Intersectionality and Women’s Access to Justice in Africa


Book Description

Intersectionality and Women's Access to Justice, edited by J. Jarpa Dawuni, propounds layered intersectionality as a paradigm for examining how gendered factors affect women's access to justice, whether as judges or litigants. Through intersectional and decolonial frameworks, the contributors analyze the lived experiences of women and their access to justice by situating the courtroom as both a spatial and a temporal arena for seeking justice (as litigants) and for seeking access to the bench (as judges). This book examines patterns of mutually reinforcing discriminatory practices that women share based on common gender identities and depending on which identities are at play at a given point in time in both traditional and statutory courts. The book provides recommendations for various justice sector providers.




On Intersectionality


Book Description

A major publishing event, the collected writings of the groundbreaking scholar who "first coined intersectionality as a political framework" (Salon) For more than twenty years, scholars, activists, educators, and lawyers--inside and outside of the United States--have employed the concept of intersectionality both to describe problems of inequality and to fashion concrete solutions. In particular, as the Washington Post reported recently, "the term has been used by social activists as both a rallying cry for more expansive progressive movements and a chastisement for their limitations." Drawing on black feminist and critical legal theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality, a term she coined to speak to the multiple social forces, social identities, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized. In this comprehensive and accessible introduction to Crenshaw's work, readers will find key essays and articles that have defined the concept of intersectionality, collected together for the first time. The book includes a sweeping new introduction by Crenshaw as well as prefaces that contextualize each of the chapters. For anyone interested in movement politics and advocacy, or in racial justice and gender equity, On Intersectionality will be compulsory reading from one of the most brilliant theorists of our time.




Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities


Book Description

Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives examines the relationship between legal pluralities and the prospects for greater gender justice in developing countries. Rather than asking whether legal pluralities are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women, the starting point of this volume is that legal pluralities are a social fact. Adopting a more anthropological approach to the issues of gender justice and women’s rights, it analyzes how gendered rights claims are made and responded to within a range of different cultural, social, economic and political contexts. By examining the different ways in which legal norms, instruments and discourses are being used to challenge or reinforce gendered forms of exclusion, contributing authors generate new knowledge about the dynamics at play between the contemporary contexts of legal pluralities and the struggles for gender justice. Any consideration of this relationship must, it is concluded, be located within a broader, historically informed analysis of regimes of governance.




Intersectional Discrimination


Book Description

This book examines the concept of intersectional discrimination and why it has been difficult for jurisdictions around the world to redress it in discrimination law. 'Intersectionality' was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. Thirty years since its conception, the term has become a buzzword in sociology, anthropology, feminist studies, psychology, literature, and politics. But it remains marginal in the discourse of discrimination law, where it was first conceived. Traversing its long and rich history of development, the book explains what intersectionality is as a theory and as a category of discrimination. It then explains what it takes for discrimination law to be reimagined from the perspective of intersectionality in reference to comparative laws in the US, UK, South Africa, Canada, India, and the jurisprudence of the European Courts (CJEU and ECtHR) and international human rights treaty bodies.




The Future of Women's Rights


Book Description

"The Future of Women's Rights" identifies the emergence of various trends threatening the advance of gender equality, women's human rights and sustainable human development. These phenomena include the impacts of globalization and neoliberal economics, developments in biotechnology, the neo-conservative backlash against women's rights, monopolistic ownership patterns over information technologies, the rise of identity politics marginalizing women's issues, and the increase in violent conflict and war. The contributors to this volume are united in seeing a pressing need for women's movements to evaluate their methods, with a view to making their future political work more effective. They identify current issues and trends in the world, thinking through how these may impact women and the work of women's movements.




Society, Space, and Social Justice


Book Description

Society, Space, and Social Justice addresses multiple contextual intersectionalities, highlighting the underlying processes and causes contributing to the genesis and regeneration of emergent and extant spaces of (in)justice. Employing quantitative and qualitative techniques underpinned by elucidatory theoretical frameworks, the contributors to this collection investigate intersections of class, disability, gender, race, and “the other” within sociocultural and political-economic structures in varied geographic scales in Brazil, India, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States. This book’s thematic diversity—the environment and outdoors, employment and labor, gendered/othered violence, health and disease, housing, infrastructure, and urban design—gives it interdisciplinary appeal. This timely collection examines and unpacks the complex mechanisms by which social justice can be perverted, thwarted, or achieved.




Intersectional Approach


Book Description

Inter sectionality, or the consideration of race, class, and gender, is one of the prominent contemporary theoretical contributions made by scholars in the field of women's studies that now broadly extends across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Taking stock of this transformative paradigm, The Intersectional Approach guide...




Black Women in Politics


Book Description

Examines how Diasporic Black women engage in politics. This book explores how Diasporic Black women engage in politics, highlighting three dimensions—citizenship, power, and justice—that are foundational to intersectionality theory and politics as developed by Black women and other women of color. By extending beyond particular time periods, locations, and singular definitions of politics, Black Women in Politics sets itself apart in the field of women’s and gender studies in three ways: by focusing on contemporary Black politics not only in the United States, but also the African Diaspora; by showcasing politics along a broad trajectory, including social movements, formal politics, public policy, media studies, and epistemology; and by including a multidisciplinary range of scholars, with a strong concentration of work by political scientists, a group whose work is often excluded or limited in edited collections. The final result expands our repertoire of methodological tools and concepts for discussing and assessing Black women’s lives, the conditions under which they live, their labor, and the politics they enact to improve their circumstances. “Black Women in Politics offers a new perspective on Black women as political actors. Jordan-Zachery and Alexander-Floyd have assembled a stellar group of essays that speak to the broad experiences and concerns of Black women as political actors. Together, the essays present a compelling story of what we learn when we center Black women’s voices in policy debates, democratic theory, and notions of political leadership.” — Wendy Smooth, The Ohio State University




The Handbook of Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice


Book Description

This Handbook presents current and future studies on the changing dynamics of the role of immigrants and the impact of immigration, across the United States and industrialized and developing nations. It covers the changing dynamics of race, ethnicity, and immigration, and discusses how it all contributes to variations in crime, policing, and the overall justice system. Through acknowledging that some groups, especially people of color, are disproportionately influenced more than others in the case of criminal justice reactions, the “War on Drugs”, and hate crimes; this Handbook introduces the importance of studying race and crime so as to better understand it. It does so by recommending that researchers concentrate on ethnic diversity in a national and international context in order to broaden their demographic and expand their understanding of how to attain global change. Featuring contributions from top experts in the field, The Handbook of Race and Crime is presented in five sections—An Overview of Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice; Theoretical Perspectives on Race and Crime; Race, Gender, and the Justice System; Gender and Crime; and Race, Gender and Comparative Criminology. Each section of the book addresses a key area of research, summarizes findings or shortcomings whenever possible, and provides new results relevant to race/crime and justice. Every contribution is written by a top expert in the field and based on the latest research. With a sharp focus on contemporary race, ethnicity, crime, and justice studies, The Handbook of Race and Crime is the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars interested in the disciplines such as Criminology, Race and Ethnicity, Race and the Justice System, and the Sociology of Race.




The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies


Book Description

This definitive handbook is the first reference of its kind bringing together knowledge, scholarship, and debates on themes and issues concerning African women everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyses, theorizes, synthesizes and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. This Handbook questions the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Contributors offer a consistent emphasis on debunking erroneous and misleading myths about African women's roles and positions, bringing their previously marginalized stories to relief, and ultimately re-writing their histories. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. This reference work includes, to the greatest extent possible, the voices of African women themselves as writers of their own stories. The detailed, rigorous and up-to-date analyses in the work represent a variety of theoretical, methodological, and transdisciplinary approaches. This reference work will prove vital in charting new directions for the study of African women, and will reverberate in future studies, generating new debates and engendering further interest.