Struggle For Justice Research Articles

Bending Towards Justice: Progress and Societal Narratives

Throughout history, changing societal narratives have played important roles in fostering social change, bringing about progress. However, historical progress is not linear; instead, it is a paradoxical concept involving social advancements, regressions, and ongoing struggles for justice and equality. A myriad of historical and contemporary movements for social justice have contributed to the complex path towards addressing the persistent inequalities and challenges faced by marginalized groups worldwide. Despite these attempts, questions arise regarding the extent to which progress has been realized and whether the ideals of progress envisioned by early theorists align with contemporary realities. This paper delves into case studies of numerous significant global movements, including feminism, anti-racism, Indigenous rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and strides toward liberal democracy, to assess how progress is understood and achieved. It will analyze progress as a dominant narrative of history, examine its various implications, and investigate how it correlates with the idea of democracy.

“White Privilege . . . Is Not an Organizing Strategy”: Shifting Frameworks in White People’s Antiracist Efforts

We know relatively little about how to mobilize and sustain White involvement in politically impactful, antiracist collective action. Adding to the literature on the vexations of White people’s approaches to antiracism, this study takes the case of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a national organization that seeks to bring a critical mass of U.S.-based White people into antiracist campaigns at a scale not previously attempted. It traces the shift from a White privilege analytic that has been dominant in many White-led antiracist spaces, often in ways that can be individualizing and depoliticizing, to a “mutual” or “shared” interest approach, which identifies White people’s own stake in dismantling White supremacy, though not without its own perils. Findings suggest that a mutual interest orientation prioritizes collective action over personal morality, holding important benefits for the recruitment, retention, and principled engagement of White people in racial justice struggles.

Politics and Violence in Representation of Acid Attack Victims in the Media: A Feminist Discursive Perspective

Abstract In recent times, narratives of acid attack survivors have become common in the media (newspapers and magazines), showcasing them simultaneously as fashion models and victims of a heinous crime. In a similar vein, the Hindi film Chhapaak underscores the barbarity of an acid attack and the subsequent struggles for justice by the protagonist. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis and insights from Nancy Fraser on cannibal capitalism, this article analyzes the discursive construction of acid assault victims through select extracts from media articles and the film to highlight the politics of representation of the survivors and their ordeals against patriarchal and androcentric arrangements in society. Linguistic analysis (through speech acts, vocabulary, and presupposition) reveals contradictory discourses of celebration and discrimination in the media in relation to fashion, where the acid survivors are used not only to increase awareness about the offense but also to promote sales of garments. The discourses of rampant unemployment, gender-based oppression, and racial violence, despite laws regulating the sale of acid, underscore the cannibalizing tendencies of a capitalist society that seeks to devour and shun women after incapacitating them. Furthermore, the complicity of public agencies (legal, medical, and governmental) hints at apathy, callousness, and the systemic violence symptomatic of a profit-driven capitalist society.

PHRASEOLOGISMS WITH THE "BREAD" COMPONENT AS MARKERS OF UKRAINIAN LINGUOMENTALITY (FEATURES OF USAGE IN MASS MEDIA TEXTS)

The article deals with phraseological units with the "bread" component, which are actively used in the texts of mass media messages. The semantic groups of such idioms are analyzed, as well as their inherent property of actualizing the idea of the food culture of Ukrainians, their worldview, mentality, etc. The purpose of the study was to identify and describe the features of media phraseological units (PHUs), namely those containing the "bread" component, which required the completion of tasks: to single out the phraseological array in media texts for the period of 2021-2024, where special attention was focused on phrasemes with gustatives; to identify PHUs that have a "bread" component in their structure and to find out the semantic content of such units in the media space. The object of the study was headlines and texts with phraseology in Ukrainian electronic editions of national and regional media, the subject was the peculiarities of the implementation of such units in the mass media. To achieve the goal, the work used a descriptive method, elements of component analysis (using which the semantic structure of the meaning of phraseological units was established); a quantitative method that made it possible to compare and generalize the obtained results. The work examines the verbal expression of the "bread" component as a linguistic marker through the development of dictionaries of phraseological units. A semantic analysis of phraseological units is presented, the most used in speech are identified, which reveal character traits, behavior, moral qualities, traditions and customs of Ukrainians, illustrate various life and everyday situations through food culture, and present a linguistic picture of the world. The significant cultural and national potential of such phraseological units is also emphasized. The peculiarities of the implementation and functioning of phraseological units with the "bread" component in the headlines and texts of Ukrainian electronic media are clarified, where they maximally reveal their influential power, which consists in the ability to attract the attention of the reader, evoke emotions, be remembered, as well as in the property of comprehensive display the current meaning of the message. As a result of the research, it was found that the most frequent phrases in newspaper materials are the phraseological units with the "bread" component to indicate the positive qualities of Ukrainians, in particular hard work, hospitality, good-naturedness and generosity, and PHUs were also frequent, reflecting the struggle for justice and the hard efforts of Ukrainians to survive in the conditions war.

Analisis Perilaku Karakter Marisol Dalam Film A Man Called Otto Sebagai Representasi Kepedulian Sosial

This study aims to analyze the character of Marisol in the film "A Man Called Otto" as a representation of the attitude of social care. Marisol is portrayed as a social activist who cares about the welfare of the surrounding community. The method used in this research is Roland Barthes semiotic analysis with a qualitative descriptive approach. The data collection techniques used are observation techniques, documentation techniques, and literature study techniques. The data is analyzed to identify how Marisol's social care attitude is reflected in her social interactions, real actions, as well as her thoughts and motivations. The results show that in the 8 scenes analyzed on Marisol's character, it shows that Marisol's character plays an important role in exploring the complexity of social care attitudes. Through her actions and sincere attitude towards social issues, Marisol represents the struggle for social justice and concern for human rights. The analysis also highlights how the character stimulates reflection in the audience on the importance of social care in shaping a more just and inclusive society.

Thick rhetoric: MLK and global cartographies of polyvocal struggle

ABSTRACT This essay introduces a framework of thick rhetoric looking to articulations of freedom and resistance around The Montgomery Story, a 1958 graphic novel published in Alabama U.S.A. Thickness suggests discourses that have been accused of being simultaneously too much and too little, having been forced into one plane of coherence, often against their own cultural location. Here, thick rhetoric engages social location and discursive circulation while allowing for possibilities of reading and participating in polyvocal and cross-boundaried resistance. Engaging thick frameworks of temporal and spatial cartographies of MLK’s global circulation offers insight into polyvocal, coalitional struggles for justice.

THEMES IN ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA: A STUDY OF THE 1940S AND 50S

The paper talks about various themes explored in Italian neorealist cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. During the 1940s and 1950s, Italian filmmakers responded to the artificiality of pre-World War II and Fascist films with a new movement called neorealism (Italian for "new reality"). The movement aimed to address the pre-war events and the social and economic issues that the war spawned realistically. The presentations of events/situations follow certain patterns like poverty, starvation, suffering and struggle for socio-economic justice. There is a clear-cut and distinct emphasis on characterization and the social milieu from which its thematic concerns grow. It aims to make films less glamorous and more helpful as a means of communication for the greater good. It could be suggested that while interacting with the socio-political realities of that period cinema was influencing and being influenced by it. The objective is to show that films do not just appear in a vacuum but are part and product of a specific political, historical, and cultural milieu. They can’t remain divorced from the socio-cultural and political relations of the period they belong to. The themes of anti-Fascism, problems of have v/s have-nots, unemployment, poverty, inequality, and their moral dimensions have been studied. The de-dramatization of situations and the deviations in the portrayal, as evident in Miracle in Milan (1953), which has been compared with the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, have also been discussed.

Blooming activism in a drying land: Water justice movements along river Tigris in Iraq

This paper explores water justice struggles in the understudied region of Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan through a focus on two water justice movements, one civil society campaign, and a related event. While most of the relevant literature in geography and cognate fields has thoroughly dissected inter-State hydropolitical quarrels, discussed water justice from a legal perspective, and analysed water conflicts, less attention has been paid to bottom-up movements, to their visions and actions within a materially and socially challenging environment, and to their engagement with the state. Relying on published material as well as primary research, we show how Iraqi water activists seek to strike a balance between engaging institutions and moving beyond them, across ethno-religious divides and advocacy registers, in their quest to re-signify and re-common waterscapes. We argue that it is not despite all odds, but rather because of all odds, that Iraqi activists showcase such a developed awareness of their role and transformative potential along the rugged path of democratisation.

‘The rent is too damn high’ meets ‘pay the rent’: practising solidarity with the dispossessed*

This paper reflects on the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Project that unfolded in so-called brisbane in 2021, in response to concerns over how the framing of demands and solutions to the present housing crisis in so-called australia can reinvest in and further legitimise colonial-carceral-capitalist logics and structures. Using critical co-constructed autoethnography as methodology, the authors reflect on their own involvement in housing struggles as settlers on unceded Aboriginal land, the recent history of these struggles in so-called brisbane, and the lessons and reflections that instigated the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Project, and which emerged from our experiences organising together. The project, comprising a series of radio interviews and broadcasts followed by a public forum, was an attempt to foreground what ongoing Aboriginal sovereignty means for struggles for housing justice, and to challenge the colonial logics and common sense that often permeates settler-led housing politics. Drawing on Indigenist research approaches and police and prison abolition discourse, we offer some partial reflections on building communities of struggle that refuse to accept a housing justice that begins and ends with a more equitable distribution of stolen land.

Hammering It Out: On Worker Cooperatives and the Question of Transforming the Tech Industry

This article describes what it's like to work at an employee-owned technology cooperative, grappling with working conditions and the present state of the tech industry. The benefits of unionization are described, as are attempts to resist and refuse oppressive tech through consciousness of and engagement with struggles for justice around the world.

Disappearances, dissident memory and magic: Sandya Ekneligoda’s struggle for justice

Disappearances, dissident memory and magic: Sandya Ekneligoda’s struggle for justice

Modernism as Liberation: J. Max Bond Jr. at Mississippi’s Mary Holmes College

Abstract From early in his career, J. Max Bond Jr. (1935–2009) brought the civil rights movement to bear on architecture, insisting that modernism live up to its promise to build a better world. Exemplary of this effort was the first completed work of Bond Ryder Associates, the Neigh Dormitory (1968–70) at Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi. This article offers a close reading of this overlooked project in the context of Bond’s own encounters with modern architecture as an African American, the realities of Mississippi in the 1960s, and the experiences of the students who made this dorm their home. It contends that Bond Ryder shaped a liberatory modernism here especially focused on the freedom and self-determination of the dorm’s Black residents amid ongoing racial violence. In doing so, the article provides a novel perspective on the role that architecture played as a force for racial equality and that, in turn, the long civil rights movement played in shaping architectural modernism. While modern architecture had caused much harm by midcentury, this dorm’s history reveals an unexpected source for the rejuvenation of modernism’s social promise: the long struggle for racial justice.

Struggling for Housing Justice – New Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

ABSTRACT How can struggles for housing justice act as a lens to expand housing researchers’ understanding of the rental crisis and of the systems that underpin this crisis? By presenting papers from Sweden, Spain, Greece, the UK, and Australia this special issue contributes with knowledge on how housing struggles can inform new theoretical and methodological approaches within the field of housing studies. In turn, the SI presents three tenets that together form a framework for housing scholars: institutionalization as politics, tenants as political actors, and learning housing justice. We argue that it is crucial for housing scholars to recenter on struggles for housing justice in their readings of contemporary housing systems.

Prison expansion in the plains grasslands: Coloniality, ecological injustice and carceral sprawl

This article examines the politics of prison siting on contaminated land within an endangered ecosystem in Australia, contributing to the literature on carceral geography and the burgeoning field of abolition ecology. I argue that prisons materialise in the landscape through processes of dispossession, environmental degradation and value extraction that enclose Indigenous lands for caging populations cast as ‘surplus’ to settler racial capitalism. The primary focus is the interface between prisons and the Victorian Volcanic Plain grasslands at a site called Ravenhall, a former military testing site that has been remade as a ‘prisons precinct’ and native grasslands reserve on Bunurong country in the outer Western suburbs of Melbourne. I investigate the history, ecology and political economy of prison-building at this site, unearthing the assemblage of living and nonliving entities involved in the construction of carceral geographies, and the meaning-making that guides planning and conservation processes. Rather than simply protecting and enhancing the biodiversity of the plains grasslands, neoliberal conservation practices at Ravenhall facilitate carceral development by generating more visible and ‘substitutable’ natures to gloss over the socially and ecologically toxic realities of prisons. The analysis reinforces the role that carceral geographies play in reproducing structured racial-environmental vulnerabilities and the importance of challenging sprawling prison developments as part of decolonial, abolitionist and ecological justice struggles.

“Why Is the Old Dying and the New Is Not Being Born?” The Church’s Struggle with Public Justice and Righteousness in Zimbabwe

Abstract This article attempts to present how the church has struggled with public justice and righteousness in Zimbabwe where the past and old dominate the national debate without giving room for emerging personalities and ideas. The church introduced programmes, organisations and documents in an attempt to theoretically break away with the past. The documents are results of transformative projects designed to address the holistic needs of people in Zimbabwe against both the localised and internationalised neoliberal paradigms of Capitalism, Colonialism and Christianity that disempowered rather than liberated followers. Being critical of the past, Derrida says: “To ask such questions, such difficult questions, requires that we change the most resistant, archaic structures of our desire”. The Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations (ZHOCD s) introduced the post-liberation discourse through the Zimbabwe We Want Document (ZWWD) in 2006, and a national economic discussion through the National Holistic Agenda for Renewal and Empowerment (NHARE) in 2019 against the idea that the Church must be confined in the pews and politicians in the public arena. These documents and programmes engaged with both politicians and citizens in critical ways to achieve both justice and righteousness. Justice and righteousness are big themes in the Bible and Christian doctrine. Breaking away with the past promised to reverse the slippery slope on public life in Zimbabwe that increased national poverty, class inequalities, and factionalised politics. The opening of space in public life by the ZHOCD allowed citizens to engage in all public life and justice struggles, which is “a revival of a voice that has been silenced after independence, or was send to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), paralysed, captured, neutralised or unauthorised”. It explored new alternatives to engaging state theology in relationship to the margins. Scripture has been useful in the church’s engagement with the state on public life goods, hence the question: “Why is the old dying and the new not being born”? The article pursues this question in view of the church programmes and documents.

The nutritional turn towards crisis: a critical perspective

ABSTRACT With concerns about food systems growing due to environmental change and the abrupt disruption of trade relations following the dual crises of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, it has become increasingly common for global development agendas to include discussions, programmes, initiatives, and policy proscriptions about the risks of malnutrition. Yet, there remains limited insight into how securitising nutrition in particular influences the politics of food insecurity more broadly. Therefore, we aim to develop a critical perspective of ‘nutritional crisis’. In doing so, we draw from critical security studies to advance an interpretation of the nutritional turn that takes into account three key dynamics: (1) the performativity of nutritional crisis discourses (2) the political-economic context in which they are embedded (3) alternative notions of nutrition, security, and crisis among resistance movements. We apply this perspective to a case in point concerning food insecurity in Guatemala – a country that remains the intense focus of nutritional policies at the global level and simultaneously a site of struggle and resistance for local and transnational food justice.

The Struggle for Justice for Battered Women: Still a Colossal Work in Progress, as Exemplified by Helen Naslund’s Case

This article recounts the campaign for justice for Helen Naslund, a Canadian woman who lived in rural Alberta when she killed her abusive husband Miles in 2011 as he slept. Rather than go to trial on self-defence, on the advice of counsel Helen pled guilty to manslaughter and then, consequent to a joint submission on sentencing made with the Crown, she was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2020, the longest sentence on record for such a woman in Canada. The contributors to Helen’s journey, including Helen herself, a Senator, an academic, an activist, a lawyer and a journalist, all describe the roles they played in supporting Helen’s successful appeal against sentence in 2022 and her release from prison in 2023.

A Postcolonial Marxist Critique of the River‐as‐Subject: Situating the Atrato River in Its Development Aporias

AbstractIn 2016, Colombia's Constitutional Court declared the Atrato River a subject with rights and named the river's environmental stewards. This article traces how various actors co‐produced the ruling and critically engages scholarly calls to theorise a river‐as‐subject ontology. Centring postcolonial Marxist perspectives, the piece illuminates how power operates through the Rights of Nature discourse and theorises that the river‐as‐subject builds on and creates racialised development aporias: non‐passages beyond the hegemony of the state, capital, and development discourse and double‐binds for environmental justice struggles. Unpacking how the plaintiffs built the case and the river stewards navigated the ruling's first five years, I show that mining‐induced river degradation unfolds through (i) the fraught promise of justice in the Colombian Constitution, (ii) the naturalisation of collective legal personhood as “bio‐cultural rights”, and (iii) the inclusionary exclusion of river stewards from policy discussions about large‐scale mining enclosures and alluvial gold exploitation.

Education.Co-op: A Nudge to the Future

The role of education is one which transforms. In a capitalist neo-liberal environment, the consuming and competitive individual is cast as the protagonist at the expense of communities that struggle for a common good. Especially in the global north, this is exacerbated by lifestyles and leisure patterns which have been heavily influenced by the onslaught of digital technologies, fragmenting to a considerable degree the physical community and the spaces for social interaction strongly associated with wellbeing. This is evident in a number of trends in society at large, including the organization of labour, which pits workers against each other, eroding solidarity, and dissipating class consciousness. In this context, many educators try their best to provide hope, a sense of belonging, and a struggle for justice. This they do despite being considered pegs to plug holes in a system struggling to cope, and where knowledge is considered technical and practical, rather than emancipatory. A cooperative model which provides a greater sense of belonging, an ethos underpinned by social justice and democratic principles, and ultimately a sense of trust and wellbeing, will be proposed. This model can provide a sound but permeable matrix which empowers educators collectively and provides a better community experience for a diversity of learners.

THE ROLE OF MEDIA INFLUENCE ON THE JUDICIAL PROCESS IN INDIA: AN ANALYSIS

In the bustling streets of Delhi, amidst the cacophony of vendors hawking their wares and the incessant honking of cars weaving through congested lanes, lies a cornerstone of India's democracy in the courtroom. Within its solemn confines, the wheels of justice turn relentlessly, unfolding stories of triumph, tragedy, and the pursuit of truth. Here, amidst the hushed whispers of legal arguments and the weighty pronouncements of judges, unfolds a tale as old as time as a clash of rights, a struggle for justice, and the delicate balance between law and morality. Yet, amidst this age-old drama, another character stealthily emerges, its presence weaving seamlessly into the fabric of the narrative of the media. Like an unseen hand guiding the plot from the shadows, media influence in the Indian judicial process has evolved into a formidable force, akin to a secondary protagonist in this theatrical production of justice. With its omnipresent gaze and insatiable appetite for stories, the media casts its spotlight on courtroom dramas, transforming legal proceedings into riveting spectacles that captivate the nation's attention.