Vision Of Justice Research Articles

Jurisdiction and Afro-Brazilian Legal Politics from Colonialism to Early Independence

Abstract Every empire in the Americas developed a law of slavery that connected the forced transoceanic migration of enslaved people with land-based economic production and social life. Competing conceptions of jurisdiction over land and sea emerged from legal processes regarding slavery in the transition from colonial Portuguese rule to early independence in Brazil. Both the Portuguese monarch and post-independence Brazilian ministers sought to assert jurisdiction over residents inside the territory, including enslaved people. Their attempts to do so created social conflicts in which enslaved people put forth their own visions of jurisdiction and justice. Afro-Brazilian people developed a legal politics that drew upon diasporic maritime connections to overturn enslavement. The legal politics of cases regarding uprisings and contraband slave-trading animated concerns among judges and imperial administrators about effective legal order. A revolutionary movement in 1798 contested Portuguese colonial sovereignty with a vision of free-trade popular sovereignty. The monarch’s transfer from Portugal to Brazil in 1808 opened a small route for enslaved people to petition the crown for freedom based on innovative readings of free soil. A major case of capture in 1851 illuminated how the naval court judge adjudicated the case as the capture of an enemy. Captive African people testified in court to gain collective freedom in a liminal space. These claims to freedom raised important questions about legal equality and freedom from illegal trafficking for all people held in slavery in Brazil.

“A Content Analysis of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences’ Presidential Address, 1993-2022: A Qualitative Exploration”

Prominent sociologists and criminologists have not accorded the respect that criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) deserves. They have questioned CCJ’s standing as an autonomous discipline; they have criticized CCJ for its lack of a “common conceptual language,” a “core theoretical tradition,” and a “methodological commitment.” Consequently, criminologists and criminal justice scholars have been warned not to stray too far from their sociological roots. This condition leads to the following question: are there new ideas about crime and justice that are contained in the annual addresses of ACJS presidents? This article examines the addresses delivered by the presidents of ACJS. The findings indicate that three key domains of reflections can be discerned in the ACJS presidential addresses: (1) legitimacy through accreditation; (2) policy irrelevance as a prelude to public criminology; and (3) visions of justice. The three findings are compared and contrasted with the core themes found in a prior study of ASC presidential addresses.

Social Justice in the Name of __________: Cultivating Abolitionist Visions of Justice with Project-Based Learning

Social Justice in the Name of __________: Cultivating Abolitionist Visions of Justice with Project-Based Learning

KADEM’s vision of gender justice and neopatriarchal masculinity in illiberal Turkey

ABSTRACT Women’s and LGBTI + rights have always been under attack in Turkey, but recent developments in AKP’s attempts to consolidate a pro-family, pro-birth, and Islamist gender regime based on the ‘moral’ regulation of women and LGBTI + creates an atmosphere that must be examined in detail. KADEM, a women’s GONGO established in 2013, plays a crucial role in this anti-gender backlash context, positioning their line of action as a challenge to the global feminist attempts to impose Western standards on Turkish society while advocating for women’s rights from a culturalist position. We analyse KADEM’s construction of men and masculinities in the materials on their website to understand their strategies of legitimisation of a form of neopatriarchal masculinity along the traditional ‘family values’ to see how KADEM serves as a transmitter of an Islamic neopatriarchal culture, with its implicit justifications of men’s patriarchal roles and duties in a neoliberal society.

Popular Criminology, Sexual Violence and Alternative Modes of Justice

The idea of ‘popular criminology’ has gained currency within academic criminology, with criminologists recognising that popular cultural portrayals of crime, violence and justice offer alternatives discourses which enhance the criminological imagination beyond the limits of academic criminology, offering more complex understandings of crime and violence and reimagining the nature of justice (Brown and Rafter, 2012; Rafter, 2007; Wakeman, 2013; Wattis, 2018, 2022). This article will consider cultural representations of sexual violence as progressive portrayals which reveal the harms of sexual violence, disrupt stereotypical rape narratives and highlight the victim experience (Powell et al., 2015; McGlynn and Westmarland, 2019). There is now a growing activist and academic movement calling for a reimagining of justice beyond formal redress. This is in part a response to the widely acknowledged failure of formal justice systems to deliver justice for victims of sexual violence and the anti-carceral critique of feminism’s support for carceral justice responses to violence against women. Ultimately, I consider how popular culture might contribute to a more progressive vision of justice which resonates with McGlynn and Westmarland’s (2019) notion of ‘kaleidoscopic justice’ where victims are centred and the harms of sexual violence are fully recognised. I conclude by considering the ethics of representations of violence against within popular culture.

Angélique Keturah Walker‐Smith. Ahead of Her Time: Pan‐African Women of Faith and the Vision of Christian Unity, Mission, and Justice. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2023. 113 pp.

Angélique Keturah Walker‐Smith. Ahead of Her Time: Pan‐African Women of Faith and the Vision of Christian Unity, Mission, and Justice. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2023. 113 pp.

Singing truth to power: Transformative (gender) justice, musical spatialities and creative performance in periods of transition from violence

Feminist security studies have demonstrated that transitional justice processes worldwide have largely fallen short in providing actual transformative justice for women and that many gendered war experiences remain largely unaccounted for. Through an activist-academic collaboration and mobilizing feminist scholarship on war, embodiment and emotions together with literature on transitional justice and the arts, this article argues that women’s collective artistic resistance can foster deeper cultural and structural changes in transitional justice settings. By delving into the case of the women’s music collective Enkelé in Colombia, the article examines the creative possibilities afforded by music and choreography to document and testify to an enduring culture of violence and their role in probing the effectiveness of post–peace agreement transitional justice. We contend that paying attention to musical performances is key because these can express new visions of justice that are not constrained by the limits of what is possible and feasible in formal transitional justice mechanisms and can offer corporeal connectivity able to bring together communities fractured by war and armed conflict and to give visibility to knowledges and practices of memory and healing of marginalized communities.

Intersecting Visions of Justice: The Philosophical Tapestry of Human Rights and Human Nature in the Thoughts of Macintyre, Arendt, Nino, and Habermas

This study explores the philosophical foundations of human rights concerning freedom, equality, and solidarity through the lenses of Iusnaturalism, Iuspositivism, and Ethical Constructivism, with a special focus on Alasdair MacIntyre, Hanna Arendt, Carlos Santiago Nino, and Jürgen Habermas. It examines MacIntyre’s revision of Iusnaturalism with an Aristotelian approach, Arendt’s methodological Iuspositivism highlighting legal frameworks, Nino’s rationality-based human rights theory, and Habermas’ emphasis on communicative action and social constructs. This research navigates the dynamic interplay of these theories, offering a multi-dimensional perspective on the evolution, validation, and application of human rights in contemporary society. Significantly, it introduces a dialectical perspective on rationality as a dynamic and evolving human attribute, addressing the constructivist necessities in defining human nature amidst prevailing uncertainties.

Contesting the boundaries of physics teaching: What it takes to transform physics education toward justice‐centered ends

AbstractThe underrepresentation of Black Americans in physics has been persistent for so long that it seems to have constrained physics educators' collective imagination when it comes to conceptualizing and pursuing equity in physics teaching and learning. Drawing on a teacher research study that foregrounds justice‐centered physics teaching, this article pushes past the “equity as access” narrative toward more expansive visions of equity and justice by reimagining physics education as a liberatory praxis. Accordingly, this study explores the complexities that emerged while expanding the boundaries of physics learning to embrace a justice‐centered curriculum through a Youth Participatory Science (YPS) project. Taught in the context of a freshman physics course at an urban public high school, this YPS project engaged students in designing solar energy systems for an African‐American community historically harmed by environmental racism. Critically evaluating curricular documents, I juxtaposed the traditional goals of physics learning with respect to definitions of community needs and assets. Simultaneously, I investigated the ways in which canonical physics knowledge dialectically interacts with interdisciplinary knowledge throughout the defining, investigating, and intervening phases of the YPS cycle. Throughout this process, I considered how physics learning provides opportunities to either reproduce or transform existing power relations within the sociopolitical and environmental schema of the community. The critical understandings constructed from this study frame what it takes to repurpose physics teaching and learning for environmental justice, specifically emphasizing the agentic pedagogical and curricular decisions teachers must negotiate to transform physics education for liberatory purposes.

Collective Impunity for Transition? Consenso and the International Travels of a Spanish Paradigm

Abstract: Before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation , there was the Spanish consenso . The idea of negotiated and peaceful consensus it embodied, as a way to overcome violent pasts after the end of dictatorship, was forged in the work of Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats and human rights organisations both internationally and in Spain from the late 1950s onwards. Following the death of Franco and Spain's successful democratization from the late 1970s, it would then become an influential approach that travelled internationally for two decades. This article highlights the role of left politicians and organisations such as the Socialist International in the deradicalization of visions of post-dictatorial justice and in the circulation of this paradigm across Latin America and Eastern Europe. It concludes by tracing the way in which, in the twenty-first century, consenso-type settlements have been attacked for, variously, their acceptance of impunity; avoidance of questions of economic and structural justice; and incapacity to effect a revolutionary break sufficient to protect societies from corruption, inequality and a return to authoritarianism. Shorter Abstract: Before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation , there was the Spanish consenso , understood not only as a commitment to a peaceful democratic exit from dictatorship, but also a way of forging an end to, and not falling back into, civil war. This article explores in particular the contribution of an international and domestic left in not only building the consenso in Spain, but also exporting its deradicalized vision of post-dictatorial justice across Latin America and Eastern Europe. It concludes by analysing why consenso-type settlements fell out of fashion after the Cold War and have been attacked in the twenty-first century.

Welfare, justice, child development and human rights: a review of the objects of youth justice legislation in Australia

ABSTRACT In Australia, as elsewhere, there is consensus that new and more effective ways of responding to young people who commit crimes need to be identified and, when available, implemented and evaluated. In this paper we review youth justice legislation across each Australian jurisdiction and consider how it provides the mandate for service delivery. We contextualise this with an account of historical variations in how the seemingly competing goals of welfare and justice have been balanced. This is followed by an overview of contemporary understandings of child development and human rights which are increasingly recognised as both relevant and important to the way in which the community works with justice-involved children and young people. The analysis illustrates how youth justice agencies are still expected to achieve multiple and, at times, conflicting legislated objectives which results in a lack of coherence in policy and practice. This serves only to limit effectiveness. We conclude that legislative reform will be necessary to realise any new vision for youth justice, especially if one of the overarching purposes is to protect vulnerable children.

“If You’re Going to Be Beautiful, You Better Be Dangerous”

Abstract Refusing both sex workers’ state-produced vulnerability to violence and the state’s monopoly on protection, sex worker radicals articulate community defense as a practice of care. Grounded in interviews with thinkers of the sex worker Left and in sex workers’ cultural production, this article explores sex worker community defense with an eye to its relationship to past struggles and contributions to future ones. Chief among those is the abolitionist struggle for a world beyond prisons and policing. Sex worker abolitionists identify a tension between a vision of transformative justice that rejects violence and the understanding that transformation might not come without injury to those who do violence on behalf of the state. Sex worker abolitionists seek resources for navigating this tactical ambivalence in Black radical, decolonial, and queer and feminist traditions. Many wonder if building new worlds will require a transitional program of militant community defense, even retribution.

The Reversal of (Food) Injustice: The Song of Hannah (1 Sam 2:1–10)

Abstract The book of Samuel contains numerous mentions of food, particularly in connection to David. This article examines how the Song of Hannah provides a lens for interpreting food-related events in the book of Samuel. First, it considers how the Song of Hannah describes God’s engagement with the hungry and the well-fed, along with how the surrounding narrative reinforces that picture. Second, it identifies four ways that David appears in relationship to food throughout the book. In each of these, David seems to align himself with the vision of food justice laid out in the Song of Hannah—David regularly feeds the hungry; David sometimes refuses to eat for virtuous reason; David ensures that everyone under his care receives an equal portion; and sometimes, David himself is the hungry person who is fed. Finally, it demonstrates that David’s major moral failure is characterized, parabolically, as an act of the unrighteous rich who take the food of the poor in an act of “hypocritical hospitality.”

When Leadership Meets a Vision of Love and Justice: The Art of Leading for Social Justice

When Leadership Meets a Vision of Love and Justice: The Art of Leading for Social Justice

A critical feminist system justification analysis of climate obstructionism on the part of conservative white men

AbstractIn the U.S. and other Western nations, one demographic group is most likely to downplay anthropogenic climate change and its consequences, to embrace the “discourse of delay,” and to resist pro‐environmental policies: conservative white men. In this article, we bring together critical, feminist perspectives on masculinity and environmental dominance and social psychological insights from system justification theory to hypothesize that identity‐protective cognition, material interests, and ideological legitimation processes combine and reinforce one another to motivate obstructionism when it comes to taking climate action. Our hope is that by integrating critical and empirical approaches to social science—and illuminating individual and group psychological factors that are embedded in specific historical and political settings—it will be possible to increase solidarity among environmental scholars and activists and forge a shared vision of climate justice across disciplines.

Catholic Jesuit educational mission: Catholic social teaching and Arrupian justice approach in pursuit of racial justice at traditional Jesuit schools

ABSTRACT Results from a case study school are reported. The mission of a Catholic, Jesuit High School consists of teaching and living the seven principles of Catholic Social Teaching as a way to love one’s neighbor. This involves ensuring the human dignity of all human beings. Traditional American Jesuit High Schools continue to pursue the human dignity and be in right relationship with all underrepresented and underserved communities despite societal and demographic challenges and political headwinds. This manuscript presents a perspective of racial justice that interweaves Catholic Social Teaching with the social justice vision of Pedro Arrupe. Arrupe is the former Jesuit Superior General of the Jesuits and the inspiration behind Traditional Jesuit high schools incorporating the principles of Catholic Social Teaching within their schools. This article explores how the Catholic Jesuit mission specifically as it pertains to issues of racial justice can be animated within the traditional Jesuit educational institutions in substantive and most transformative ways requiring greater prophetic governance and leadership.

‘Somewhere. Some time. Somehow. Something has to change’: Prima Facie and the cruel optimism of feminist legal advocacy

In her play Prima Facie, playwright and lawyer Suzie Miller uses theatre to critique legal responses to sexual violence. This article thus offers an analysis of the play as both feminist theatre and feminist advocacy. We examine the rhetorical and performative strategies it deploys, arguing that they are effective because they mobilise long-standing feminist tropes which use a representative figure of the traumatised victim and the repetition of statistics to position the audience as potential victims of violence. Such strategies, however, fail to account for the complexity of sexual violence, intersectional understandings of it, or its relationship to other structural forms of harm that flow from turning to the state, as articulated by Black feminist scholars. These limitations also function in the play’s loop between an indictment of law’s failings and recuperating the law as a privileged site for responding to sexual violence. We read this tension as exemplifying the play’s enactment of a cruelly optimistic relationship to law, which is, we argue, a recurring feature in feminist cultural advocacy around sexual violence. However, we also suggest that reading the play through the words of its protagonist can open visions of justice beyond what Carol Smart has described as the ‘siren call of law’.

The role of the philosopher of education in the task of decoloniality

Abstract This paper explores the meaning of ‘decolonization’ in relation to the school curriculum and the role of the philosopher of education in this task. Taking the Philippines as an example, this paper illustrates how coloniality has underpinned not only school curricula, but also entire systems of formal education in the post-colony. Following from this, it argues that decolonization in education must transcend the diversification of curricula and aim at a broader vision of justice. Drawing from the author’s own attempts to reimagine the teaching of national identity, the paper proposes that philosophers of education who wish to participate in the work of decoloniality view their contribution as the three-fold task of historical critique, conceptual retrieval, and creative reimagination.

Containing visions of justice: on the assimilation, alienization, and disappearance of Black Lives Matter in Scandal’s “The Lawn Chair”

ABSTRACT When the primetime television show Scandal aired its Ferguson-inspired episode “The Lawn Chair” in March 2015, they sought out to envision what racial justice “should” mean. This vision assimilated Black Lives Matter’s (BLM) radical systemic critique of white supremacy into a binary logic of guilt and innocence, alienized the political power of black anger, and disappeared Black queer women from the narrative, projecting an image of activists as ineffectual and an image of white political actors as the arbiters of social change. Through critical rhetorical analysis, I argue that “The Lawn Chair” effectively functions to contain the liberatory potential of BLM, bounding the movement’s intersectional critique within the liberal fantasy of inclusion and recognition. In so doing, I map out what I call the three dominant forms of rhetorical containment—assimilation, alienization, and disappearance—to better understand how the force of containment both recurs and accumulates within the dominant cultural memory and the social imaginary.

The Prosecutor’s Power to Correct and Prevent Unjust Convictions

Abstract Over the past three decades, it has become increasingly clear that the United States’ protections for criminal defendants are insufficient to prevent unjust convictions. The increased availability of DNA testing and surge in exonerations have cast a bright light on the prevalence of wrongful convictions and the systemic factors that drive these errors. Yet, despite increased awareness of these concerns, wrongfully convicted individuals still face tremendous barriers to justice. In order to address these challenges, a growing number of prosecutors have established Conviction Integrity Units (CIUs)<fnote>We use the term CIU to refer broadly to a unit within a prosecutor’s office dedicated to reviewing wrongful conviction claims, although the official terms used to refer to these units vary by office. For example, these units are sometimes called Conviction Review Units, which can be used interchangeably with CIUs, or Post-Conviction Justice Units, which, as we explain in Section 5, perform the functions of a CIU but include a broader focus.</fnote> dedicated to reviewing wrongful conviction claims. This work has, over time, informed some prosecutors’ efforts to prevent future wrongful convictions by developing a »just culture« based on shared accountability and continuous improvement. As the movement to address wrongful convictions continues to expand, some prosecutors are beginning to advocate for broader reforms and a holistic vision of post-conviction justice.