Realising systemic justice-oriented reform in education in postcolonial contexts

Reviews: Where Bad Things Go: Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago, Killing Me Softly: Toxic Waste, Corporate Profit, and the Struggle for Environmental Justice, from the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement

As the climate crisis accelerates and disproportionately affects marginalised communities and countries in the global South, the need for power and social justice approaches is particularly important. Community psychology, with a long interest in the impacts of power discrepancies on the well-being of groups and communities, can offer theoretical and practical tools for addressing climate change and environmental problems without reproducing or intensifying existing inequalities and injustices. This special issue looks at communities' struggles for climate and environmental justice by focusing on how they resist, contest and overcome power inequalities. The issue consists of one perspective and six empirical articles. Most contributions come from high climate vulnerable countries and regions in the global South. Authors address current and relevant environmental and climate change issues such as renewable energy and natural resource extraction, social transformations and extreme weather events, the links between poverty, rurality and climate change, youth empowerment, and racism in climate activism. Inspired by their contributions, community psychology approaches and interdisciplinary research on environmental and climate justice, we discuss a research and intervention agenda for a community psychology of climate change.

This chapter discusses struggles over power and knowledge among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements contesting capitalist globalization. Building on a review of an emerging body of critical literature on NGOs’ implications in capitalist relations and the professionalization of social change, and the author’s activist engagement, it argues that processes of NGOization and professionalization, and hierarchies of power and knowledge within “alternative” milieus often reproduce rather than challenge dominant practices and power relations, and serve elite economic and political interests instead of constituencies which these organizations claim to represent. It identifies and questions aspects of hegemonic NGO practices, primarily among “civil society” networks contesting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)1 forum in the 1990s, in which I was an activist. In interrogating “alternatives to globalization” advocacy positions advanced by nongovernmental actors ostensibly committed to social transformation, I argue that critical attention to texts and actual practices reveals that many NGOs are tied to what I refer to as an ideology of pragmatism which normalizes and reinforces dominant ideologies of liberalism and liberal democratic nation-states with regard to their current and historical implication in colonialism and global capitalist relations. In contending that many such “alternative” actors claim a positional superiority for a small, professionalized NGO/activist elite, this chapter highlights how NGO texts and actual practices can socially organize, conceptually coordinate, fragment and compartmentalize struggles for social and environmental justice, undermining or constraining more critical systemic analysis.

In the wake of the September 11th attacks on the United States and the bombing of Afghanistan, those engaged in struggles for social and environmental justice are faced with a number of emerging problems and challenges.

Critical literature on David Chariandy's Soucouyant has explored the dementia suffered by the protagonist's mother, Adele, as a metaphor for the erasure of Black experience from cultural memory and dominant historical narratives and as a response to the traumatic effects of imperialism. This essay builds on these critical insights using a postcolonial ecocritical lens to argue that in Chariandy's novel, dementia is both an effect and symptom of the multiple sites of chemical exposure that disproportionately impact low-income communities of color. From Adele's and her husband Roger's origins in Trinidad to their home and work environments in Canada, the family's multiple encounters with byproducts of industrial production are inseparably linked to legacies of colonialism and racism. This reading traces the roots of Adele's trauma to environmental and cultural disruptions wrought by the United States' military occupation of Trinidad during World War II. We also examine SoucouyantS critique of Canada's discourse of neoliberal multiculturalism as well as the novel's relevance to Indigenous-Black solidarity movements against racism, white supremacy, and injustices in Canada. In its attention to epistemologies of memory and the multigenerational effects of (neo)colonialism, Soucouyant is a literary intervention in support of local and global decolonization struggles for social, environmental, and ecological justice.

The struggle for environmental and social justice within American Indian communities is one that has been ongoing since the beginning of United States history, but the main catalyst to effect change and to promote and disperse the American Indian narrative has emerged through the power of social media in today's hyperconnected society. This article examines the power of social media to effect change, as well as a hyperconnected society's ability to empower historically disadvantaged groups that have often been misrepresented within traditional media outlets. The historic movement occurring at Standing Rock, North Dakota, and the #NoDAPL protests illustrates the capacity of social media to galvanize individuals to become change-makers as well as create a vast support network within a population that might otherwise remain uninformed or unaware of media misrepresentations. The role of libraries as support systems within communities and the responsibility of libraries to provide unbiased and freely available information within a hyperconnected society are also discussed.

The purpose of this instrumental qualitative case study was to address the challenges that community college professors face when curating or creating high-quality and low- or no-cost open educational resources (OERs), the accessibility of the resources, and the impact OER has on student success and social justice in education. The goal of this instrumental qualitative case study was to examine faculty's perceptions of OERs and explore whether and how the professors thought use of OERs helps to improve student engagement and student success in the classroom. In seeking to explore community college professors' perceptions of OER and their impact on student engagement and student success, the researcher used an instrumental qualitative case study. The target population for this study was full- and part-time faculty members who have created, curated, or have taught at least one semester (in the face-to-face, blended, or distance learning formats) using OER course content. This study utilized purposeful sampling and an additional participant was identified, invited and accepted the invitation as a result of the snowballing approach to selecting participants. The researcher conducted 12 semistructured interviews using open-ended questions to collect the data for this study. Analysis of the interviews led to the development of 5 themes and 10 subthemes associated with the data. The researcher's interpretations led to three results. Based on the data and research findings, the researcher concluded that social justice in education emerged as being implied and woven through all participants' responses. A comprehensive discussion on social justice in education is a subject for further research. There were three recommendations for practice covering these topic areas: (a) continue to foster the development and curation of OER, working collaboratively with partners internal and external to the institution; and (b) develop and promote OEP that allow students to acquire skills and knowledge, learning from their own and each other's experiences; (c) create flexible and sustainable course design for the post-pandemic environment. There were two recommendations for future research as follows: (a) broaden the approach to work toward social justice in education; and (b) recognize students as producers and creators of content and provide them with interactive learning environments in which to learn and become agents of change. Keywords: open educational resources (OER), social justice in education community college, student engagement, student success, faculty perceptions, benefits to students, inclusive learning environment, student creators of content, OER quality

Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago<i>Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago</i>. By David Naguib Pellow. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002, Pp. 234. $24.95.)

In September 2013, President Correa balanced himself on a felled log over an oil waste pit in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Extending a bare hand dripping with crude, he launched La Mano Sucia de Chevron campaign, demanding accountability for decades of contamination. This article explores the role of bodily knowledge in witnessing industrial contamination and struggles for environmental justice. Situating the mano sucia in the history of activism in the region, I show how the juxtaposition of different hands within the same motif reveals profoundly asymmetric relationships to the toxic entanglements that oil produces. Dirtied hands reveal the co-production of toxicity and power in extractive landscapes: At times throughout this article, the gesture calls for corporate accountability and distributive environmental justice, at other times, it reveals the systemic production of material, social and political distance between the accrual of benefit and the production of harm in an industrial-capitalist order. While drawing on the central role of bodily knowledges in apprehending environmental harm, I argue that bodily knowledges must also be examined for their specific relationships to forms of power and exploitation, and for their potential for appropriation by other parties - even when dedicated to condemning environmental injustice.

The neoliberalisation of higher education is gathering pace and momentum on a global scale, albeit with national differences. In this context, a number of challenges and conflicting politics are emerging especially in relation to pedagogical ethos of social justice. Our article analyzes the general characteristics of neoliberal policy and practices worldwide, looking in particular at their impacts on students and teachers alike mainly in relation to the license to exercise critical thinking and social justice. Subsequently, it suggests resisting neoliberal agenda by using radical teaching methods which consider diversity and difference as social and political assets which allow meaningful dialogue across social, ethnic, national and gender groups while working to promote equality and social justice. This theoretical background informs the five papers composing this Special Issue. The authors all introduce radical and critical research and pedagogies with a struggle for social justice and against inequalities at their core—as effective tools of resistance against the oppressive and unjust conditions created by the neoliberal agendas that are structuring education worldwide. Situated in a range of national contexts, the papers provide the ground for a pedagogy of critical locational encounter, recognizing this as a site of struggle while addressing multiple and complex relationships of power and their contestation.

This essay, which reflects on the “unfinished humanistic project” of decolonisation in Africa, is an invitation to examine the problem of epistemic injustice from a philosophical standpoint. At the core of my argument is the position that there is an epistemic dimension to Africa’s problems, and the struggle for epistemic justice is as fundamental to humanity as all other struggles for social justice. Addressing the problem of epistemic injustice calls for multiple efforts and initiatives. Among these is commitment to new canon building across the disciplines, and adopting “strategic particularism” as a paradigm and philosophical framework in our academic projects. To confront epistemic injustice—and thus restore parity and equilibrium—polemics, contestations, and dialogue are inevitable. In this endeavour, the goal should be to reclaim Africa’s position in the conversation of humankind.

This article moves beyond an understanding of environmental communication as merely the “translation” of scientific knowledge for the general public and advocates for environmental science and sustainability (ESS) educators to understand environmental communication as a critical practice with complex social, cultural, and political stakes. Due to the interconnectedness of environmental issues and social, political, and cultural contexts, environmental communication pedagogy is an important site of both environmental and epistemic justice. This article addresses the question: What forms of environmental communication pedagogy contribute to dynamic communication competencies for students while also promoting environmental and epistemic justice? The authors begin with a literature review of environmental communication and environmental justice research. Subsequently, they develop a theoretical argument advocating for an “undisciplining” of environmental communication pedagogy to promote critical thinking about the exclusionary politics of environmental knowledge production and communication. In doing so, the authors advocate for cultivating dynamic and ethically engaged real-world literacies for students through social and participatory media, including Wikipedia and podcasts. The article concludes with two sample assignments that instructors can adapt to their classrooms.

All communities and persons across this nation should live in a safe and healthy environment .... To the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law... each Federal agency shall make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority population and low-income population in the United States and its territories and possessions ....

This conceptual article critically examines the pervasive issue of epistemic injustice within educational settings. Drawing from critical theory and social justice frameworks, this paper aims to uncover and critically analyse the various forms of epistemic injustice in education settings, focusing on marginalised and underrepresented groups. Through lensing within the transformative worldview and employing conceptual analysis to make sense of the arguments, this paper explores how epistemic injustices manifest through biased curriculum design, pedagogical approaches, and assessment methods. The article argues the detrimental impact of epistemic injustice on marginalised students. Additionally, it evaluates strategies and interventions to address epistemic injustice in education, such as inclusive pedagogical practices, curriculum reforms, and the promotion of diverse perspectives in knowledge systems. I propose alternative approaches for creating inclusive learning environments towards dismantling epistemic injustice. This paper contributes to the scholarly discourse on epistemic justice, calling for the transformation of educational practices and policies to promote equity, inclusion, and the recognition of diverse knowledge and experiences, inspiring stakeholders to actively work towards achieving epistemic justice for all students.

Reviewed by: American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and their Struggle for Social and Political Justice by Albert J. Raboteau Casey Bohlen Albert J. Raboteau, American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and their Struggle for Social and Political Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016) In American Prophets, historian Albert J. Raboteau provides concise, lucid biographical sketches of seven religious radicals, each of whom contributed to movements for social justice in the 20th-century United States. His subjects include intellectuals and activists from a diverse set of faith traditions, including the familiar faces of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, and Fannie Lou Hamer, as well as the less well-known Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel, heterodox iconoclast A.J. Muste, Black Protestant intellectual Howard Thurman, and Catholic monk Thomas Merton. Although these individuals hailed from disparate theological backgrounds, Raboteau argues that they were united by a shared religious commitment to social justice, defined by moral solidarity with the socially marginalized and faith in the redemptive power of nonviolent direct action. For readers who are unfamiliar with the history of the mid-century [End Page 339] religious left, this book offers a readable and illustrative introduction to the field, told through the lives of some of its most influential participants. Raboteau's central argument is that members of the religious left have served as a prophetic voice in 20th-century United States politics, blending civic and theological language to develop effective moral arguments against injustice and inspire grassroots movements for social change. Their political vision was defined by what Raboteau dubs "divine pathos" – meaning a heightened sense of compassion for the least among us, derived from a religious belief in the divine dignity of each individual, the spiritual unity of humanity, and categorical opposition to systems rooted in violence and coercion. Inspired by this divine pathos, religious radicals played pivotal roles in a wide variety of social justice movements across the course of the century, ranging from the long civil rights movement to radical labour organizing to anti-war resistance. They mounted campaigns rooted in nonviolent direct action, drew on religious networks to organize activists at the grassroots, and delivered soaring political speeches redolent with religious imagery, appealing to the consciences of their fellow citizens through both word and deed. These appeals were often successful, most notably in the case of the Southern freedom struggle, which unsurprisingly takes centre stage here. But of equal importance, Raboteau argues, they passed their sense of divine pathos on to their audiences, engendering new moral awakenings and sustaining the religious left across generations in a manner that other branches of the United States left have notably failed to do. This combination of interpersonal encounters, flexible moral language, and effective protest tactics have made religious radicals capable of adapting their relatively consistent set of principles and strategies to a diverse set of causes. In doing so, they have had an outsized impact on United States politics over the course of the century. Raboteau delivers this argument episodically, organizing American Prophets into seven independent chapters, each devoted to one of his subjects' intellectual biography and history of social engagement. The book is already succinct, clocking in at just under two-hundred pages, but because each chapter can stand alone, educators might consider exploring Raboteau's overarching argument by assigning excerpts on just one or two of his subjects. His chapter on Thomas Merton is a prime candidate for such treatment. Merton was a Trappist monk whose early writings called on readers to seek God by withdrawing from the world, but who reemerged as a preeminent social critic and political advocate in the 1960s. Raboteau's discussion of him is rife with meaty block quotes, which articulate Merton's seemingly-paradoxical fusion of contemplative life and worldly engagement, his analysis of the relationship between systems of social violence and personal alienation, and his deep skepticism of the ability of white liberals and civil rights legislation to unravel the tangled knots of racial inequality in America. His writing is rich and provocative, and his thinking on race relations feels especially prescient today, marking Merton as one of the most intellectually challenging voices in this collection. Also noteworthy are...