Housing Justice in Unequal Cities

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities is a global research network funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1758774) and housed at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. This open-access volume, co-edited by Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, brings together movement-based and university-based scholars to build a shared field of inquiry focused on housing justice. Based on a convening that took place in Los Angeles in January 2019, at the LA Community Action Network and at the University of California, Los Angeles, the essays and interventions situate housing justice in the long struggle for freedom on stolen land. Embedded in the stark inequalities of Los Angeles, our work is necessarily global, connecting the city’s Skid Row to the indebted and evicted in Spain and Greece, to black women’s resistance in Brazil, to the rights asserted by squatters in India and South Africa. Learning from radical social movements, we argue that housing justice also requires a commitment to research justice. With this in mind, our effort to build a field of inquiry is also necessarily an endeavor to build epistemologies and methodologies that are accountable to communities that are on the frontlines of banishment and displacement

Transnational reflections on transnational research projects on men, boys and gender relations

This article reflects on the research project, ‘Engaging South African and Finnish youth towards new traditions of non-violence, equality and social well-being’, funded by the Finnish and South African national research councils, in the context of wider debates on research, projects and transnational processes. The project is located within a broader analysis of research projects and projectization (the reduction of research to separate projects), and the increasing tendencies for research to be framed within and as projects, with their own specific temporal and organizational characteristics. This approach is developed further in terms of different understandings of research across borders: international, comparative, multinational and transnational. Special attention is given to differences between research projects that are in the Europe and the EU, and projects that are between the global North and the global South. The theoretical, political and practical challenges of the North-South research project are discussed

Young, Feminist, and Fearless: Holding the Line - State of Youth Civil Society Report

We live in uncertain times! Worldwide, we are witnessing attacks on the rights of women, girls and non-binary persons , threatening our foremothers' hard-fought gains. From preventing access to sexual health services in the United States and banning girls from education in Afghanistan, to restricting digital feminist organising in China and brutally suppressing feminist activism in Iran, the global rollback of rights is coordinated, wellfunded, and gaining momentum everywhere.Young feminist activists are revered as sheroes and are often at the frontline of democratic struggles, employing creative methods to hold the line- yet we fail to realise the toll of activism on their wellbeing, mental health, and hopes for the future. This is particularly critical for young women and non-binary young people involved in feminist movements, as they are both uniquely vulnerable and forced to be increasingly brave. Their actions appear fearless from the outside, but this work is fraught with danger and comes at a personal cost.This year's State of Youth Civil Society Report - Young, Feminist, and Fearless: Holding the Line, focuses on feminist movements and their critical role in making the world more equitable, safe and accessible for everyone. Young feminists are fearless and hold the line despite the dangers to their security, the uncertainty that today's world presents, and the cost to their mental health. They are pushing back against tyranny

Being the Body of Christ: rethinking Christian identity in a religiously plural world

This dissertation develops a constructive theological interpretation of the Body of Christ metaphor in order to provide a distinct understanding of Christian identity to assist Christians in responding to religious diversity. Presently, two academic approaches guide contemporary Christian theological responses to religious pluralism: theology of religions and comparative theology. They offer resources and insights into Christian responses, but questions remain regarding the relationship of Christian identity to contexts of religious diversity. Revitalizing the Body of Christ metaphor through engagement with contemporary theologians, this dissertation interprets their insights about alterity and embodiment regarding religious difference. Focusing on concepts of embodiment, relationality, diversity and praxis, the Christian identity that emerges is neither exclusive nor contained, but open and interdependent. This provides a framing of Christian identity that assists Christians in relating to religious diversity with openness. Chapter one surveys contemporary approaches that have guided the Christian theological response to religious diversity. Turning to the Body of Christ metaphor in the New Testament writings of Paul, chapter two demonstrates the original power of the metaphor to shape the values and worldview of early Jesus-followers. Chapters three and four explore womanist, feminist, queer, and crip theologies for critiques and contributions to the theological significance of bodies. Offering warnings about the failure to attend to the realities of difference, they offer essential theological insights into conceptions of bodies, hierarchy, and difference. The content they provide for the Body of Christ metaphor shapes Christian self-understanding in a manner that opens the Christian community as it engages other religious bodies. The final chapter provides a constructive interpretation of the Body of Christ and points to distinctive practices that guide the Christian community into a new embodiment of this metaphor. The identity provided by the metaphor shapes Christian relationships with each other and the world through practices of discernment, re-membering, and partnership. It challenges Christians to value fluidity and porousness, putting them in tension with dominant conceptions of Western society, and, through relationality and appreciation for the other, it calls Christians to engage religious diversity with actions of social justice

NACCS 42nd Annual Conference

Chicana/o In/Civilities: Contestación y Lucha: Cornerstones of Chicana & Chicano Studies April 15-19, 2015 Parc 55 A Hilton Hotel #NACCSSFhttps://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/naccs_programs/1032/thumbnail.jp

Bees and Feminism

The topics of bees and feminism engage community members in thinking of how and what ecology and community look like. The project workshop will cater to the ways in which people think and speak about their very own thoughts. As well, this workshop seeks to focus on bees and feminism as a means to engage the community in cogenerated dialogue about bee- preservation and women’s issues. The desired outcomes produced from this topic delivers insight about community, sustainability, and the terms of participation for engagement purposes. This workshop is the reason bees and feminism are being talked about as a singular unit, conceptually

Effectiveness of Aid Interventions to Strengthen Collective Action that Facilitate Women’s Political Empowerment – Annotated Bibliography

There is significant rigorous evidence that collective action can play an important role in facilitating women’s political engagement, and in advancing women’s empowerment in formal and informal politics, in low-, middle- and high-income countries. Certainly, collective action does not automatically lead to engagement and empowerment. Further, it does not always lead to all aspects of political empowerment being realised (e.g. voice, plus access, plus participation, plus influence, plus power in formal and informal politics), let alone success in obtaining all the political outcomes collective actors had aimed for. Conversely, women’s political engagement and empowerment do not result only from collective action. For example, there are also individual pathways to engagement and empowerment. Moreover, women do not necessarily promote gender equality, and collective action by women (and men) does not necessarily lead to women’s political empowerment (WPE). Nonetheless, a range of rigorous empirical studies, spanning multi-country qualitative studies, ethnographies, in-depth literature reviews, and large quantitative studies, have found that collective action, under the right conditions, has been one important historical and contemporary way in which the women involved have successfully achieved voice, access, participation, influence, and power, and have advanced gender equality for their societies at large. Box 1 at the end of this overview provides a selection of references published in the last 10 years about the relationship between collective action and women’s political empowerment and engagement. These references offer entry points to the nuances of the evidence base in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), showing when, how, and why collective action has contributed to WPE and their engagement. Despite the importance of collective action for WPE, a rapid review of the literature conducted for this report found only limited rigorous evidence about aid interventions in low- and middle-income countries in this area. This small evidence base was encountered when looking at interventions focused on WPE that had a component on formal or informal collective action, and when looking at interventions focused on formal or informal collective action that, wittingly or not, resulted in WPE (see section 2 for details). In this context, the present annotated bibliography presents a selection of the most rigorous references it identified about the effectiveness of aid interventions for collective action that have facilitated WPE

Supporting Pathways of Women's Empowerment: A Brief Guide for International Development Organisations

Most international development organisations include women's empowerment and gender equality as a key objective. But what empowerment means and how best to support it remains a matter of debate. This brief by Rosalind Eyben informs that debate with empirical evidence from the five-year international research programme, Pathways. Pathways researchers from West Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the UK used quantitative surveys, ethnographic fieldwork, participatory action research, life histories, storytelling and film-making to discover how empowerment happens.UKaid from the Department for International Development with co-funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affair

You Are My Way to the Universe: Critical Collective Research Through Feminist Community Building

In diesem Artikel stützen wir uns auf den feministischen Kommunitarismus, um eine Kritik an dem vorherrschenden neoliberalen Modell der Zusammenarbeit in der qualitativen Sozialforschung zu entwickeln. Wir argumentieren, dass feministische Theorien und Praktiken über Gemeinschaftsbildung und politischen Aktivismus das Potenzial haben, die stark institutionalisierte, individualistische und managerialistische Kultur von Zusammenarbeit zu überwinden. Feministische Einsichten können Wissenschaftler*innen helfen, sich in der kollaborativen Forschung zurechtzufinden und Schlüsselfragen wie Reflexivität, Konsensbildung, Wissensvalidierung und Gruppensolidarität anzugehen. Wir nutzen unsere eigene Arbeit im Feministischen Forschungskollektiv und im WomenWeLove-Projekt, um eine alternative Orientierung und einen kollektiven Weg zur Verwirklichung einer transformativen Forschung vorzustellen. Diese feministische Intervention gegen die neoliberale Forschungskultur trägt zu laufenden Überlegungen darüber bei, wie wir mithilfe der qualitativen Sozialforschung Wissen produzieren und warum wir dies in der gegenwärtigen historischen Situation tun sollten. Sie erweitert unsere Vorstellungen von der Verantwortung der Forschenden und schafft neue Möglichkeiten für Widerstand und Emanzipation.In this article, we draw on the scholarship of feminist communitarianism to develop a critique of the predominant neoliberal qualitative social research collaboration model. We argue that feminist theories and praxis about community building and political activism have the potential to transcend the highly institutionalized, individualistic, and managerialist collaborative culture. Feminist insights can help today's researchers navigate collaborative research and address key issues such as reflexivity, consensus formation, knowledge validation, and group solidarity. We use our own work in the Feminist Research Collective and in the WomenWeLove project to present an alternative orientation and a collective way to enact transformative research. This feminist intervention against the neoliberal research culture contributes to the ongoing reflections of how we produce knowledge via qualitative social research and why we shall do so in the current historical juncture, expands our imaginations of researchers' responsibilities, and engenders new possibilities for resistance and emancipation

Intersectionality queer studies and hybridity: methodological frameworks for social research

This article seeks to draw links between intersectionality and queer studies as epistemological strands by examining their common methodological tasks and by tracing some similar difficulties of translating theory into research methods. Intersectionality is the systematic study of the ways in which differences such as race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and other sociopolitical and cultural identities interrelate. Queer theory, when applied as a distinct methodological approach to the study of gender and sexuality, has sought to denaturalise categories of analysis and make normativity visible. By examining existing research projects framed as 'queer' alongside ones that use intersectionality, I consider the importance of positionality in research accounts. I revisit Judith Halberstam's (1998) 'Female Masculinity' and Gloria Anzaldua's (1987) 'Borderlands' and discuss the tension between the act of naming and the critical strategical adoption of categorical thinking. Finally, I suggest hybridity as one possible complementary methodological approach to those of intersectionality and queer studies. Hybridity can facilitate an understanding of shifting textual and material borders and can operate as a creative and political mode of destabilising not only complex social locations, but also research frameworks