Transformative Approaches to Sustainable Development at Universities


Book Description

This book documents and disseminates experiences from a wide range of universities, across the five continents, which showcase how the principles of sustainable development may be incorporated as part of university programmes, and present transformatory projects and programmes, showing how sustainability can be implemented across disciplines. Sustainability in a higher education context is a fast growing field. Thousands of universities across the world have signed declarations or have committed themselves to integrate the principles of sustainable development in their activities: teaching, research and extension, and many more will follow.




Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe


Book Description

After decades of steady progress in terms of gender and sexual rights, several parts of Europe are facing new waves of resistance to a so-called ‘gender ideology’ or ‘gender theory’. Opposition to progressive gender equality is manifested in challenges to marriage equality, abortion, reproductive technologies, gender mainstreaming, sex education, sexual liberalism, transgender rights, antidiscrimination policies and even to the notion of gender itself. This book examines how an academic concept of gender, when translated by religious organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church, can become a mobilizing tool for, and the target of, social movements. How can we explain religious discourses about sex difference turning intro massive street demonstrations? How do forms of organization and protest travel across borders? Who are the actors behind these movements? This collection is a transnational and comparative attempt to better understand anti-gender mobilizations in Europe. It focuses on national manifestations in eleven European countries, including Russia, from massive street protests to forms of resistance such as email bombarding and street vigils. It examines the intersection of religious politics with rising populism and nationalistic anxieties in contemporary Europe.




The Revolution Starts at Home


Book Description

Radical movements for social change are not immune to sexual assault and gendered violence. This landmark collection brings together two dozen voices, as fearless as they are compassionate, to challenge the intimate forms of oppression that surround us. The Revolution Starts at Home began as a popular zine when published in its complete form by South End Press (2011). With South End's closing, it went out of print before it could reach its audience - just as its relevance was becoming clear. This facsimile reprint edition will breathe new life into this important project.




The Ruptures of American Capital


Book Description

Universality is a dangerous concept, according to Grace Kyungwon Hong, one that has contributed to the rise of the U.S. nation-state that privileges the propertied individual. However, African American, Asian American, and Chicano people experience the same stretch of city sidewalk with varying degrees of safety, visibility, and surveillance. The Ruptures of American Capital examines two key social formations—women of color feminism and racialized immigrant women’s culture—in order to argue that race and gender are contradictions within the history of U.S. capital that should be understood not as monolithic but as marked by its crises. Hong shows how women of color feminism identified ways in which nationalist forms of capital, such as the right to own property, were repressive. The Ruptures of American Capital demonstrates that racialized immigrant women’s culture has brought to light contested modes of incorporation into consumer culture. Interweaving discussion of U.S. political economy with literary analyses (including readings from Booker T. Washington to Jessica Hagedorn) Hong challenges the individualism of the United States and the fetishization of difference that is one of the markers of globalization. Grace Kyungwon Hong is assistant professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.




Conquest


Book Description

In this revolutionary text, prominent Native American studies scholar and activist Andrea Smith reveals the connections between different forms of violence—perpetrated by the state and by society at large—and documents their impact on Native women. Beginning with the impact of the abuses inflicted on Native American children at state-sanctioned boarding schools from the 1880s to the 1980s, Smith adroitly expands our conception of violence to include the widespread appropriation of Indian cultural practices by whites and other non-Natives; environmental racism; and population control. Smith deftly connects these and other examples of historical and contemporary colonialism to the high rates of violence against Native American women—the most likely to suffer from poverty-related illness and to survive rape and partner abuse. Smith also outlines radical and innovative strategies for eliminating gendered violence.




Stop Street Harassment


Book Description

Using groundbreaking studies, news stories, and interviews, this book underscores that there will never be gender equity until men stop harassing women in public spaces—and it details strategies for achieving this goal. Street harassment is generally dismissed as harmless, but in reality, it causes women to feel unsafe in public, at least sometimes. To achieve true gender equality, it must come to an end. Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women draws on academic studies, informal surveys, news articles, and interviews with activists to explore the practice's definition and prevalence, the societal contexts in which it occurs, and the role of factors such as race and sexual orientation. Perhaps more crucially, the book makes clear how women experience street harassment—how they feel about and respond to it—and the ways it negatively impacts lives. But understanding is only a beginning. In the second half of the book, readers will find concrete strategies for dealing with street harassers and ways to become involved in working to end this all-too-common violation. Educators, counselors, parents, and other concerned individuals will discover resources for teaching about harassment and modeling behavior that will help prevent harassment incidents.




Aberrations in Black


Book Description

A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture The sociology of race relations in America typically describes an intersection of poverty, race, and economic discrimination. But what is missing from the picture—sexual difference—can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology—Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson—has measured African Americans’s unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans’s culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality. Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology’s regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories—the narrative of capital’s emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture—works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story—one in which people who presumably manifest the dysfunctions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery—a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way that complicates and illuminates Ellison’s project. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson’s work introduces a new mode of discourse—which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis—that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology.




Normal Life


Book Description

Revised and Expanded Edition Wait—what's wrong with rights? It is usually assumed that trans and gender nonconforming people should follow the civil rights and "equality" strategies of lesbian and gay rights organizations by agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee nondiscrimination and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the best way to address the poverty and criminalization that plague trans populations is to gain legal recognition and inclusion in the state's institutions. But is this strategy effective? In Normal Life Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change, and points to examples of transformative grassroots trans activism that is raising demands that go beyond traditional civil rights reforms. Spade explodes assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations, and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence. In the new afterword to this revised and expanded edition, Spade notes the rapid mainstreaming of trans politics and finds that his predictions that gaining legal recognition will fail to benefit trans populations are coming to fruition. Spade examines recent efforts by the Obama administration and trans equality advocates to "pinkwash" state violence by articulating the US military and prison systems as sites for trans inclusion reforms. In the context of recent increased mainstream visibility of trans people and trans politics, Spade continues to advocate for the dismantling of systems of state violence that shorten the lives of trans people. Now more than ever, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.




Methodology of the Oppressed


Book Description

In a work with far-reaching implications, Chela Sandoval does no less than revise the genealogy of theory over the past thirty years, inserting what she terms "U.S. Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity. What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S. liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed." This methodology—born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange—holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics. Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on any theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression.