Political ecology and the epistemology of social justice

Piers Blaikie’s writings on political ecology in the 1980s represented a turning point in the generation of environmental knowledge for social justice. His writings since the 1980s demonstrated a further transition in the identification of social justice by replacing a Marxist and eco-catastrophist epistemology with approaches influenced by critical realism, post-structuralism and participatory development. Together, these works demonstrated an important engagement with the politics of how environmental explanations are made, and the mutual dependency of social values and environmental knowledge. Yet, today, the lessons of Blaikie’s work are often missed by analysts who ask what is essentially political or ecological about political ecology, or by those who argue that a critical approach to environmental knowledge should mean deconstruction alone. This paper reviews Blaikie’s work since the 1980s and focuses especially on the meaning of ‘politics’ within his approach to political ecology. The paper argues that Blaikie’s key contribution is not just in linking environmental knowledge and politics, but also in showing ways that environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of socially vulnerable people. This pragmatic co-production of environmental knowledge and social values offers a more constructive means of building socially just environmental policy than insisting politics or ecology exist independently of each other, or believing environmental interventions are futile in a post-Latourian world

Hos in the garden: staging and resisting neoliberal creativity

This article takes up the challenge of extending and enhancing the literature on arts interventions and creative city policies by considering the role of feminist and queer artistic praxis in contemporary urban politics. Here I reflect on the complicities and potentialities of two Toronto-based arts interventions: Dig In and the Dirty Plotz cabaret. I analyse an example of community based arts strategy that strived to ‘revitalise’ one disinvested Toronto neighbourhood. I also reflect on my experience performing drag king urban planner, Toby Sharp. Reflecting on these examples, I show how market-oriented arts policies entangle women artists in the cultivation of spaces of depoliticised feminism, homonormativity and white privilege. However, I also demonstrate how women artists are playfully and performatively pushing back at hegemonic regimes with the radical aesthetic praxis of cabaret. I maintain that bringing critical feminist arts spaces and cabaret practice into discussions about neoliberal urban policies uncovers sites of feminist resistance and solidarity, interventions that challenge violent processes of colonisation and privatisation on multiple fronts

FundHer Brief 2008: Money Watch for Women's Rights Movements and Organizations

This Fundher brief is divided into 4 sections. Section 1 looks at the organizational profiles of survey respondents: their scope, size, priorities and other core characteristics. The second section presents the funding landscape for these organizations, exploring some of the existing challenges for accessing funds and advances that have been made in recent years. Section 3 shares the self-analysis done by participants in the research on the state of their organizing, in particular related to fundraising, introducing interesting experiences in collaborative resource mobilization. Finally, the section entitled "What's next" summarizes implications of all the above for women's rights organizations and donors. At the end of the document there are 5 thematic overviews of important funding trends and opportunities for organizations working on those issues

Boundary objects, power, and learning: The matter of developing sustainable practice in organizations

This article develops an understanding of the agential role of boundary objects in generating and politicizing learning in organizations, as it emerges from the entangled actions of humans and non-humans. We offer two empirical vignettes in which middle managers seek to develop more sustainable ways of working. Informed by Foucault’s writing on power, our work highlights how power relations enable and foreclose the affordances, or possibilities for action, associated with boundary objects. Our data demonstrate how this impacts the learning that emerges as boundary objects are configured and unraveled over time. In so doing, we illustrate how boundary objects are not fixed entities, but are mutable, relational, and politicized in nature. Connecting boundary objects to affordances within a Foucauldian perspective on power offers a more nuanced understanding of how ‘the material’ plays an agential role in consolidating and disrupting understandings in the accomplishment of learning

Tactical Urbanism on a University Campus: A Case Study of Crossroads on Dickson

Tactical Urbanism is a method of creating temporary, low-cost interventions in a city’s built environment, aiming to test new ideas, gather community feedback, and create momentum for larger-scale changes. The approach is characterized by its focus on quick, iterative projects that can be easily implemented and adjusted, rather than large, expensive initiatives that take years to complete. Examples of Tactical Urbanism projects include pop-up bike lanes, parklets, and community gardens. The goal is to encourage community participation, foster a sense of ownership, and create a safer, more livable, and inclusive city. In spring 2022, a class called “Walk, Bike, Link” taught by Prof. Jim Coffman, designed Crossroads on Dickson, a Tactical Urbanism project on West Dickson Street. The design proposed to change the appearance of the street by painting a pattern across the pavement in an effort to make drivers more cautious and aware of the pedestrian presence. Unfortunately, the project could not get approved before the end of the semester. Crossroads on Dickson attempted to utilize Tactical Urbanism strategies to address the specific need for pedestrian safety near the University of Arkansas campus. It envisioned the street as a shared space for both cars and pedestrians, rather than prioritizing one over the other. This capstone defines Tactical Urbanism and investigate the differences between implementing a Tactical Urbanism project on and off the University of Arkansas campus. The capstone then uses descriptive case study methods to analyze West Dickson Street and the Crossroads on Dickson project from the “Walk, Bike, Link” class in the Spring of 2022. The case study analyzes the project’s design, processes, and context in the university setting. It answers key internal questions such as why the project wasn’t approved and provide a new Tactical Urbanism case study for both northwest Arkansas and university contexts

Tactical Urbanism on a University Campus: A Case Study of Crossroads on Dickson

Tactical Urbanism is a method of creating temporary, low-cost interventions in a city’s built environment, aiming to test new ideas, gather community feedback, and create momentum for larger-scale changes. The approach is characterized by its focus on quick, iterative projects that can be easily implemented and adjusted, rather than large, expensive initiatives that take years to complete. Examples of Tactical Urbanism projects include pop-up bike lanes, parklets, and community gardens. The goal is to encourage community participation, foster a sense of ownership, and create a safer, more livable, and inclusive city. In spring 2022, a class called “Walk, Bike, Link” taught by Prof. Jim Coffman, designed Crossroads on Dickson, a Tactical Urbanism project on West Dickson Street. The design proposed to change the appearance of the street by painting a pattern across the pavement in an effort to make drivers more cautious and aware of the pedestrian presence. Unfortunately, the project could not get approved before the end of the semester. Crossroads on Dickson attempted to utilize Tactical Urbanism strategies to address the specific need for pedestrian safety near the University of Arkansas campus. It envisioned the street as a shared space for both cars and pedestrians, rather than prioritizing one over the other. This capstone defines Tactical Urbanism and investigate the differences between implementing a Tactical Urbanism project on and off the University of Arkansas campus. The capstone then uses descriptive case study methods to analyze West Dickson Street and the Crossroads on Dickson project from the “Walk, Bike, Link” class in the Spring of 2022. The case study analyzes the project’s design, processes, and context in the university setting. It answers key internal questions such as why the project wasn’t approved and provide a new Tactical Urbanism case study for both northwest Arkansas and university contexts

Reframing Kurtz’s Painting: Colonial Legacies and Minority Rights in Ethnically Divided Societies

Minority rights constitute some of the most normatively and economically important human rights. Although the political science and legal literatures have proffered a number of constitutional and institutional design solutions to address the protection of minority rights, these solutions are characterized by a noticeable neglect of, and lack of sensitivity to, historical processes. This Article addresses that gap in the literature by developing a causal argument that explains diverging practices of minority rights protections as functions of colonial governments’ variegated institutional practices with respect to particular ethnic groups. Specifically, this Article argues that in instances where colonial governments politicize and institutionalize ethnic hegemony in the pre-independence period, an institutional legacy is created that leads to lower levels of minority rights protections. Conversely, a uniform treatment and depoliticization of ethnicity prior to independence ultimately minimizes ethnic cleavages post-independence and consequently causes higher levels of minority rights protections. Through a highly structured comparative historical analysis of Botswana and Ghana, this Article builds on a new and exciting research agenda that focuses on the role of long-term historio-structural and institutional influences on human rights performance and makes important empirical contributions by eschewing traditional methodologies that focus on single case studies that are largely descriptive in their analyses. Ultimately, this Article highlights both the strength of a historical approach to understanding current variations in minority rights protections and the varied institutional responses within a specific colonial government

Re-Examining School Structures of People, Place, and Time to Promote Equity at the Middle Level

In 2018 we published a chapter entitled “Middle Grades Schools and Structures” (Ellerbrock et al., 2018a) in Literature Reviews in Support of the Middle Level Education Research Agenda (Mertens et al., 2013). Building on the earlier work of Ellerbrock et al. (2018a), this chapter reviewed literature between 2000 and 2018 that reported on the organizational structures of middle level education settings in the United States of America and Australia. Though the findings highlighted the dearth of research specifically examining the organizational structures of middle level education, the literature examined supported the original three key interconnected themes of people, place, and time (Ellerbrock et al., 2018b) as being key features necessary for the implementation of effective middle schooling practices. In our conclusion, we called for more robust research in this area to guide policy and enact practices across different jurisdictions. At the same time, Bishop and Nagle (2018) noted the many increasing disparities in access to quality education and invited readers to consider how schools can serve all students both equitably and well. Equitable access is first and foremost, but equitable outcomes for all students is paramount. At the time of publication of all of these works, no one could have predicted the significant negative impact of COVID-19 and the resultant exacerbation of the already challenging inequities in education across the globe. However, research over the last five years, and particularly since 2020, has placed a greater focus on policy, system, and grassroots pedagogical changes to bridge this widening gap. In light of this heightened focus, this essay aims to reexamine the three key themes of people, place, and time and, when implemented with integrity, the ways middle grades schools and structures can contribute to creating both developmentally responsive and equitable educational experiences for young adolescent learners

The Habermas/Foucault debate: Implications for rhetoric and composition

This thesis sheds light on (1) the extent to which composition has fallen short in its efforts to examine Habermasian discourse in the public sphere/politicized classroom; and (2) whether, through a careful and explicit exploration of the Habermas/Foucault debate and the competing concepts of discourse contained therein, we might make use of those concepts in the politicized classroom to inform student writing in the public sphere

Higher education, bridging capital, and developmental leadership in the Philippines: Learning to be a crossover reformer

The article presents findings from a research project which explored how experiences of higher education supported – or not – the emergence of developmental leadership and the formation of networks among leaders of three political and social movements in the Philippines in the post-Marcos era. Based on life history interviews with key leaders, the study points to the importance of different forms of social capital, especially bridging capital, in navigating a stratified system within this oligarchical democracy. Experiences of higher education were important for leaders' development, but not necessarily in predictable ways