Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ask, Tell, Vickie R. Phipps

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum

When I was designing these marks a year ago, I wanted to acknowledge GLBTQI military persons serving under the unjust policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. To accomplish this, one of the counterforms in each of the military branch logos is flipped upside down creating the GLBTQI symbol of an inverted triangle.

On September 20th, 2011, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy was repealed.

Before the repeal, the simple act of wearing a t-shirt with one of these logos on it would have been an act of defiance and resistance. Today that same mark serves as a celebration of …

The Garden Is Always Greener..., Billy Hall

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum

This essay builds upon a case study of community gardening in Miami to explore the extent to which these gardens are contributing to, and possibly triggering, processes of gentrification within low to lower-middle income neighborhoods. Through a literature review of recent urban planning policy and development in Miami and relevant discourse on the neoliberalization of food, food politics, food justice activism, and gentrification, I situate Miami’s gardens within a complex, multi-scalar web of ideas and processes. I show how the interaction of these forces, varying dramatically with respect to place, is implicit in the motivations for each garden’s development and …

Educating For Peace And Justice In America's Nuclear Age, Ian Harris, Charles F. Howlett

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum

The emergence of peace education as embodied in the context of peace studies, which emerged during the post-World War II ideological struggle between capitalism and Communism, the nuclear arms race pitting the United States against the former Soviet Union, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement in America, met with considerable criticism. There were many within and outside the academic community who argued that peace studies had very little to offer in terms of “real scholarship” and were primarily politically motivated. Some went so far as to insist that this new area of study lacked focus and discipline given …

Pushing Me Through: A Poetic Representation, Jessica Nina Lester, Rachael Gabriel

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum

For many children and adults labeled learning disabled (LD), the very process of being identified and eventually labeled is oriented to as difficult to understand, disorienting, and just a taken-for-granted part of a system that names some ‘normal’, even gifted, while others are named abnormal. Minimal research exists that attends to the ways in which the official ways of talking about LDs are worked up in the everyday language of those most involved in the special education process, particularly the students themselves. Thus, in this article, we present, in an alternative form of writing (Richardson, 1997), a poetic representation of …

Editors' Introduction, Shane Willson, Rachael E. Gabriel

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum

It is with great pride that we present to you the inaugural issue of Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum. Here we have attempted to create an innovative, peer-reviewed space in which people from numerous disciplines, or even those claiming no discipline, can present research, multimedia, and art aimed at furthering the ideals of social justice, broadly defined. Social justice is not a concept owned by the academy, for attempts to create a more just world can come from many professions, or even from no profession at all. By applying the traditionally academic peer-review process to work done by activists, artists, …

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum, Volume One, Issue One, Shane Willson, Landon S. Bevier, Rachael E. Gabriel, Taylor Krcek, Alaina Elizabeth Smith

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum

It is with great pride that we present to you the inaugural issue of Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum. Here we have attempted to create an innovative, peer-reviewed space in which people from numerous disciplines, or even those claiming no discipline, can present research, multimedia, and art aimed at furthering the ideals of social justice, broadly defined. Social justice is not a concept owned by the academy, for attempts to create a more just world can come from many professions, or even from no profession at all. By applying the traditionally academic peer-review process to work done by activists, artists, …