Free abortions in England will not remove the fundamental injustice Northern Irish women suffer

The government's decision to finally allow Northern Irish women to have free NHS abortions in England is to be welcomed, writes Jennifer Thomson. Yet the move does not remove the more fundamental injustice of their situation, as it does not place these women on an equal footing with their English, Scottish and Welsh counterparts

Book review: Windows of opportunity: how women seize peace negotiations for political change by Miriam J. Anderson

Why, even when women have not been intimately involved in conflicts, do peace agreements so frequently contain reference to their rights? In Windows of Opportunity: How Women Seize Peace Negotiations for Political Change, Miriam J. Anderson examines how provisions relating to gender and women’s rights have been part of peace negotiations through three case studies of conflict resolution in Burundi, Macedonia and Northern Ireland as well as discussion of 195 peace agreements signed between 1975-2011. Jennifer Thomson welcomes this book for exploring questions that are of fundamental importance to feminist work on post-conflict societies and peace negotiations

Critical actors and abortion law: a group of individuals in Northern Irish politics obstructs change

There are various reasons why progress on legal abortion in Northern Ireland has been blocked over the years. Key among them is that individual politicians rule out any suggestion of change, writes Jennifer Thomson. She argues that more attention should be given to the actions of individual actors, considering their role can often be as important as that of political parties or institutions

Toxic Residents: Health and Citizenship at Love Canal

This article investigates the relationship between American political culture and grassroots environmentalism in the 1970s. To do so, it examines how the white working class residents of Love Canal, New York, claimed health and a healthy environment as rights of citizenship. To date, the Canal has remained a sore spot for environmental scholarship; this article demonstrates how the analytic difficulties posed by the Canal stem from the cross-currents of American political culture in the late 1970s. Canal residents put their local experience into several larger frames of reference: the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, the plight of Cuban and Vietnamese refugees, and a culture of skepticism towards government and medical authority. Residents’ use of these frameworks illustrates two broader points about American political culture in the late 1970s. First, the claim to health as a right rather than a privilege, articulated by health radicals throughout the 1960s, had by the late 1970s been decoupled from its origins in left-liberal struggles. Second, the cross-currents of localism, nativism, racism, and anti-authoritarianism characteristic of the reactionary populism of urban working-class whites could, quite logically for their proponents, co-exist with co-exist with rights-based claims to health and a healthy environment. Love Canal demands that we embed our narratives about the development of environmental politics within a broader story about deregulation, the rise of the New Right, and the political and economic marginalization of the working class in the United States

Sustainability on Campus

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University, interviews three Bucknell student activists. The group discussed a recent campus sustainability forum, and expanded on various sustainability-related topics. Issues included food waste and insecurity, divestment [fossil-fuel], and economic sustainability versus environmental sustainability. The students also discussed campus culture and the challenges with and opportunities for engaging with the campus community and encouraging sustainable actions

Strategic Planning and Democracy

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University, interviews Ellen Herman, associate professor of Geology at Bucknell, and two anonymous guests about the strategic planning process underway at Bucknell, 2018-2019. The group discusses the lack of transparency in the identification of priorities and the top-down approach to governance. Guests also identify labor issues and the feeling of being strategically beleaguered by meetings and electronic communication. They express concern over references to sustainability concepts, which are specific only to economic sustainability, and they analyzed the way the strategic plan addresses problems with the Greek system and its impact on student life. The group concludes with a conversation about the remaining opportunities for commentary. NB: Version crawled by the Wayback Machine -- April 17, 2019 http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.bucknell.edu/strategicplanning. Older iterations will be managed by the University archives

Civil Rights Enforcement and Fair Housing at the Environmental Protection Agency

This article analyzes the EPA within the broader history of federally-sponsored residential segregation, as well as the criminalization of and disinvestment from urban areas contemporaneous with the agency’s founding. It offers a detailed analysis of EPA’s first decade of recalcitrance regarding its own obligations under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Title VII of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The EPA developed a pattern of responding to scrutiny by rearranging its internal office structure and launching new initiatives tangential to the substantive issues of civil rights. Through this detailed interpretation, the article demonstrates how EPA’s first ten years were crucial in laying the groundwork for subsequent decades of inaction on racial residential segregation, one of the primary causes of ill health in the United States. Ultimately the article argues that EPA\u27s early paternalism and intransigence furthered the structural racism at the heart of the U.S. national project, and mitigated against the agency taking substantive action on the key demands of environmental justice voiced by activists in the 1990s

Maya McKeever and Ralph Corbelle Interview

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University, interviews two Bucknell students about their experience with and perspective about food insecurity. McKeever and Corbelle describe the challenges of securing food on a limited budget while in a university regulated market

Music and Social Justice

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University, interviews students in the Bucknell course Music 322: Music and Social Justice. Students describe the goals of the course and discuss the resources used to exchange knowledge about social justice issues including race, inequity, prison abolition, and sentence disparity