The WRRC launched the Audre Lorde Project with the goal of exposing LGBTQAI issues within and beyond the classroom (Guy-Sheftall, 2012). As other HBCUs strive to create similar inclusive queer campus activities and resources, an examination of how campus activities can work to deconstruct traditional gender and sexuality hierarchies is essential moving forward. With its own unique story, while also positioning education as a path towards inclusivity and freedom, Ashmun Institution was initially founded to educate Black men of African descent. Renamed Lincoln University (1866), the first degree-granting Historically Black University has a history of social justice work dating back to 1854 before the American Civil War. Lincoln University has served as a welcoming and affirming institution for many LGTBQAI Black graduates. However, our contemporary story has yet to develop an assessment plan for gender and sexuality diversity and inclusion in our campus community. As Audre Lorde (1986) shares, "it is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences." Cocurricular programming provides a space beyond the classroom to support these differences and cultivate a culture of kinship and belonging for LGTBQAI folks and, in turn, the larger campus community. Suskie (2014) identified five essential dimensions of co-curricular programming in higher education that we have incorporated in an assessment model to "queer" [End Page 106] our work. These tenants include: (1) focus, (2) relevance, (3) community, (4) evidence, and (5) betterment. In this coalition we identified our focus (1) to be "queering" the co-curricular. Queering was defined...

Voices of Justice in Non-Fiction Films and in Christianity.

Environmental degradation and one of its effects, global warming, have worsened the inequalities between the rich and the poor among people and nations. The Catholic Church has demonstrated its deep commitment to social justice visibly since the Vatican II, while the most recent Encyclical, Laudato Si1, offered by Pope Francis moves the Church in an unprecedented manner toward the coupling of sustainability and religion to address global inequalities.This paper features a few important dimensions of inequalities to heighten the urgency of global social justice work. It then reviews documents connected to sustainability in Catholic social teaching, with an emphasis on Laudato Si by Pope Francis.Finally, through a brief analysis of a contemporary documentary film, “Virunga” (2014),2 which focuses on a crisis that recently occurred in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this paper illustrates an impactful and effective way to articulate global inequality and mobilize coalitions to protect people, creatures and land against violence and environmental degradation.Social documentaries, in general, represent voices for justice and the common good shared by all major religions, and the documents of the Catholic Church highlighted in the paper offer a concrete trajectory for global justice that we see in cinematic form.

Pedagogy and the Politics of Organizing in Mississippi

This article reflects on a community-directed collaboration between students at a four-year liberal arts institution and a local organization in Mississippi to develop an index of women's economic security. It suggests that the collaborative nature of the course, as well as the relationship- and community-building witnessed in Mississippi offer counter-narratives to liberal individualism, southern conservatism, and the practice of social justice work.

Intersecting Sexual Identities, Oppressions, and Social Justice Work: Comparing LGBTQ Baby Boomers to Millennials Who Came of Age After the 1980s AIDS Epidemic.

In this study we analyze 50 interviews with racially diverse, predominantly low-income, LGBTQ participants living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Rooted in intersectional theory that conceptualizes identities as shaped by interlocking forms of oppression and privilege, we compared interviews with "Baby Boomers" to those with "Millennial" participants, who came into adulthood in a time of greater legal and social inclusion for LGBTQ people. Our analysis focused on three questions: How do participants understand their sexual identities? How are the identities of sexual minority participants co-constructed with intersecting forms of oppression? What motivates LGBTQ people in our sample to engage in social justice work? We found that white LGBTQ people tended to see their sexualities as primary to their identity, compared to LGBTQ Black and/or Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) who tended to see their identities in intersectional terms. Younger LGBTQ people were more likely to delink sex and gender identity; consequently, they were more likely to frame their sexual identities with terms not rooted in a gender binary (e.g., pansexual or queer). Experiences with homophobia were prevalent across generations, and intersected with racism and economic oppressions, but younger people more often described support from institutional agents. Participants' sense of community and commitment to giving back after experiences of trauma motivated them to engage in social justice work. Our findings highlight the intersectional nature of oppressions faced by LGBTQ people and the need for organizations to move away from focusing exclusively on homophobic oppression as a monolith.

Introduction to the special issue, “intersectional experiences and marginalized voices”

In order to advance our goal of highlighting intersectional work and the importance of centering critical praxis we felt it was necessary to make a visible contribution to the Mid-South Sociological Association’s journal, Sociological Spectrum. While there are issues of general sociology journals that focus on “race, class, and gender” there are few instances of these same journals dedicating an entire issue to “intersectionality.” Never before has Sociological Spectrum published a special issue totally dedicated to intersectional research, analysis, and praxis. We begin with a rationale for this special issue, then follow with a brief review of intersectionality, highlighting the seminal research and the variety of applications. Next, we summarize the articles in this special issue to demonstrate the versatility of intersectionality. We end with a call to recognize the importance of intersectional scholarship and application to social justice work

Emotional configurations of politicization in social justice movements

PurposeThis paper aims to trace how emotion shapes the sense that is made of politics and how politicization can remake and re-mark emotion, giving it new meaning in context. This paper brings together theories of politicization and emotional configurations in learning to interrogate the role emotion plays in the learning of social justice activists.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on sociocultural learning perspectives, the paper traces politicization processes across the youth climate movement (using video-based interaction analysis) and the animal rights movement (using ethnographic interviews and participant observation).FindingsEmotional configurations significantly impacted activists’ politicization in terms of what was learned conceptually, the kinds of practices – including emotional practices – that were taken up collectively, the epistemologies that framed social justice work, and the identities that were made salient in collective action. In turn, politicization reshaped how social justice activists made sense of emotion in the course of activist practice.Social implicationsThis study is valuable for theorizing social justice learning, so social movement facilitators and educators might design spaces where learning about gender, racialization, colonialism and/or human/more-than-human relations can thrive. By attending to emotional configurations, this study can help facilitate a design that supports and sustains learning for justice.Originality/valueEmotion remains under-theorized and under-analyzed in the learning sciences, despite indications that emotion enables and constrains particular learning opportunities. This paper proposes new ways of understanding emotion and politicization as co-constitutive processes for learning scientists interested in politics and social justice.

A reflection on living through COVID-19 as a social work professor

This short exposaccent is a reflective piece on my work with people experiencing homelessness in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper provides an intimate portrait of the fragility, insecurity and uncertainty of navigating social justice work during a state of emergency. As such, I attempt to provide a brief sketch of being a social work professor and practitioner during this surreal time.

Economy and STEM Education Policy: Towards a Bidirectional STEM Pipeline

Whether implicit or explicit, the purpose of K-12 education in the American mind is for (1) economic advancement of the individual and (2) the maintenance of the capitalist economic structure through the provision of a qualified labor force. As the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are seen as central to future economic activity, much attention in science education research is presently paid to how to best retain students in a unidirectional pipeline model towards STEM careers. I challenge the purely economic impetus for diverse participation in STEM education as necessarily reproducing historical inequities. Rather, I reconceptualize a bidirectional STEM pipeline that seeks to democratize the tools of science for the continued work of social justice. In this model, science takes on the role of one of a number of equally valuable funds of knowledge that students can appropriate to answer questions and address issues in their own community contexts. I draw on the work of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky in discussing the dialectical relationship between identity and culture, to explain how democratizing the tools of science in this way will allow marginalized groups to (re)construct the very culture of science.

Applied Anthropology, Activism, and Loss: Experiences from highland Guatemala

AbstractIn this essay, I contemplate the ethics of community engagement based on my work as an applied medical anthropologist in Guatemala. During my dissertation fieldwork in a highland community, I lived with a local Mayan family, and our lives together centered on discussing their goals, community organizing, and strategies for improving indigenous rights. I describe how the relationships I built with this family and the social justice work happening in the community gave me a sense of purpose as an applied anthropologist. At the time, it seemed like participatory and collaborative research at its best. A year later, an adult son of the local family was murdered for his community work, calling into question the notions of progress and advocacy. Here, I discuss my struggle with the moral imperative of applied anthropologists to support the human rights of local communities in counterbalance to our ethical obligation to protect research collaborators.

Introduction: The Social Justice Work of German Comics and Graphic Literature

Introduction: The Social Justice Work of German Comics and Graphic Literature