Various Forms Of Oppression Research Articles

A Call for Climate Justice in Medical Curricula.

To the Editor: Over the last several decades, it has become evident that the biomedical model of health is insufficient for providing equitable care that considers the structural determinants of health and well-being. To deliver patient-centered care, medical students are now being taught the complex interplays between health outcomes, social hierarchies, and various forms of oppression. However, despite the World Health Organization describing climate change as the greatest global health threat of this century, 1 medical school curricula often do not encompass any teachings in this area. Without an appreciation for climate justice, medical students will be unprepared to support patients whose ill health is driven by the oppressive systems underlying climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions have numerous downstream impacts on the environment, the global economy, and human health, which disproportionately affect vulnerable populations such as children, those in racial/ethnic minority groups, and lower-income communities including many in the Global South. 2 According to a 2019 analysis, the health care sector was responsible for 4.4% of annual global carbon emissions. 3 As medicine is firmly grounded in the principle of nonmaleficence, neglecting to address the climate crisis is both unconscionable and paradoxically violates one of the core ethical principles of medicine. To address this gap in medical education, we partnered with the Centre for Sustainable Health Systems at the University of Toronto to host a 6-part webinar series and certificate program on sustainability in medicine. This series had more than 270 registered participants from 8 Canadian provinces. Medical students were well represented among participants, engaging on topics ranging from sustainable practices during a pandemic to advocacy approaches for climate action, and many participants shared ways in which they are advancing the global climate action agenda at their own institutions. Furthermore, a Canadian medical school took notice of our efforts and asked for our assistance in implementing sustainable medicine discussion points in their undergraduate medical curriculum. We are invigorated by the positive response from our colleagues and hope that further trainee-led efforts will continue to inspire ambitious action to build a more equitable future for all on local, national, and international stages. As medical students, we have the power to create change in academic medicine. Throughout our medical school journey, we hope to use our newfound privilege as members of the medical profession to further raise awareness of the health inequities associated with climate change and to better advocate for climate justice. Acknowledgments: The authors thank those at the Centre for Sustainable Health Systems for their guidance and support throughout this process. They also thank Rebecca Wang, a medical student at Temerty Faculty of Medicine, for her assistance in developing the webinar series and certificate program.

Des Black Panthers à l’Arabian Panther : quand Médine en appelle aux leaders du passé pour mener son combat. Une étude de « Self Defense »

In the 2000s, as French society was experiencing a rise in postcolonial demands, politicised French rappers focused their writing on themes such as the history of relationships between Europe and Africa, slavery, colonisation, and the history of immigration. Medine, who is one of these rappers, is committed to defending the cause of victims of exclusion. His keen interest in history makes him think that we have much to learn from the past so as not to repeat the same mistakes in the present. He has made it his duty to keep alive our collective memory and warn us against some official truncated versions of history. His rap “Self Defense”, from the album Arabian Panther (2008), features historical leaders who fought against various forms of oppression and defended their people’s rights. Throughout this rap, Medine establishes a close link between these leaders’ fights and his own, bringing their people together in a kind of symbolic ‘community of the oppressed’. Mixing provocation and political demands all along his rap, he draws our attention to his call for the duty of remembrance, which he finally legitimises by quoting the Taubira law promoting the recognition of the slave trade and slavery as a crime against humanity and asking for the inclusion of these historical facts in school and university curricula.

Nagaland as the Home for Existential Dread: A Critical Study on the Select Stories of Temsula Ao

The North Eastern states of India are known for their myths, cultural tradition, folklores and nature which found their expression in many forms of literature. Though this region is gifted by Mother Nature with abundant resources and unblemished beauty it also witnesses bloodshed, violence, turmoil and conflicts in the names of ethnicity, race and national identity. People of this region suffer from various forms of oppression and they are not in a position to find solutions to the problems they face. Their helplessness and lack of political power or support make them vulnerable to oppression and violence. Temsula Ao, the emerging English writer from the Naga community brings out the sufferings and pain of this region through her writings. Violence, which has become the part of their day to day life, is the primary theme of her works and she portrays the significant impact of violence on the people of Nagaland which deprives peace, harmony and other fundamental requirements of coexistence. People are forced to give up their socio-ethnic practices, food habits and culture. The trauma, humiliation, exclusion and discrimination experienced by the marginalized tribes of this region remain the primary cause for the youth joining the armed rebel groups. People are caught up between the nation state and the rebel groups and suffer because of both the elements. This paper focuses to analyse the affliction, disillusionment and trauma experienced by the ordinary people in the conflict zones of Nagaland through the select stories of Temsula Ao.

Patriarchy & unwed mother of Odisha

This article starts with the presumption that women experience gender in different ways. For example, Black women experience various forms of oppression simultaneously, as a complex interaction of race, gender, and class that is more than the sum of its parts. By focusing on gender as the primary locus of oppression, main-stream feminist legal thought often forces women of colour to fragment their experience in a way that does not reflect the reality of their lives .The recognition of women's differences, however, does not negate the fundamental premise of feminism that women are oppressed

SILENCING AND SPEAKER VULNERABILITY

The French feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff has taught us something about “the collectivity,” which she discovers in women’s struggle for access to the philosophical, but also about “the unknown” and “the unthought.” It is the unthought which will matter most to what I intend to say today about a fundamental ignorance on which speaker vulnerability is built. On International Women’s Day, it seems appropriate to speak about – or, at least, to evoke – the silencing which has been imposed on women by an oppressive form of ignorance. My question is: how do our resounding voices as women – on 8 March 2016 – avoid what feminist philosophers have distinguished as wilful forms of silencing? Silencing exploits vulnerability; and speaker vulnerability is an exposure either to violence or affection, in its dependence on an audience. My response seeks to undo the silencing of women by transforming an ignorance of vulnerability into a distinctively ethical avowal. To see the significance of this undoing, we will consider how our contemporary global world reduces vulnerability to an openness to violence, ignoring what has been unthought: an openness to affection. A wilful ignorance of vulnerability develops not as a lack of knowledge but its disavowal – on which various forms of oppression are built. An active disavowal of thinking (the unthought) is the other side of a striving for invulnerability; and this striving is encouraged by a social world which remains ignorant of its own wounding, as well as its own potential for ethical relations in vulnerability. Like la mauvaise foi of the French existentialist, invulnerability is a form of self-deception; and those who claim it embrace ignorance of their own and others’ vulnerability too.

Connectivity, Community, and Kinship as Strategies to Foster Queer and Trans College Student Retention

Given that multiple forms of oppression are endemic to higher education, strategies intended to retain queer and trans college students should mirror the strategies of survival and thriving found within queer and trans communities. Fostering and bolstering connections, community, and kinship among queer and trans college students through a lens of multiplicities of identities will better support queer and trans students’ retention. For example, some queer and trans students may depart from an institution—whether temporary or long term to support their own well-being and identity development, given the various forms of oppression that higher education institutions instantiate and exacerbate. We call on higher education leaders to take seriously their role in reducing or eliminating the harm caused to queer and trans college students. Queer and trans college students are resilient within hostile environments and have agency about their educational trajectories.

The career women of Kabul and their struggle for an empowered identity

The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences of Afghan women as they pursue careers in post-Taliban Kabul and how these experiences help shape their identity. This study, through in-depth interviews with professional women in Kabul, explores how women continue to challenge stereotypes and fight various forms of oppression. The results of the study have highlighted how women in Afghanistan are motivated by opportunities to exercise economic autonomy and empowered identities that challenge both historical issues of patriarchal society. However, there are still many barriers facing Afghan women including access to quality education, political instability along with issues around challenging Western stereotypes and assumptions regarding Afghan women.

The career women of Kabul and their struggle for an empowered identity

The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences of Afghan women as they pursue careers in post-Taliban Kabul and how these experiences help shape their identity. This study, through in-depth interviews with professional women in Kabul, explores how women continue to challenge stereotypes and fight various forms of oppression. The results of the study have highlighted how women in Afghanistan are motivated by opportunities to exercise economic autonomy and empowered identities that challenge both historical issues of patriarchal society. However, there are still many barriers facing Afghan women including access to quality education, political instability along with issues around challenging Western stereotypes and assumptions regarding Afghan women.

The Question of Existence: Revisiting Black Women in Go Tell it on the Mountain

Women had been always at the receiving end of the society and she is forced to cater to the needs of the society she is part of. Existing as an individual with the basic rights and freedom is the bigger question for women as she is always an object of oppression in almost all the society, in particular the ‘Patriarchal society’, in which she is expected to be under the control of a man and tender to the needs of the man and those around him without question. Racism along with Sexism in America ensured the suppression of black women and the white women to a certain extent. The research paper titled ‘The Question of Existence: Revisiting Black Women in Go Tell it on the Mountain’ makes an study on the state of the blacks in general and attempts an in depth analysis on the state of black women in America in the 1920s and the various forms of oppression they endured, from physical to psychological oppression, from skinning to caning to the violence that they have to be victims even after a very long time is studied in this paper.

Restructuring Interreligious Dialogue from the Bottom Up through the Lenses of Deep Solidarity and the Multitude

AbstractSocial movements and liberation theologies have addressed various forms of oppression and exploitation along the lines of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and other factors, not without tensions. What might bring them closer together without erasing differences? Addressing this question has important implications for fresh approaches to interreligious dialogue. In this contribution, notions of deep solidarity and of the multitude point the way toward restructured interreligious engagements.

Predicting Different Types of Victim-Trafficker Relationships: A Multinomial Logistic Regression Analysis

ABSTRACT Domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) is the commercial sexual exploitation of a child under the age of 18 within the borders of the United States. The purpose of the present study is to explore how various forms of oppression and risk predict DMST victimization, particularly specific subcategories of DMST victimization by traffickers. This study focuses on whether risk factors can predict victims’ trafficking by a family member, friend, romantic partner, or stranger. Utilizing intersectionality theory and odds ratios analyses, the results of this cross-sectional analysis of secondary data suggest that the presence of certain risk factors in adolescents’ lives can, indeed, predict the type of relationship victims have with their traffickers. In the final odds ratio model, child welfare involvement and juvenile justice involvement are the strongest predictors of specific victim-trafficker relationship types. The results of this study provide insight into targeted prevention and intervention programs for specific subpopulations of youth who are identified as at-risk for DMST. Results may also provide advocates with information about how best to lobby policymakers to make the systemic changes that are necessary to prevent DMST from occurring in the first place.

Entrepreneuring as an everyday form of resistance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to problematise the dominant conceptualisation of entrepreneurship by recognising the everyday resistance inherent in mundane entrepreneurial practices. Its principle purpose is to show how entrepreneurial activities enacted by ordinary individuals in a marginalised and oppressed context can be an important means of resisting economic adversity, social marginalisation and political (colonial) domination.Design/methodology/approachFramed within de Certeau’s conceptualisation of the practices of everyday life, this study utilises a “focussed ethnography”, relying on “participant observation” and “informal interviews”, to explore the perceptions and experiences of Palestinian women street vendors, and how they use everyday entrepreneurial practices in the open-air market of the Old City of Jerusalem to become socially and politically empowered.FindingsThe arguments in this paper demonstrate how marginalised Palestinian women, who are equipped with a genuine critical vision of their reality and a biophiliac attitude, use entrepreneuring to enact new possibilities for themselves and for their families. Through their entrepreneurial act of street vending, these women exemplify a struggle against economic and socio-political constraints, transforming the act of entrepreneuring from a mere economic practice to an all-encompassing human project, one with a more human face.Originality/valueThis paper extends the argument for the complex and dynamic nature of the phenomenon and exposes its political nature, hitherto inadequately addressed in existing literature, as well as uncovers the potential of entrepreneurialism to enhance individual empowerment and contribute to meaningful social change. In addition, it addresses the need for scholarly work that focuses on the everyday entrepreneurial activities carried out by ordinary individuals experiencing various forms of oppression in new and challenging spaces, which are seldom acknowledged within the dominant theoretical and research frameworks.

Youth Anti-Racist Engagement: Conceptualization, Development, and Validation of an Anti-Racism Action Scale

Scholarship on youth engagement indicates that adolescents address social issues of public concern, but it is not clear how youth challenge racism. This gap in the literature stems from indirect conceptualizations and a lack of quantitative measurement of adolescents’ acts to oppose racism. Correspondingly, this study presents the validation of a measure of youth anti-racism action. Study 1 describes the youth participatory approach used in the development of the Anti-Racism Action Scale and presents the results from an exploratory factor analysis that examined the measure’s initial factor structure and reliability. The factor structure of the 22-item measure was explored with a diverse sample of adolescents (Mage = 16.00, SD = 1.18; 61.7% girls, Black/African American [29.3%], Asian/South Asian [21.1%], White/European American [24.4%], Arab/Middle-Eastern [17.5%], Latino/Hispanic [4.5%], and Multiracial [3.3%]) enrolled in a race dialogue program (n = 249). The results indicated the measure consisted of three subscales: Interpersonal Action, Communal Action, and Political Change Action. In Study 2, a confirmatory factor analysis was conducted with an independent, nationally representative sample of youth (n = 384) from diverse backgrounds (Mage = 17.00, SD = 1.29, 51.0% girls, White/European American [26.1%], Black/African American [25.6%], Latino/Hispanic [19.3%], Asian/Pacific Islander [13.6%], Multiracial [9.9%], Native American [5.2%] and “other” [0.3%]). The results confirmed a three-factor model that resulted in a 16-item measure. Furthermore, tests of convergent validity tests were pursued between the Anti-Racism Action Scale and the Critical Consciousness Scale, a widely used measure of youths’ awareness of the structural causes of various forms of oppression, sense of sociopolitical agency, and social action. This study suggests that youth engagement in anti-racism is multidimensional and that notion of adolescent social action are more diverse than represented in the literature.

“Broken Threads of Varying Colors and Tones”: A Souvenir Album of the Phoenix Indian School (1904)

In spring 1904, the United States Indian Industrial School in Phoenix, Arizona printed a booklet with ninety-four photographs of campus life and local landmarks for sale to the city’s burgeoning tourist market. The Phoenix Indian school’s agenda of acculturation, and the racial power relations it reified, permeate the album’s representations of Native American students as “civilized” bodies that are uniformly docile and disciplined. However, a careful reading of the photographs alongside the voices of Native pupils opens up alternative meanings incompletely repressed by the institution’s photographer. This article weaves student writings from the campus newspaper and other sources back through the album’s imagery to identify anonymous children and glimpse their personal stories of growth, struggle, and cultural resilience in the official visual archive of the Indian school. By arguing that the identities and agencies of the Phoenix students can be rediscovered within the limits of the album, this study challenges the conventional interpretation that such pictures simply evidence and enact various forms of oppression, both concrete and symbolic. More broadly, it extends recent scholarly efforts to recover and celebrate those individuals who persevered in federal Indian boarding schools during the era of assimilation.

Audre Lorde’s Hopelessness and Hopefulness: Cultivating a Womanist Nondualism for Psycho-Spiritual Wholeness

The late black American feminist lesbian poet Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was known in feminist communities in the United States, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere for her poetry and prose about how to survive various forms of oppression. Though Lorde authored many political and spiritual poems and essays (including psychological topics) in her adulthood, little has been written about Lorde’s early psycho-spiritual spiritual journey from Catholicism to I Ching, which informed her adult integrated African spirituality, which in turn informed her political and social consciousness. Lorde’s poems to God, written during puberty and post-puberty, and her embrace of I Ching nondualism, provides insight into how Lorde understood the psycho-spiritual challenges of surviving through hopelessness and despair, and into confidence and hopefulness.

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo Revisited: The Intersections of Politics, Culture, and Self-Development

CLA JOURNAL 151 Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo Revisited: The Intersections of Politics, Culture, and Self-Development Jacqueline Jones In an interview that appears in Claudia Tate’s Black Women Writers at Work, novelist, poet, and dramatist Ntozake Shange states that “if there is an audience for whom I write, it’s the little girls who are coming of age. I want them to know that they are not alone and that we adult women thought and continue to think about them” (162). Shange’s first novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) does just that. Set in Charleston, South Carolina in the 1960s and 1970s, the bildungsroman charts the effects shifting cultural, political, and artistic values have on the coming-of-age experiences of sisters Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo. The product of several generations of women weavers, the sisters learn to weave, dye cloth, and cook from their mother Hilda Effania. Shange integrates poems, tonics, recipes, letters, and dance choreography into the narrative to provide additional context for the characters’ rich lives. Eldest sister Sassafrass follows in her mother’s footsteps and becomes a weaver; she also is a poet. Middle sister Cypress is a dancer. Youngest sister Indigo plays the fiddle, communicates with the spirits of slaves, and has magical powers. Drawing from black nationalist and black feminist ideologies of the period, Shange constructs the sisters as working toward dismantling various forms of oppression through self-development and redefinition. The sisters look toward African diasporic and women’s cultural practices, their connection to nature and the spirit world, as well as their artistic abilities to create and define individual identities. Sassafrass engages and extends the conversations of black women writers in the 1970s and early 1980s regarding the role black communities play in the lives and self-development processes of black girls and women. Using what we would now consider an intersectional approach, novelists of the period illustrate the effects patriarchy, sexism, violence, and internalized racism have on the development of black girl and women.1 As Barbara Christian asserts in “Trajectories of SelfDefinition ,” novels including Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) depict black communities as “a major threat to the survival and empowerment of women” (240). This was significant as black women writers articulated that not only do their experiences with sexual violence, patriarchy, and other issues within black communities require the same urgency as institutional racism in larger society but also being both black and women compounds their marginalization. In these works, then, protagonists challenge community norms as they work toward survival, autonomy, and self-definition. Characters in 152 CLA JOURNAL Jacqueline Jones 1970s novels were likely to find that their endeavors left them isolated from the community or with a limited sense of social inclusion. In several early 1980s novels, the addition of a “strong woman’s community” results in most protagonists surviving, with some experiencing “the possibility of wholeness” (Christian 243). Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo has generally been linked to this latter category of early 1980s novels in which protagonists create “the possibility of wholeness” through female friendship and or engagement in communities of women. While the novel does depict problematic attitudes and behaviors related to gender and sexuality that pose a threat to black girls and women, it also incorporates instances where the sisters’ community of origin aids or empowers the protagonists’ self-development. Though most of the positive interactions that occur in the novel happen among women, there are also occasions, particularly during the sisters’ childhoods, where the protagonists are empowered by elder men in their community. Furthermore, Shange distinguishes the text from similar works of the time by providing her characters with more than the “possibility of wholeness” (Christian 243). With exposure to a broad array of spiritual, cultural, and political influences, Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo learn to internalize the values and lessons that work for them and discard or overcome the ones that do not. The sisters leave home on a quest for education and fulfillment, and they harmoniously return self-actualized and as meaningful participants in their community. As such, through Sassafrass, Shange offers a vision of black women establishing autonomy without sacrificing communal integration, which she...

Race, Gender, and identity in Selected Plays by Adrienne Kennedy and Sonia Sanchez through the Lens of Black Feminism, BlackArts Movement, and the theatre of the Avant‒garde

Feminism does not solely concern the oppression of women as women. It is also concerned with eradicating the various forms of oppression affecting women such as the sexist, racist, classist, economic, and cultural oppressions. Black women, in such patriarchal and racially divided societies, are influenced by the double jeopardy of such racial and sexist oppressions. Smith asserts: Since a black woman, for example, cannot separate her race and her sex―these axes of her identity intersect and are always present in her lived experience. She can never be just a black person; she can never be just a woman either (qtd. in Dicker 7). Women, in such a patriarchal society, wanted to free themselves from the constraints and oppressions caused by patriarchy; a social system in which men rule and women are pushed into positions of

Towards decolonising teacher education: Reimagining the relationship between theory and praxis

We live in a dynamic world, characterised by major economic, technological and social change. Decolonising teacher education is embedded in a critical approach that aims to create counterhegemonic intellectual spaces in which new worldviews can unfold, in ways that can lead us toward change of praxis. The idea for this article was born out of discussions that took place during the various workshops of our recent curriculum renewal process and provides an explication of the subsequent outcome of the process; the newly developed, integrated Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) curriculum of the Nelson Mandela University’s Faculty of Education. This curriculum is underpinned by a critical, conceptual framework of teacher development, progressing from ‘ bridging ,’ through ‘ becoming ’ and ‘ being ’ towards ‘ belonging ’ as a teacher in the teaching profession. Drawing upon key themes which emerged during our curriculum renewal process, we explore possible strategies to intervene and disrupt various forms of oppression that are manifest in the current composition of a colonised higher education in South Africa. Keywords: curriculum renewal; decolonisation; developmental model; teacher education

History of Rakhine State and the Origin of the Rohingya Muslims

The Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority group in Rakhine, are considered among the most persecuted, vulnerable, and oppressed minorities in the world. Recently, the persecution on the Rohingya Muslims has increased due to Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar. The Rohingya continue to suffer from several forms of restrictions and human rights violations in Myanmar due to them being denied Myanmar citizenship. They are victims of various forms of oppression, such as arbitrary taxation, land confiscation, destruction of mosques, torture and ill-treatment, extrajudicial executions, restrictions on movements, forced eviction and house destruction, forced laborers on roads and at military camps, and financial restrictions on marriage. Since the 1970s, a number of crackdowns on the Rohingya in Rakhine have forced them to flee to neighboring countries. More than one million Rohingyas have migrated to refugee camps in the Bangladeshi district of Cox’s Bazar. This article deals with the origin of the Rohingya, the form of their citizenship, and recent oppression in the Rakhine State of Myanmar.

Can subaltern professors speak?: examining micro-aggressions and lack of inclusion in the academy

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight various ways in which micro-aggressions and other forms of institutional oppression have affected subaltern professors and students in the academy.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative case study draws from testimonios collected from fall 2010 to spring 2016. Six testimonios are incorporated in the study, and they stem from a various set of data. These testimonios show patterns across data set regarding systemic oppression subaltern that professors have experienced in the academy.FindingsAs the findings of this study show, subaltern professors face intersecting forms of discrimination – often race, language, accent, gender, and class based – in predominantly white institutions. Their testimonios unravel the complexity of the professional, academic, and personal lives of these professors highlighting their professional achievements and successes. Their testimonios demonstrate at the same time the ways in which various forms of oppression might have limited their life chances and opportunities.Research limitations/implicationsSuggestions are made as to how social justice educators and policy makers can collectively challenge and eradicate these social wrongs.Originality/valueThis paper is an original take on both micro-aggressions and institutional oppression affecting subaltern professors and students.