Justice Work Research Articles

Exploring the Journey of STEM Faculty into Justice-centered Pedagogy.

In higher education and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), interlocking oppressions can lead to inequitable environments for those who hold marginalized identities. Instructors can play key roles in either exacerbating or mitigating these inequities through their pedagogical approaches and choice of curricular material. However, it remains unclear how instructors who self-identify as committed to justice achieve higher levels of consciousness around areas of injustice and develop the self-efficacy to dismantle barriers for students over time. Here, we draw upon critical race theory and critical white studies to investigate what events or life experiences influence STEM instructors to understand the importance of social justice and examine how STEM instructors use this understanding to drive pedagogical shifts. We find variations in the ways that instructors' experiences and identities shape their understanding of justice. In addition, we uncover factors that influence the switch moment; curriculum and pedagogical shifts; their relationship to justice work broadly; and barriers and supports for justice work. These stories hold powerful lessons for STEM education, but also for education more broadly, both in terms of pedagogical practice and the questions that shape research agendas on equity in education.

Integrating an Ethics Advisory Committee Into Public Health Response: A Case Study of COVID-19, Infection Prevention and Control, and Essential Work in the United States.

A lack of infection prevention and control protections for essential industries in the United States led to increased risk and incidence of COVID-19 among essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the nation deems an industry essential during a disease outbreak, an ethical obligation exists to safeguard the health of workers who are at increased risk of being exposed to disease. The Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska Medical Center began work to rapidly develop and disseminate infection prevention and control guidance for essential industries, such as meat processing. The Global Center for Health Security established an ethics advisory committee to support COVID-19 response efforts. The ethics advisory committee supported the development of guidance on infection prevention and control to promote justice, reciprocity, health, safety, and equity for workers in the meat processing industry. Our experience highlighted the fundamental role of ethical analysis in public health response efforts, but ethical analysis in this case required an interdisciplinary approach, including the need for effective community-relevant solutions. The integration of an ethics committee into public health emergency response efforts can address ethical concerns for workers in industries that must remain operational during public health emergencies.

“We are all in this together”:

As carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels warm the planet, altering the climate and causing severe drought in some regions and unprecedented flooding in others, and as state and local governments privatize once-public water systems in the name of fiscal austerity, the connection between water equity and social justice is increasingly evident. This article introduces a critical lens of intersectional environmentalism and identifies three questions that teachers and students can ask to examine how a society’s treatment of water is connected to its treatment of people. When students understand how the well-being of people, animals, natural resources, and the Earth itself are interconnected, they are better prepared to explain how working for environmental justice necessitates their working for social justice as well.

Awakening Consciousness: HESA Graduate Students’ Perspectives on Consciousness-Raising Pedagogical Practices

ABSTRACT Despite incorporating diversity coursework into most higher education and student affairs (HESA) graduate programs, HESA graduate students report feeling underprepared to enact social justice work. Current pedagogical approaches introduce students to foundational concepts but fail to develop reflective, justice conscious administrators. This qualitative case study explores what pedagogical practices promote HESA graduate students’ critical consciousness development during a diversity course.

A Path Forward: A Critical Race Mixed-Methods Study of Social Justice Teacher Education

Teacher preparation programs are being called to comprehensively engage preservice teachers (PSTs) in expansive learning about equity issues beyond one “diversity” course or superficial approach. Our interdisciplinary faculty collaborative within a Midwestern predominantly-white institution met this call by implementing a Critical Social Justice Teacher Education (CSJTE) framework, redesigning three foundational PST courses around social justice. We then conducted a critical race mixed-methods (CRMM) study to measure the impact upon PSTs’ social-justice dispositions and commitments to action in their future classrooms. The results yielded findings that were both expected and unexpected and present a path forward for critical social justice work in teacher education.

Community Informatics & I

In this essay, inspired by the timeliness of our chronologically shared symbolic birth (the journal’s inaugural issue and my professional career as a faculty member) I briefly discuss and critically analyze the influence of community informatics upon my professional journey, in our mutual symbiotic growth, intersections and divergences. I also share my insights and reflections of the process that might influence readers’ own thinking about the past, present, and future of community informatics and its identity, intersections, growth, and more. This opportune moment allows me to draw upon intersections with my current work in social justice and inclusion advocacy and trace my privileged positionality to the “nurturing intellectual embrace” of community informatics that opened many proverbial doors and areas of impact over the years. In the process, I use evidence chronicled in my current curriculum vita that serves as a roadmap providing documentation “on the record” of milestones and activities referenced along the journey as I also develop ponderings of the past, current, and future emergence and growth of community informatics. In tracing key directions of growth through my own lens of experience and reality with community informatics shows how broader aspects in the larger society, academic world, and information field have strongly curtailed its emergence and adoption. Considering such factors directly might be helpful to shape its positive placement and positionality moving into the future.

Sustainable and inclusive; transforming residential undergraduate fieldtrips in an age of the climate crisis

ABSTRACT The Higher Education sector has a critical role to play in shaping our global response to “wicked problems” and nowhere is this more evident than in university research, teaching, and public engagement on sustainability that seeks to tackle the increasingly perilous environmental situation. However, despite this critical civic mission, the Global North HE sector faces growing scrutiny and critique over the mechanisms, cultural norms and practices in which staff, students, research partners, and others operate. This paper explores one facet of this scrutiny by focusing on the recent internationalisation of residential undergraduate fieldtrips within geography, earth, and environmental science programmes. Using a UK Department as a case study, it will document the significant carbon emissions and necessary offsetting costs associated with residential undergraduate fieldtrips, particularly those overseas. It will finish by discussing the Department’s revision to its fieldtrip design through the creation of a value-based fieldtrip framework grounded in the twin agendas of sustainability and Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity (EDI). This “sustainable and inclusive” fieldtrip framework becomes an important way for the Department to reduce the environmental impacts of this teaching activity and strengthen its accessibility and social justice work, thereby ensuring that the Global North HE sector leads by example.

Consideration of Labor Cases by Special Labor Courts as a Way to Optimize the Civil Process in the New Economic Policy Period

The article is devoted to the scientific development of the problem of consideration and resolution of labor cases by courts. The purpose of the work is to study the historical experience of considering and resolving labor cases in civil proceedings by special labor sessions of people’s courts during the New economic policy period on the basis of comparative historical and formal legal research methods, scientific principles of objectivity and historicism. The creation of special labor sessions of people’s courts was motivated by the need for those who resolved disputes to have special knowledge and skills to consider labor cases, and also correlated with the focus on accessibility of justice for workers and the course towards optimizing legal proceedings. The article traces changes in the normative regulation of the activities of labor sessions, identifies the role of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR in filling gaps in the law, and analyzes the problems of jurisdiction and jurisdiction of labor cases. Based on the analysis of judicial practice materials (primarily the rulings of the Civil Cassation Board of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR), the peculiarities of the civil process when considering labor disputes during the New economic policy period are revealed: in the subject composition (thus, representatives of trade unions could be representatives of their members), in matters of evidence and proof, due to the initiative of the court and the specifics of the cases.

No Evolution Without Revolution: Historical Revelations for LIS Education

As the field evolves and adapts to emerging technologies and societal changes, the rich historical context and radical changes that have shaped libraries and information systems risks being overshadowed. This SIG panel presentation will feature presentations ranging from understanding the role of caucuses in the LIS field, using creative storytelling to illuminate LIS history, and how AI will impact our ability to tell, know, and make history. Following the presentations, we expect to have a conversation about how we preserve and share LIS history in the face of technological change. National Associations of Librarians of Color Provides Historical Context to Teach Social Justice Work - Long Before DEI and social justice were integrated into statements, core principles, standards, or competencies for LIS education, there were efforts conducted by BIPOC library leaders who moved the needle in the profession by establishing professional associations that represented their communities. This presentation makes the connection between diversity efforts in LIS history and LIS pedagogy, by proposing the use of the specific historical context of social movements to substantiate and inform the social justice work that current LIS graduates will encounter. Demystifying the Past to Examine the Present and Shape the Future: Historical Research and Creative Storytelling in LIS Education - Ely-Ledesma Unpacking the complicated history of libraries in the United States, and recognizing historical threads that connect past to present, is vital as the profession continually adapts to emerging technologies and societal changes. When considering implementing historical perspectives into LIS education, we must ask a basic question: How can we infuse historical perspectives into LIS courses in an effective way? Historical research and creative storytelling are one way to address this question. To this end, I propose a three-step process for a project suitable for foundational courses or courses on library history. Teaching the History and the Evolution of the Information and Knowledge Profession - Hawamdeh According to Marcus Garvey “A person without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots." Understanding the LIS history, evolution and the radical changes is a key to the continued transformation of the information and knowledge profession. The continued expansion, evolution, and the emergence of concepts such as knowledge management, data science and generative AI are raising questions like how these concepts are related to LIS, how can they be woven into LIS curriculum, and how historical perspectives can be used to shape the future of the information and knowledge profession.

Working Principles of Practice for Enacting Social Justice Pedagogies in Physical Education Teacher Education

Acknowledging the lack of literature on ‘how’ to teach about, through, and for social justice in physical education teacher education (PETE), the authors studied their own practice as teacher educators ‘doing’ social justice work. This article describes seven working principles of practice for enacting social justice pedagogies in PETE for those who want to incorporate social justice in their own programs.

Period poverty, menstrual health and menstrual (in)justice in the context of social work – in the opinions of students and graduates of social work

Menstruation, until recently treated as a purely biological phenomenon, is beginning to be perceived as a social phenomenon, becoming the subject of research, scientific theorizing and publications. Third-sector organizations are being formed to tackle period poverty, promote menstrual health and work for menstrual justice. Menstrual poverty and broadly understood menstrual inequalities are often experienced by socially vulnerable individuals, families, groups and communities, who become social welfare institutions and social work service users. The article presents selected results of a survey with participation of social work students (current and graduates) on their perception of the relationship between social work and the elimination of menstrual poverty, the promotion of menstrual health and the prevention of menstrual injustice.

The Administration of Youth Justice Through the Lens of Community-Based Service Providers: Risk Factors and Programming Challenges

Since the Youth Criminal Justice Act of 2003 in Canada, the juvenile justice system has prioritized diverting youth away from in-custody sentences (incarceration in jail, prison, or other facilities) and towards a community-based system of justice. Despite this shift, there is limited research directly examining the experience of community-based service providers that were responsible for this shift in adjudicating youth. To understand the experience of working with youth involved in the system, we conducted semi-structured interviews with youth justice workers from one of the largest community-based organizations in a western Canadian province that offer alternatives to custody for at-risk youth. Findings provide a complex depiction of youth risk factors and illustrate the successes and challenges of administering youth justice in a community context.

The Black Lives Matter Movement, Jewish Allies, and the Long Legacy of Black Anti-Zionism

Abstract: From the emergence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, massive numbers of Jews, committed to resuming the Black-Jewish coalition of the civil rights era, became its avid allies. They failed to recognize that this alliance, which foundered and was sundered by the late 1970s, had increasingly been replaced by Blacks' identification with "their Brown Palestinian siblings," which rendered the conflict with Israel in stark racial terms. After the Six Day War, Black militants promoted a narrative that replaced Jews as a fellow oppressed group with Jews as iniquitous Zionists, who had established an illegitimate settler-colonial state that ethnically cleansed and victimized indigenous people of color—a narrative upon which their successors in the BLM movement drew heavily. With the rise of the BLM movement, the Black-Palestinian alliance was solidified—their wide divide on issues of race, gender, and homosexuality overridden by their shared anti-Zionism. In 2016, when the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a constituent partner of the BLM umbrella organization, issued a policy platform identifying Israel as "an apartheid state," committing "genocide against the Palestinian people," leading Jewish organizations appeared confounded and dismissed these views as a minority position. Spokespersons of secular and religious Jewish associations condemned what they labeled BLM's "anti-Israel rhetoric," which they insisted was "totally unrelated" to the movement's "social justice work." They appeared to be unaware that far from mere "rhetoric," the denigration and delegitimization of the Jewish state had long been at or near the core of the anti-racist ideology propounded by the Black militants revered by BLM leaders and activists. Thus, in 2020, organizations allegedly "representing over half of Jewish people in America" published a statement that endorsed the BLM movement "unequivocally," while several of the signatories released additional statements condemning those Jews who had rejected the movement once it posted the policy platform. The Jewish community fractured over the issue of Black antisemitism, but unlike in earlier periods, far more Jews, identifying as "progressives," continued to support a movement whose leaders and activists espoused or tolerated antisemitism, albeit lightly cloaked in anti-Zionist garb.

Crime and Nourishment: A Narrative Review Examining Ultra-Processed Foods, Brain, and Behavior

Recently, there has been increased scientific and clinical interest in the potential harms associated with ultra-processed foods, including poor mental health, aggression, and antisocial behavior. Research spanning epidemiology, mechanistic pre-clinical work, addiction science, microbiome and exposome science, and human intervention trials has underscored that nutrition is of relevance along the criminal justice continuum. As such, the emerging dietetics research is salient to the thousands of international psychologists and allied mental health professionals that are engaged in justice work, including forensics, prevention, and intervention. In addition, relationships between nutrition and behavior relate to “food crime”, an emergent area unifying criminal justice researchers with psychology, public health, and other interdisciplinary sectors. Food crime scrutinizes the vast harms, including non-communicable diseases and adverse behavioral outcomes, as influenced by the distribution of addictive ultra-processed food products. Here, we examine the emergent research, including biophysiological mechanisms, and evidence indicating that dietary patterns/components intersect with psychosocial vulnerabilities linked with risks of antisocial behavior and justice involvement. Viewed through a prevention lens, the study of nutrition and aggressive behavior should be prioritized, especially if the outcomes emerge as externalities of the global consumption of ultra-processed food. In the context of criminal justice and behavior, there is a need for forensic examination of how industry influence and power structures can undermine matters of food justice.

Poetry as Gift to Articulate Oppression Across Transdisciplinary Health Scholarship

Those of us on the 'fringes' of society find ourselves there because of crises that happen in our communities—housing crises, colonization, and many more crises that intersect to make up our human condition. What happens now on the 'fringes' of society directly connects to past and on-going legacies of oppression in systems of health because such systems marginalize folks as part of systemic strategic plans. It is important to trace and articulate these historical and on-going legacies of violence so that we can build something more useful. This manuscript weaves liberatory social theory throughout a collection of poems on class struggle and racial oppression for movement toward just futures. This collection of poems traverses disciplinary boundaries and uses poetry as a buffer against being burned down for people engaged in the work of liberation and justice with desire to confront legacies of colonialism and enslavement in our everyday practice.

We Keep Each Other Safe: Mutual Aid and the Methods of Graphic Medicine

Mutual aid, a framework rooted in crip queer and trans, Black, indigenous, and people of color care practices, has increasingly been taken up through mainstream visibility and parlance. Dean Spade (2020) articulates that while aiming to meet survival needs, mutual aid does further politico-therapeutic work: it builds shared understandings as to why we do not have what we need, mobilizes people to expand solidarity and build movements, and engages communities in participatory problem solving through collective action. How is the project of graphic medicine entangled with mutual aid outcomes and sensibilities? How might a mutual aid framework crip graphic medicine? Elaborating genealogies of mutual aid in disability justice work and crip survival tactics brings into relief graphic medicine’s entanglements with mutual aid. The article first explores graphic medicine storytelling as grounded in shared genealogies of crip care. It then takes up Félix Guattari’s concept and practice of transversality to diagnose politico-therapeutic potentialities of graphic medicine.

Science of Unitary Human Beings: Toward Anti-racist Actions for Human Environment Wellbecoming.

Rogers' Science of Unitary Human Beings (SUHB) and several theories that emanate from Rogers' work contain foundational concepts that may lend themselves toward nursing actions to address important social justice mandates, to advocate and to act for equity, and to uproot systems of oppression and racism in nursing. However, at the same time, theoretical concepts such as power arising from ascendant theories of SUHB are often used with little to no critical reflection for past and present-day histories of racism and power inequities in nursing and in society writ large. Using concepts related to SUHB such as integrality, turbulence, power, and patterning, we critically explore the potential of developing anti-racism reflections and actions through 3 theories: Barrett's Knowing Participation in Change; Butcher's Kaleidoscoping in Life's Turbulence; and Smith's Turbulence-Ease in the Rhythmic Flow of Patterning. We acknowledge that SUHB was/is largely developed within a framework of whiteness by scholars who were/are working from academic positions and social identities of societal safety and privilege. This requires nurses to reflect on how that history shapes SUHB. We also acknowledge the urgent need for ongoing anti-racism and justice work by nurses. As a call to action, we suggest a start by critically building upon existing theoretical foundations in SUHB to develop a more explicit anti-racist theorizing-praxis in nursing for the wellbecoming of humans and nonhumans alike.

Just Participatory Research with Young People Involved in Climate Justice Activism

This commentary reflects on the tensions inherent in enacting creative, co-produced, and participatory methods with younger co-researchers who are also climate justice advocates. Whilst participatory research with young people involved in climate justice work has the potential to build intergenerational networks of solidarity, such research is contoured with complexity. The authors, two university-based researchers, juxtapose the social justice agenda at the foundation of participatory research, with the climate justice agenda, and consider the resonances and tensions between research and social movements. They advocate for an intersectional climate justice approach to participatory research that positions young people as co-researchers and co-authors, aiming to counter epistemic injustices and amplify the voices of those first and worst affected by climate change. Simultaneously, the felt value-action gap (between the justice sought and the injustices that persist within research) generates questions about the profound differences, even incommensurability, between university-generated research and the pursuit of climate justice in movement spaces. A series of questions are offered to those engaged in participatory research with younger people to prompt collective reflection on research processes and practises. The commentary concludes with a call for university-based researchers to engage critically with the power structures within academia and to prioritise the needs and goals of younger climate justice advocates over institutional demands.

Unearthing Stigma About Prostitution Among Indonesian State Actors: A Critical Narrative Analysis

ABSTRACT Prostitution has long been stigmatized in socio-political discourse. The mounting empirical evidence shows that stigmatization is discursively attached to sex workers’ occupations. Although much prior research has addressed this phenomenon, little evidence reports to which extent prostitution practice is institutionally stigmatized from a developing state-and-social-sanctioned perspective in which this prostitution stigmatization is viewed as a fundamental cause of social inequality. This study examines to which extent the narratives embedded in policy documents, news articles, and ethnographic interview reports frame ideologies, assumptions, and biases that shape governmental responses to prostitution. Data from policy documents, news articles, and ethnographic interviews were analyzed with a critical narrative approach. Three emergent finding themes presented in this article include knowledge of religious norms shaping government policy and public opinions, the discourse of governmental power, and female sex workers as the main target of government policy. The implication of the present study is how governments and state and social actors mitigate the adverse effects of stigma and promote social justice and equality for sex workers in Indonesia and other developing countries.

De-othering: indigenous perspectives on diversity, equity and inclusion

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to share two Indigenous perspectives on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). It is grounded in aspirations for de-othering and de-colonisation. De-othering is the unpicking of the status of “other” bestowed upon us by the dominant culture, and de-colonisation involves the deconstruction of the ways the settler states in which we live have defined and oppressed us. Design/methodology/approach The methodology is a critical self-reflection, drawing on the lived experience of two Indigenous scholars in business fields outside of the international business discipline. Findings The findings explore policies, like affirmative action emerging in the 1960s, to the pantheon of DEI theory and strategies developed, as tools of the dominant culture, albeit well-meaning, that perpetuate the dependency of the “other” on the largesse of the “dominant”, which ultimately maintain relations of oppression. Research limitations/implications The limitations of the paper include, that we cannot speak for all Indigenous peoples. This paper is a personal viewpoint and is not a meta-analysis of theory and literature. The authors draw on the personal, which for Indigenous peoples is also the political, perspectives, that are steeped in their cultural histories and identities, and underpinned by their aspirations for social change and social justice for their peoples. Practical implications The authors offer practical implications for those Indigenous Peoples and allies looking to develop empowering strategies for de-othering individuals and communities defined by dominant cultures as “others”, which in turn has social implications for engagement in truly empowering work in social justice at the borderlands of power, particularly in terms of international business guided by ethics and social responsibility. Social implications In this paper, the authors use the following terms: Maori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, First Peoples and Indigenous Peoples. They use the term Peoples to denote that they are not one homogenous People but a collective society that consists of many distinct communities, peoples and nations. Originality/value The authors offer practical implications for those Indigenous Peoples and allies looking to develop empowering strategies for de-othering those defined by dominant cultures as “others”, which in turn has social implications for those engaged in truly empowering work for social justice at the borderlands of power, particularly in terms of international business guided by ethics and social responsibility. They make no apologies for this paper, as it is entirely based on personal viewpoints.