"Featuring both scholarly and autobiographical writings, Bearing Witness to Crime and Social Justice follows Richard Quinney's development as a criminologist. Quinney's criminology is a critical criminology which he describes as a journey of witnessing to crime and social justice. Quinney's travels from the 1960s through the 1990s show a progression of ways of thinking and acting: from the social constructionist perspective to phenomenology, from phenomenology to Marxist and critical philosophy, from Marxist and critical philosophy to liberation theology, from liberation theology to Buddhism and existentialism. Along this journey, Quinney adopts a more ethnographic and personal mode of thinking and being. Each new stage of development incorporates what has preceded it; each change has been motivated by the need to understand crime and social justice in another or more complex way, in a way excluded from a former understanding. Each stage has also incorporated changes that were taking place in Quinney's personal life. Ultimately, there is no separation between life and theory, between witnessing and writing."--Jacket.

From the Women's March in D.C. to #BlackLivesMatter rallies across the country, there has been a rising wave of protests and social activism. Yet, the struggle for social justice continues long after the posters and megaphones have been packed away. After the protests are heard, how can we continue to work toward lasting change?

Arts educators have adopted social justice themes as part of a larger vision of transforming society. Social justice arts education confronts oppression and inequality arising from factors related to race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, ability, gender, and sexuality. This edition of Common Threads investigates the intersection of social justice work with education in the visual arts, music, theatre, dance, and literature. Weaving together resources from a range of University of Illinois Press journals, the editors offer articles on the scholarly inquiry, theory, and practice of social justice arts education. Selections from the past three decades reflect the synergy of the diverse scholars, educators, and artists actively engaged in such projects. Together, the contributors bring awareness to the importance of critically reflective and inclusive pedagogy in arts educational contexts. They also provide pedagogical theory and practical tools for building a social justice orientation through the arts.

A New Global Agenda explores the most compelling issues of our time, highlighting key strategies, initiatives, and calls to action. To catalyze regenerative solutions for People, Society, and Planet, this text engages visionary thought leaders, advocates, and innovators spanning international policy, academia, private sector, and civil society.

"American society is often described as one that celebrates self-reliance and personal responsibility. However, abolitionists, progressive reformers, civil rights activists, and numerous others often held their fellow citizens responsible for shared problems such as economic exploitation and white supremacy. Moreover, they viewed recognizing and responding to shared problems as essential to achieving democratic ideals. In Democratic Responsibility, Nora Hanagan examines American thinkers and activists who offered an alternative to individualistic conceptions of responsibility and puts them in dialogue with contemporary philosophers who write about shared responsibility. Drawing on the political theory and practice of Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and Audre Lorde, Hanagan develops a distinctly democratic approach to shared responsibility. Cooperative democracy is especially relevant in an age of globalization and hyperconnectivity, where societies are continually threatened with harms--such as climate change, global sweatshop labor, and structural racism--that result from the combined interactions of multiple individuals and institutions, and which therefore cannot be resolved without collective action. Democratic Responsibility offers insight into how political actors might confront seemingly intractable problems, and challenges conventional understandings of what commitment to democratic ideals entails. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of political science, especially those who look to the history of political thought for resources that might promote social justice in the present"--

"In June 2015, Pope Francis published Laudato si', a magisterial vision of ecological flourishing and integral human development. At a meeting opened by Pope Francis in September 2015, world leaders came together at the United Nations to adopt Agenda 2030 and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. In December of that same year, the same 193 member states of the UN met in Paris to adopt the Paris Climate Agreement. Between October 2016 and December 2018, Monsignor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo (Chancellor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences) and Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs (University Professor, Columbia University) led a project titled Ethics in Action. Inspired by the leadership and vision of Pope Francis and guided by the framework of the SDGs, this initiative convened a core group of about 40 religious leaders, philosophers, practitioners, and scientists to explore the possibility of a shared moral vision of human flourishing that could ground sustainable development principles, practices, and actions. At 11 meetings this core group engaged in dialogue on the values and ethics (religious and secular) needed for addressing various challenges of sustainabl e development (poverty, peace and conflict, the refugee crisis, environmental justice, and the future of work). Enlisting the participation of international religious leaders has become increasingly important in framing efforts to obtain global consensus on environmental and many other issues. Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development reflects the thoughtful planning behind this initiative to ensure diversity and intellectual depth by capturing the religious and ethical thought of over 30 of its leaders and core members based on two years' worth of discussion and reflection on the ethical consensus needed to advance the SDGs. No other volume on sustainability and ethics or religion and ecology reflects such a sustained deliberative effort, with institutional support from groups like the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the University of Notre Dame, Religions for Peace, Columbia University, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)"--

"The contemporary intersection of comedy and social justice is embodied in the voices of comedians who are saying something serious about the world they inhabit while they make us laugh. But it also resides in the actions of social justice advocates who embrace comedy's artistic ability to grab and hold attention, to persuade and mobilize, to focus a critical lens on injustice, to humanize, and to allow optimism into seemingly hopeless social problems. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy--both in the entertainment marketplace and leveraged as cultural strategy--can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work with comedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age"--Provided by publisher

"Jeremy Bentham described the idea of human rights as "rhetorical nonsense." In this book, which is proposed for the Moral Traditions series, William O'Neill shows that the rhetorical aspect of human rights is in fact crucial. He does so by examining how victims and their advocates embrace the rhetoric of human rights to tell their stories. It is a history of human rights "from below," showing what victims of atrocity and advocates do with rights. Using a group of American writings, including Desmond Tutu's on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, O'Neill reconciles the false dichotomy between the individualistic perspective of the human rights theory of Kant, Rousseau, and Rawls and the communitarian approach of Burke, Bentham, and Alasdair Macintyre. He shows that the testimony of the victims of atrocities leads us to a new conception of the common good, based both on abstract theories of individual human rights and the circumstances and history of particular societies. The book then applies this new approach to three areas: race and mass incarceration in the U.S, the politics of immigration and refugee policy, and our duties to the next generation and the non-human world"--

"The twenty-first century is already riddled with protests demanding social justice, and in every instance, young people are leading the charge. But in addition to protesters who take to the streets with handmade placards are young adults who engage in less obvious change-making tactics. In Speaking Truths, sociologist Valerie Chepp goes behind-the-scenes to uncover how spoken word poetry-and young people's participation in it-contributes to a broader understanding of contemporary social justice activism, including this generation's attention to the political importance of identity, well-being, and love. Drawing upon detailed observations and in-depth interviews, Chepp tells the story of a diverse group of young adults from Washington, D.C. who use spoken word to create a more just and equitable world. Outlining the contours of this approach, she interrogates spoken word activism's emphasis on personal storytelling and "truth," the strategic uses of aesthetics and emotions to politically engage across difference, and the significance of healing in sustainable movements for change. Weaving together their poetry and personally told stories, Chepp shows how poets tap into the beautiful, emotional, personal, and therapeutic features of spoken word to empathically connect with others, advance intersectional and systemic analyses of inequality, and make social justice messages relatable across a diverse public. By creating allies and forging connections based on friendship, professional commitments, lived experiences, emotions, artistic kinship, and political views, this activist approach is highly integrated into the everyday lives of its practitioners, online and face-to-face. Chepp argues that spoken word activism is a product of, and a call to action against, the neoliberal era in which poets have come of age, characterized by widening structural inequalities and increasing economic and social vulnerability. She illustrates how this deeply personal and intimate activist approach borrows from, builds upon, and diverges from previous social movement paradigms. Spotlighting the complexity and mutual influence of modern-day activism and the world in which it unfolds, Speaking Truths contributes to our understanding of contemporary social change-making and how neoliberalism has shaped this political generation's experiences with social injustice"--

"'Rights' language and practices have been used increasingly in the last decade to address conditions of economic, social, and cultural marginalization. It is still unclear, however, whether such efforts have been effective at promoting transformative social change. Have rights - as embodied in constitutions, statutory and judicial law, international conventions, resolutions, and treaties - fostered demonstrative improvements in the lives of the excluded? When, where, how, and under what conditions? This volume explores these questions through a systematic comparison of the mechanisms, actors, and pathways (MAPs) operating in a diversity of cases, analyzed by established scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds. The MAPs comparative approach provides insights into the conditions under which, and institutions through which, rights 'on the books' are more or less effectively translated into substantive rights realization. We suggest multiple pathways in which litigation may combine with non-legal mechanisms and strategies, including institutionalized and non-institutionalized politics and global and local networks and advocacy. The volume is unique in its synthesis and advancement of parallel issues and debates across different disciplines and geographic regions; it likewise brings into dialogue scholars of economic, social and cultural rights with the scholarship on civil and political rights. These cross-fertilizations allow us to conclude by proposing a series of testable hypotheses about how economic and social rights might be realized, as well as an agenda for future research to broaden and deepen empirical integration and theoretical synthesis in ways that can facilitate human rights realization worldwide."--Provided by publisher

"The Movement for Reproductive Justice explores the relationship between women of color and social activism"--