Re-searching Margins


Book Description

Identity, power, and positionality play crucial roles in designing and implementing research critically and ethically across marginalized cultures and communities. Through four unique case studies, this book highlights the dilemmas faced by researchers in the field of education, demonstrating how they grapple with the ethics of research and with their role in the process. Re-searching Margins: Ethics, Social Justice and Education attends to research in four specific marginalized communities, whilst also engaging in a wider dialogue about the complex theories, methodologies and practices of ethical research in communities of difference. This book examines ethical research with cultures and communities as an exchange in which both the researcher and the researched bring complex contextual and biographical factors shaped by their histories, identities, and experiences. Drawing on the lives and research of four renowned scholars, this book will be of interest to researchers and policy makers in education who seek to engage ethically and justly with marginalized communities.




Violence at the Urban Margins


Book Description

In the Americas, debates around issues of citizen's public safety--from debates that erupt after highly publicized events, such as the shootings of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, to those that recurrently dominate the airwaves in Latin America--are dominated by members of the middle and upper-middle classes. However, a cursory count of the victims of urban violence in the Americas reveals that the people suffering the most from violence live, and die, at the lowest of the socio-symbolic order, at the margins of urban societies. The inhabitants of the urban margins are hardly ever heard in discussions about public safety. They live in danger but the discourse about violence and risk belongs to, is manufactured and manipulated by, others--others who are prone to view violence at the urban margins as evidence of a cultural, or racial, defect, rather than question violence's relationship to economic and political marginalization. As a result, the experience of interpersonal violence among the urban poor becomes something unspeakable, and the everyday fear and trauma lived in relegated territories is constantly muted and denied. This edited volume seeks to counteract this pernicious tendency by putting under the ethnographic microscope--and making public--the way in which violence is lived and acted upon in the urban peripheries. It features cutting-edge ethnographic research on the role of violence in the lives of the urban poor in South, Central, and North America, and sheds light on the suffering that violence produces and perpetuates, as well as the individual and collective responses that violence generates, among those living at the urban margins of the Americas.




Privacy at the Margins


Book Description

Limited legal protections for privacy leave minority communities vulnerable to concrete injuries and violence when their information is exposed. In Privacy at the Margins, Scott Skinner-Thompson highlights why privacy is of acute importance for marginalized groups. He explains how privacy can serve as a form of expressive resistance to government and corporate surveillance regimes - furthering equality goals - and demonstrates why efforts undertaken by vulnerable groups (queer folks, women, and racial and religious minorities) to protect their privacy should be entitled to constitutional protection under the First Amendment and related equality provisions. By examining the ways even limited privacy can enrich and enhance our lives at the margins in material ways, this work shows how privacy can be transformed from a liberal affectation to a legal tool of liberation from oppression.




Domestic Violence at the Margins


Book Description

Reprints of the most influential recent work in the field as well as more than a dozen newly commissioned essays explore theoretical issues, current research, service provision, and activism among Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, and lesbians. The volume rejects simplistic analyses of the role of culture in domestic violence by elucidating the support systems available to battered women within different cultures, while at the same time addressing the distinct problems generated by that culture. Together, the essays pose a compelling challenge to stereotypical images of battered women that are racist, homophobic, and xenophobic.




Encountering God in the Margins


Book Description

Takes the reader into the world of the marginalized - the slums, villages and other abandoned spaces in the undeveloped world - and allows their story to be told.




The Book of Margins


Book Description

The death of Edmond Jabès in January 1991 silenced one of the most compelling voices of the postmodern, post-Holocaust era. Jabès's importance as a thinker, philosopher, and Jewish theologian cannot be overestimated, and his enigmatic style—combining aphorism, fictional dialogue, prose meditation, poetry, and other forms—holds special appeal for postmodern sensibilities. In The Book of Margins, his most critical as well as most accessible book, Jabès is again concerned with the questions that inform all of his work: the nature of writing, of silence, of God and the Book. Jabès considers the work of several of his contemporaries, including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Roger Caillois, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Leiris, Emmanuel Lévinas, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and his translator, Rosmarie Waldrop. This book will be important reading for students of Jewish literature, French literature, and literature of the modern and postmodern ages. Born in Cairo in 1912, Edmond Jabès lived in France from 1956 until his death in 1991. His extensively translated and widely honored works include The Book of Questions and The Book of Shares. Both of these were translated into English by Rosmarie Waldrop, who is also a poet. Religion and Postmodernism series




Property in the Margins


Book Description

Having its origins in the process of transformation and land reform that began to take shape in South Africa at the end of the last century, this strikingly original analysis of property starts from deep inside the property regime and not from a distant or abstract perspective on property rules and practices. Focusing on issues of stability and change in a transformative setting and on the role of tradition and legal culture in that context, the book argues that a property regime, including the system of property holdings and the rules and practices that entrench and protect them, tends to insulate itself against change through the security- and stability-seeking tendency of tradition and legal culture, including the deep assumptions about security and stability embedded in the rights paradigm, rhetoric and logic that dominate current legal culture. The rights paradigm tends to stabilise the current distribution of property holdings by securing extant property holdings on the assumption that they are lawfully acquired, socially important and politically and morally legitimate. This function of the rights paradigm tends to resist or minimise change, including change brought about by morally, politically and legally legitimate and authorised reform or transformation efforts. The author's goal is to gauge the lasting power of the rights paradigm by investigating its effects in the margins of property law and of society, by establishing the actual efficacy and power of reformist or transformative anti-eviction policies and legislation aimed at the protection of marginalised and weak land users and occupiers in areas such as landlord-tenant law, eviction of unlawful occupiers of land and other restrictions on the landowner's power to enforce a stronger right to exclusive possession. Ultimately the book's aim is to explore the possibility of opening up theoretical space where justice-inspired changes to (or transformation of) the extant property regime can be imagined and discussed more or less fruitfully from an unusual perspective, a perspective from the margins which is valuable for any theoretical consideration or discussion of property.




Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist


Book Description

"Over the past five decades, prominent criminologist Gregg Barak has worked as an author, editor, and book review editor; his large body of work has been grounded in traditional academic prose. His new book, Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist, while remaining scholarly in its intent, departs from the typical academic format. The book is a a first-person account that examines the linkages between one scholar's experiences as a criminologist from the late 1960s to the present and the emergence and evolution of radical criminology as a challenge to developments in mainstream criminology. Barak draws upon his own experiences over this half-century as a window into the various debates and issues among radical, critical, and technocratic criminologies. In doing so, he revisits his own seminal works, showing how they reflect those periods of criminological development. What holds this book together is the story of how resisting the crimes of the powerful while struggling locally for social justice is the essence of critical criminology. His six chapters are divided into three parts-academic freedom, academic activism, and academic praxis-and these connected stories link the author's own academic career in Berkeley, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Chicago; Alabama; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and across the United States. Barak's eventful scholarly life involved efforts to overcome laws against abortion and homosexuality; to formalize protective practices for women from domestic violence and sexual assault; to oppose racism and classism in the criminal justice system; to challenge the wars on gangs, drugs, and immigrants; and to confront the policies of mass incarceration and the treatment of juvenile offenders"--




Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840


Book Description

How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.