Why books? Books often provide overview/background/history that provides valuable context for the discussion of a particular topic.
This is not an exhaustive list of relevant books, just a selection of titles that seemed relevant to the research topics suggested in the class syllabus.
Women's Activism, Feminism, and Social Justice
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A wide range of issues besieges women globally, including economic exploitation, sexist oppression, racial, ethnic, and caste oppression, and cultural imperialism. This book builds a feminist social justice framework from practices of women's activism in India to understand and work to overcome these injustices. The feminist social justice framework provides an alternative to mainstream philosophical frameworks that promote global gender justice: for example, universal human rights, economic projects such as microfinance, and cosmopolitanism. McLaren demonstrates that these frameworks are bound by a commitment to individualism and an abstract sense of universalism that belies their root neo-liberalism. Arguing that these frameworks emphasize individualism over interdependence, similarity over diversity, and individual success over collective capacity, McLaren draws on the work of Rabindranath Tagore to develop the concept of relational cosmopolitanism. Relational cosmopolitanism prioritizes our connections while, crucially, acknowledging the reality of power differences. Extending Iris Young's theory of political responsibility, McLaren shows how Fair Trade connects to the economic solidarity movement. The Self-Employed Women's Association and MarketPlace India empower women through access to livelihoods as well as fostering leadership capabilities that allow them to challenge structural injustice through political and social activism. Their struggles to resist economic exploitation and gender oppression through collective action show the vital importance of challenging individualist approaches to achieving gender justice. The book is a rallying call for a shift in our thinking and practice towards re-imagining the possibilities for justice from a relational framework, from independence to interdependence, from identity to intersectionality, and from interest to socio-political imagination.
Feminist Connections
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Highlights feminist rhetorical practices that disrupt and surpass boundaries of time and space In 1917, Alice Paul and other suffragists famously picketed in front of the White House while holding banners with short, pithy sayings such as "Mr. President: How long must women wait for Liberty?" Their juxtaposition of this short phrase with the image of the White House (a symbol of liberty and justice) relies on the same rhetorical tactics as memes, a genre contemporary feminists use frequently to make arguments about reproductive rights, Black Lives Matter, sex-positivity, and more. Many such connections between feminists of different spaces, places, and eras have yet to be considered, let alone understood. Feminist Connections: Rhetoric and Activism across Time, Space, and Place reconsiders feminist rhetorical strategies as linked, intergenerational, and surprisingly consistent despite the emergence of new forms of media and intersectional considerations. Contributors to this volume highlight continuities in feminist rhetorical practices that are often invisible to scholars, obscured by time, new media, and wildly different cultural, political, and social contexts. Thus, this collection takes a nonchronological approach to the study of feminist rhetoric, grouping chapters by rhetorical practice rather than time, content, or choice of media. By connecting historical, contemporary, and future trajectories, this collection develops three feminist rhetorical frameworks: revisionary rhetorics, circulatory rhetorics, and response rhetorics. A theorization of these frameworks explains how feminist rhetorical practices (past and present) rely on similar but diverse methods to create change and fight oppression. Identifying these strategies not only helps us rethink feminist rhetoric from an academic perspective but also allows us to enact feminist activist rhetorics beyond the academy during a time in which feminist scholarship cannot afford to remain behind its hallowed yet insular walls.
Feminism in Coalition
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#MeToo and the Politics of Social Change
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#MeToo has sparked a global re-emergence of sexual violence activism and politics. This edited collection uses the #MeToo movement as a starting point for interrogating contemporary debates in anti-sexual violence activism and justice-seeking. It draws together 19 accessible chapters from academics, practitioners, and sexual violence activists across the globe to provide diverse, critical, and nuanced perspectives on the broader implications of the movement. It taps into wider conversations about the nature, history, and complexities of anti-rape and anti-sexual harassment politics, including the limitations of the movement including in the global South. It features both internationally recognised and emerging academics from across the fields of criminology, media and communications, film studies, gender and queer studies, and law and will appeal broadly to the academic community, activists, and beyond.
The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of the #MeToo Movement
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Since the MeToo hashtag went viral in 2017, the movement has burgeoned across social media, moving beyond Twitter and into living rooms and courtrooms. It has spread unevenly across the globe, with some countries and societies more impacted than others, and interacted with existing feminist movements, struggles, and resistances. This interdisciplinary handbook identifies thematic and theoretical areas that require attention and interrogation, inviting the reader to make connections between the ways in which the #MeToo movement has panned out in different parts of the world, seeing it in the context of the many feminist and gendered struggles already in place, as well as the solidarities with similar movements across countries and cultures. With contributions from gender experts spanning a wide range of disciplines including political science, history, sociology, law, literature, and philosophy, this groundbreaking book will have contemporary relevance for scholars, feminists, gender researchers, and policy-makers across the globe.
The Making of Black Lives Matter
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A condensed and accessible intellectual history that traces the genesis of the ideas that have built into the #BlackLivesMatter movement in a bid to help us make sense of the emotions, demands, and arguments of present-day activists and public thinkers.Started in the wake of George Zimmerman's 2013 acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a powerful and incendiary campaign demanding redress for the brutal and unjustified treatment of black bodies by law enforcement in the United States. The movement is only a few years old, but as Christopher J. Lebron argues in this book, the sentiment behind it is not; the plea and demand that "Black Lives Matter" comes out of a much older and richer tradition arguing for the equal dignity - and not just equal rights - of black people. In this updated edition, The Making of Black Lives Matter presents a condensed and accessible intellectual history of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and expands on the movement's relevancy. This edition includes a new introduction that explores how the movement's core ideas have been challenged, re-affirmed, and re-imagined during the white nationalism of the Trump years, as well as a new chapter that examines the ideas and importance of Angela Davis and Amiri Baraka as significant participants in the Black Power Movement and Black Arts Movement, respectively. Drawing on the work of these revolutionary black public intellectuals, as well as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King Jr., Lebron clarifies what it means to assert that "Black Lives Matter" when faced with contemporary instances of anti-black law enforcement. He also illuminates the crucial difference between the problem signaled by the social media hashtag and how we think that we ought to address the problem. As Lebron states, police body cameras, or even the exhortation for civil rights mean nothing in the absence of equality and dignity. To upset dominant practices of abuse, oppression, and disregard, we must reach instead for radical sensibility. Radical sensibility requires that we become cognizant of the history of black thought and activism in order to make sense of the emotions, demands, and argument of present-day activists and public thinkers. Only in this way can we truly embrace and pursue the idea of racial progress in America.
Reckoning:Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements
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Examining the significance of the Movement for Black Lives, Reckoning uncovers a broadly applicable argument for the democratic necessity of social movements.Barack Obama famously said that the purpose of social movements is to get a seat at the table. However, as Deva Woodly argues in Reckoning - a sweeping account of the meaning and purpose of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) - the value of such movements is something much more profound: they are necessary for the health and survival of democracy. Drawing from on-the-ground interviews with activists in the movement, Woodly analyzes the emergence of the M4BL, its organizational structure and culture, and its strategies and tactics. She also shows how a unique political philosophy - Radical Black Feminist Pragmatism - served as an intellectual foundation of the movement and documents the role it played in transforming public meanings, public opinion, and policy. Interweaving theoretical and empirical observations throughout, Woodly provides both a unique portrait of the movement and a powerful explanation of the labor social movements do in democracy. A major work that speaks to both scholars and activists, Woodly's account of the rise and spread of M4BL will reshape our understanding of why the movement is so important - and so necessary - for democracy.
Pregnancy and Power, Revised Edition
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A sweeping chronicle of women's battles for reproductive freedom Reproductive politics in the United States has always been about who has the power to decide--lawmakers, the courts, clergy, physicians, or the woman herself. Authorities have rarely put women's needs and interests at the center of these debates. Instead, they have created reproductive laws and policies to solve a variety of social and political problems, with outcomes that affect the lives of different groups of women differently. Reproductive politics were at play when slaveholders devised "breeding" schemes, when the US government took indigenous children from their families in the nineteenth century, and when doctors pressured Latina women to be sterilized in the 1970s. Tracing the main plot lines of women's reproductive lives, the leading historian Rickie Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the effort to control sex and pregnancy in America over time. Revisiting these issues after more than a decade, this revised edition of Pregnancy and Power reveals how far the reproductive justice movement has come, and the renewed struggles it faces in the present moment. Even after nearly a half-century of "reproductive rights," a cascade of new laws and policies limits access and prescribes punishments for many people trying to make their own reproductive decisions. In this edition, Solinger traces the contemporary rise of reproductive consumerism and the politics of "free market" health care as economic inequality continues to expand in the US, revealing the profound limits of "choice" and the continued need for the reproductive justice framework.
Reproductive Rights As Human Rights
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Reveals both the promise and the pitfalls associated with a human rights approach to the women of color-focused reproductive rights activism of SisterSong How did reproductive justice--defined as the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent--become recognized as a human rights issue? In Reproductive Rights as Human Rights, Zakiya Luna highlights the often-forgotten activism of women of color who are largely responsible for creating what we now know as the modern-day reproductive justice movement. Focusing on SisterSong, an intersectional reproductive justice organization, Luna shows how, and why, women of color mobilized around reproductive rights in the domestic arena. She examines their key role in re-framing reproductive rights as human rights, raising this set of issues as a priority in the United States, a country hostile to the concept of human rights at home. An indispensable read, Reproductive Rights as Human Rights provides a much-needed intersectional perspective on the modern-day reproductive justice movement.
Routledge Handbook on Native American Justice Issues
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Native Americans are disproportionately represented as offenders in the U.S. criminal justice system. Routledge Handbook on Native American Justice Issues is an authoritative volume that provides an overview of the state of American Indigenous populations and their contact with justice concerns and the criminal justice system. The volume covers the history and origins of Indian Country in America; continuing controversies regarding treaties; unique issues surrounding tribal law enforcement; the operation of tribal courts and corrections, including the influence of Indigenous restorative justice practices; the impact of native religions and customs; youth justice issues, including educational practices and gaps; women's justice issues; and special circumstances surrounding healthcare for Indians, including the role substance abuse plays in contributing to criminal justice problems. Bringing together contributions from leading scholars - many of them Native Americans - that explore key issues fundamental to understanding the relationships between Native peoples and contemporary criminal justice, editor Laurence Armand French draws on more than 40 years of experience with Native American individuals and groups to provide contextual material that incorporates criminology, sociology, anthropology, cultural psychology, and history to give readers a true picture of the wrongs perpetrated against Native Americans and their effects on the current operation of Native American justice. This compilation analyzes the nature of justice for Native Americans, including unique and emerging problems, theoretical issues, and policy implications. It is a valuable resource for all scholars with an interest in Native American culture and in the analysis and rectification of the criminal justice system's disparate impact on people of color.
Documents of the LGBT Movement
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Beginning with the First People in the Americas and their acceptance of tribal members who did not conform to gender and sexual binary roles, to the expansion west and establishment of the United States as a Republic, to the contentious struggles for equality in the 20th and 21st centuries, this reference traces the development of the Gay Rights Movement through the examination of primary source materials related to the incremental changes toward making America safe for all people. These documents enable readers to reflect on pivotal moments in the LGBT rights and sexual equality movement in the past up to the achievement of marriage equality. A modern chronology traces key events in the Gay Rights Movement across the last 70 years, such as those during the World War II era, the formation of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in the 1950s, to the Stonewall Riot in New York in the late 1960s, the elimination of the category of homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, the judgment in 2003 by the U.S. Supreme Court that laws criminalizing sodomy are unconstitutional, and the legalization of same-sex marriage in all U.S. states in 2015.
The Path to Gay Rights
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An innovative, data-driven explanation of how public opinion shifted on LGBTQ rights The Path to Gay Rights is the first social science analysis of how and why the LGBTQ movement achieved its most unexpected victory--transforming gay people from a despised group of social deviants into a minority worthy of rights and protections in the eyes of most Americans. The book weaves together a narrative of LGBTQ history with new findings from the field of political psychology to provide an understanding of how social movements affect mass attitudes in the United States and globally. Using data going back to the 1970s, the book argues that the current understanding of how social movements change mass opinion--through sympathetic media coverage and endorsements from political leaders--cannot provide an adequate explanation for the phenomenal success of the LGBTQ movement at changing the public's views. In The Path to Gay Rights, Jeremiah Garretson argues that the LGBTQ community's response to the AIDS crisis was a turning point for public support of gay rights. ACT-UP and related AIDS organizations strategically targeted political and media leaders, normalizing news coverage of LGBTQ issues and AIDS and signaled to LGBTQ people across the United States that their lives were valued. The net result was an increase in the number of LGBTQ people who came out and lived their lives openly, and with increased contact with gay people, public attitudes began to warm and change. Garretson goes beyond the story of LGBTQ rights to develop an evidence-based argument for how social movements can alter mass opinion on any contentious topic.
Break Every Yoke: religion, justice, and the abolition of prisons
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Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once, in an era not too long past, Americans, both incarcerated and free, spoke a language of social liberation animated by religion. In the era of mass incarceration, we have largely forgotten how to dream - and organize - this way. To end mass incarceration we must reclaim this lost tradition. Properly conceived, the movement we need must demand not prison reform but prison abolition.Break Every Yoke weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America's grotesque prison expansion of the last half century, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era's biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth century abolitionism, and by turning to today's grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition "spirit."
Reform Nation
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How one law tells the story of America's modern criminal justice movement In late 2018, the First Step Act was signed into law by President Donald Trump just hours before a government shutdown. It was one of few major pieces of federal criminal justice reform since the 1970s to move toward reversing the incarceration frenzy that had characterized United States policy. While it did not amount to revolutionary reform, in Reform Nation, Colleen P. Eren investigates it as a symbol for the larger movement's trajectory. Its unlikely passage during a period of political polarization was testament to the power of a new constellation of advocates, stakeholders, and strange bedfellow alliances. These intriguing and complex dynamics are indicative of a longer, twenty-year shift in which the movement became nationalized and mainstreamed. Using in-depth interviews with major players in the national movement, formerly incarcerated activists, celebrities, and donors, this is the first book to turn the mirror back on the criminal justice reform movement itself--the frames used, the voices heard, the capital activated among elite participants, and the bitter controversies. This snapshot in time raises much larger questions about how our democratic processes inform criminal justice policy, and where we are going in the decades to come.
The Immigrant Rights Movement: the battle over national citizenship
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In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, liberal outcry over ethnonationalist views promoted a vision of America as a nation of immigrants. Given the pervasiveness of this rhetoric, it can be easy to overlook the fact that the immigrant rights movement began in the US relatively recently. This book tells the story of its grassroots origins, through its meteoric rise to the national stage. Starting in the 1990s, the immigrant rights movement slowly cohered over the demand for comprehensive federal reform of immigration policy. Activists called for a new framework of citizenship, arguing that immigrants deserved legal status based on their strong affiliation with American values. During the Obama administration, leaders were granted unprecedented political access and millions of dollars in support. The national spotlight, however, came with unforeseen pressures--growing inequalities between factions and restrictions on challenging mainstream views. Such tradeoffs eventually shattered the united front. The Immigrant Rights Movement tells the story of a vibrant movement to change the meaning of national citizenship, that ultimately became enmeshed in the system that it sought to transform.
Environmental Justice
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Environmental Justice: Key Issues is the fi rst textbook to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview of environmental justice, one of the most dynamic fi elds in environmental politics scholarship. The rapidly growing body of research in this area has brought about a proliferation of approaches; as such, the breadth and depth of the fi eld can sometimes be a barrier for aspiring environmental justice students and scholars. This book therefore is unique for its accessible style and innovative approach to exploring environmental justice. Written by leading international experts from a variety of professional, geographic, ethnic, and disciplinary backgrounds, its chapters combine authoritative commentary with real-life cases. Organised into four parts--approaches, issues, actors and future directions--the chapters help the reader to understand the foundations of the fi eld, including the principal concepts, debates, and historical milestones. This volume also features sections with learning outcomes, follow-up questions, references for further reading and vivid photographs to make it a useful teaching and learning tool. Environmental Justice: Key Issues is the ideal toolkit for junior researchers, graduate students, upper-level undergraduates, and anyone in need of a comprehensive introductory textbook on environmental justice.
Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger
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"Let this book immerse you in the many worlds of environmental justice."--Naomi Klein We are living in a precarious environmental and political moment. In the United States and in the world, environmental injustices have manifested across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. What does this moment of danger mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from environmental justice struggles? Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger examines mobilizations and movements, from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Environmental justice movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself. Exploring dispossession, deregulation, privatization, and inequality, this book is the essential primer on environmental justice, packed with cautiously hopeful stories for the future.
Environmental Racism in the United States and Canada
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From Flint, Michigan, to Standing Rock, North Dakota, minorities have found themselves losing the battle for clean resources and a healthy environment. This book provides a modern history of such environmental injustices in the United States and Canada. From the 19th-century extermination of the buffalo in the American West to Alaska's Project Chariot (a Cold War initiative that planned to use atomic bombs to blast out a harbor on Eskimo land) to the struggle for recovery and justice in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017, this book provides readers with an enhanced understanding of how poor and minority people are affected by natural and manmade environmental crises. Written for students as well as the general reader with an interest in social justice and environmental issues, this book traces the relationship between environmental discrimination, race, and class through a comprehensive case history of environmental injustices. Environmental Racism in the United States and Canada: Seeking Justice and Sustainability includes 50 such case studies that range from local to national to international crises.
Unconventional Combat: Intersectional Action in the Veterans' Peace Movement
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In recent decades, there has been a generational shift of the US veterans' peace movement, from one grounded mostly in the experiences of older white men of the Vietnam War era, to one informed by a young, diverse cohort of post-9/11 veterans. In Unconventional Combat, Michael A. Messner traces this transformation through the life-history interviews of six veterans of color to show how their experiences of sexual and gender harassment, sexual assault, racist and homophobic abuse during their military service has shaped their political views and action. Drawing upon participant observation with the Veterans For Peace and About Face organizations and interviews with older male veterans as his backdrop, Messner shows how veterans' military experiences form their collective "situated knowledge" of intersecting oppressions. This knowledge, Messner argues, further shapes their intersectional praxis, which promises to transform the veterans' peace movement and potentially link their anti-militarist work with other movement groups working for change. As intersectionality has increasingly become central to the conversation on social movements, Unconventional Combat is not only a story about the US veterans' peace movement, but it also offers broad relevance to the larger world of social justice activism.
Feminist Conversations on Peace
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What is feminist peace? How can we advocate for peace from patriarchy? What do women, globally, advocate for when they use the term 'peace'? This edited collection brings together conversations across borders and boundaries to explore plural, intersectional and interdisciplinary concepts of feminist peace. The book includes contributions from a geographically diverse range of scholars, judges, practitioners and activists, and the chapters cut across themes of movement building and resistance and explore the limits of institutionalized peacebuilding. The chapters deal with a range of issues, such as environmental degradation, militarization, online violence and arms spending. Offering a resource to advance theoretical development and to advocate for policy change, this book transcends traditional approaches to the study of peace and security and embraces diverse voices and perspectives which are absent in both academic and policy spaces.
