Social Justice Commons^™

Hetch Hetchy Redux: An Effort To Turn Back The Environmental Clock, Nancy Unger

History

If San Francisco voters pass Measure F on November 6, the city will conduct an $8 million study on the feasibility, costs, and benefits of draining the 300-foot deep reservoir created by the O’Shaughnessy Dam in 1923. The measure’s proponents see it as a first step in restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley, sister valley to Yosemite, to its natural state. That the measure is even on the ballot is a significant indication of the shift in attitudes towards the ongoing conflict between nature preservation and traditional notions of progress.

Introduction: Sex, Sexuality, And Gender As Useful Categories In Environmental History, Nancy Unger

History

This book is an effort to explain these kinds of extreme gendered divisions and to offer an enriched understanding of the powerful interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender. The synergy produced by that interplay has been significant throughout American history, but it cannot be adequately understood and appreciated as long as those fields are discussed as discrete entities. The fields of gender and environment are growing, but scholars have seldom joined them together in analysis or heeded historian Carolyn Merchant's call that a gendered perspective be added to conceptual frameworks in environmental history.5 They have not offered a …

Simulating Real Lives: Promoting Global Empathy And Interest In Learning Through Simulation Games, Christine Bachen, Pedro F. Hernández-Ramos, Chad Raphael

Communication

In response to an increasingly interdependent world, educators are demonstrating a growing interest in educating for global citizenship. Many definitions of the “good global citizen” value empathy as an especially important disposition for understanding others across national borders and cultural divides. Yet it may be difficult for people to achieve empathy with others who are perceived as psychologically and geographically distant. Can computerized simulation games help foster global empathy and interest in global civic learning? This quasiexperimental classroom study of 301 Northern California high school students in three schools examined the effects of playing REAL LIVES, a simulation game that …

"I Enter Into Its Burning": Yvonne Vera's Beautiful Cauldron Of Violence, John C. Hawley

English

Commentators inevitably remark upon Yvonne Vera's prose and upon its startling application to the violent episodes she recounts. Some find it inappropriate, self-conscious, more suited to poetry than to prose. Others (and sometimes the same folks) describe it as by far her strongest suit, wherein descriptive powers overtake narration and plot becomes inevitably amorphous - but lovely. In this essay I wish to analyze why this conflicted response would not have concerned the author and why, in fact, she would have sought to discomfort the reader while bringing pleasure. Many writers before Vera have struggled over the applicability of art …

The Social Dimensions Of Sustainability And Change In Diversified Farming Systems, Christopher M. Bacon, Christy Getz, Sibella Kraus, Maywa Montenegro, Kaelin Holland

Environmental Studies and Sciences

Agricultural systems are embedded in wider social-ecological processes that must be considered in any complete discussion of sustainable agriculture. Just as climatic profiles will influence the future viability of crops, institutions, i.e., governance agreements, rural household and community norms, local associations, markets, and agricultural ministries, to name but a few, create the conditions that foster sustainable food systems. Because discussions of agricultural sustainability often overlook the full range of social dimensions, we propose a dual focus on a broad set of criteria, i.e., human health, labor, democratic participation, resiliency, biological and cultural diversity, equity, and ethics, to assess social outcomes, …

Wisconsin's League Against Nuclear Dangers: The Power Of Informed Citizenship, Nancy Unger

History

Wisconsin's League Against Nuclear Dangers (LAND), a loose organization active in the 1970s and 1980s, was predominantly made up of white middle-aged and middle-class homemakers with minimal formal education in the sciences. The story of LAND is a powerful lesson in what people can accomplish when they take their rights as citizens seriously and commit themselves to learning a complex subject in depth in order to be knowledgeable and persuasive.

La Follette’S Autobiography: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, And The Glorious, Nancy Unger

History

La Follette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences is a remarkable primary document of the Progressive Era. Originally published in 1913, it remains in print today and has the dubious honor of being one of Richard Nixon's three favorite books. It illuminates the crucial role that La Follette's home state of Wisconsin played in molding La Follette as a man and as a politician, thereby influencing his national progressive agenda; but it also reveals much more.

The Gini Index And Measures Of Inequality, Frank A. Farris

Mathematics and Computer Science

The Gini index is a summary statistic that measures how fairly a resource is distributed in a population; income is a primary example. In addition to a self-contained presentation of the Gini index, we give two equivalent ways to interpret this summary statistic: first in terms of the percentile level of the person who earns the average dollar, and second in terms of how the lower of two randomly chosen incomes compares, on average, to mean income.

Ignatian Values In The Core Curriculum, Phyllis Brown, Diane Jonte-Pace

English

In this essay we examine three major resources for revising the core curriculum in Jesuit universities, commenting on how each can contribute to an integrated Ignatian core, guiding us toward answers to our questions about content and pedagogy. Our rich Jesuit tradition is one of these resources. Two other important resources are contemporary publications about promoting citizenship in higher education and about supporting student learning through assessment.

Games For Civic Learning: A Conceptual Framework And Agenda For Research And Design, Chad Raphael, Christine Bachen, Kathleen-M. Lynn, Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Kristen A. Mckee

Communication

Scholars, educators, and media designers are increasingly interested in whether and how digital games might contribute to civic learning. However, there are three main barriers to advancing understanding of games’ potential for civic education: the current practices of formal schooling, a dearth of evidence about what kinds of games best inspire learning about public life, and divergent paradigms of civic engagement. In response, this article develops a conceptual framework for how games might foster civic learning of many kinds. The authors hypothesize that the most effective games for civic learning will be those that best integrate game play and content, …

From Jook Joints To Sisterspace: The Role Of Nature In Lesbian Alternative Environments In The United States, Nancy Unger

History

Despite the depth and breadth of Catriona Sandilands's groundbreaking "Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature," with its emphasis on communities in southern Oregon, Sandilands does not consider her article, published in 2002, to be "the last one on the topic." Instead she hopes "fervently that other researchers will enter into the ongoing conversation [about queer landscapes)" (136). This essay is an answer to her invitation to draw further "insight from queer cultures to form alternative, even transformative, cultures of nature" (135). It examines the role of place in the history of American lesbians, particularly the role of nonhuman …

Deliberative Democracy And Inequality: Two Cheers For Enclave Deliberation Among The Disempowered, Christopher F. Karpowitz, Chad Raphael, Allen S. Hammond Iv

Communication

Deliberative democracy grounds its legitimacy largely in the ability of speakers to participate on equal terms. Yet theorists and practitioners have struggled with how to establish deliberative equality in the face of stark differences of power in liberal democracies. Designers of innovative civic forums for deliberation often aim to neutralize inequities among participants through proportional inclusion of disempowered speakers and discourses. In contrast, others argue that democratic equality is best achieved when disempowered groups deliberate in their own enclaves (interest groups, parties, and movements) before entering the broader public sphere. Borrowing from each perspective, the authors argue that there are …

Women For A Peaceful Christmas: Wisconsin Homemakers Seek To Remake American Culture, Nancy Unger

History

In the autumn of 1971, sixteen Madison homemakers, including Nan Cheney and Sharon Stein, began "Women for a Peaceful Christmas" (WPC), a unique attempt to do nothing less than remake American culture. Under the slogan "No More Shopping Days 'Til Peace," WPC organized ostensibly powerless homemakers into a "quiet revolt against 'an economy which thrives on war and the destruction of our earth's resources.'' WPC urged the public (especially women, the sex that did the vast bulk of holiday shopping) to take economic, political, and environmental matters into their own hands. "If you don't want your Christmas celebrations to be …

Introduction To Lgbtq America Today, John C. Hawley

English

l was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and learned from my classmates in seventh grade that boys who wrote with their left hand or wore green and yellow on Thursdays were homos. Because I did both, I knew I was in deep trouble from the start and might have some pretending to do. Such was the atmosphere for LGBTQ folks in the United States throughout the 1950s. Things loosened just a bit in the 1960s, when hippies were shaking society up. Then, in the 1970s, gay folks seemed to be-a lot more visible--disturbingly so, in the minds of many-and …

The Role Of Gender In Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger

History

Environmental Justice incorporates an inclusive definition of its subject matter, exploring the environmental burdens impacting all marginalized populations and communities. This expansive definition allows for the possibility that populations conventionally viewed as privileged can nevertheless be marginalized and suffer uniquely from environmental injustices. Employing such a definition can also reveal how an ostensibly powerless group can fight for environmental justice on its own terms—and win. Gender has played an important role in environmental justice (and injustice) throughout the history of the United States. Excerpts from my current book project, Beyond “Nature’s Housekeepers”: Gendered Turning Points for American Women in Environmental …

Biafra As Heritage And Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, Iweala, John C. Hawley

English

Eddie Iroh made the observation that writers of his generation, who had lived through the Biafran conflict, were too close to the suffering to write the definitive accounts of the war, and that the task would fall to later generations. This essay looks at three later accounts Dulue Mbachu’s War Games (2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beast of No Nation (2005) to assess the war’s impact on Nigerian cultural expression in the twenty-first century. As the eldest of the three writers, Mbachu lingers more on the war itself than do the other …

Introduction: Unrecorded Lives, John C. Hawley

English

When anthropology student (and later, novelist) Amitav Ghosh set out from Oxford to Egypt in 1980 to find a suitable subject for his research, he may not have suspected the impact the trip would have on his life. He succeeded in completing the required tome for his degree and then went on to write In an Antique Land (1992), an unusually constructed book that deals with themes of historical and cultural displacement, with alienation and something we might these days, under the influence of postcolonial theory, call "subaltern cosmopolitanism." Others might recognize the genre in which Ghosh is writing as …

From Differentiated Coffee Markets Towards Alternative Trade And Knowledge Networks, Roberta Jaffe, Christopher M. Bacon

Environmental Studies and Sciences

This chapter presents a case study focusing on the Community Agroecology Network (CAN), an organization started by the United States and Mesoamerica’s activists, whose effort is to create an alternative trade and knowledge network. The basic aim behind CAN is to benefit conservation and social development efforts by linking producers, consumers, and producer organizations. CAN is a response to the problems arising out of the dominance of certification processes in Fair Trade and organic coffee networks, and the chapter discusses the organization’s main goals of intercommunity relationship development, direct coffee marketing, and ecological sustainability. It moots a comparison between alternative …

Teaching “Straight” Gay And Lesbian History, Nancy Unger

History

The importance of offering a lesbian and gay American history course was initially impressed upon me in 1986. A newly minted Ph.D., I was teaching my very first class: a U.S. history survey at San Francisco State University (sfsu). The course required each student to review a book of his or her choice on any topic in U.S. history. One student chose John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 from my list of suggested titles and wrote a thoughtful, enthusiastic review.1 At the bottom of the review was a handwritten …

Agroecología: Promoviendo Una Transición Hacia La Sostenibilidad, Stephen R. Gliessman, Francisco J. Rosado-May, Carlos Guadarrama-Zugasti, Julie Jedlicka, Anais Cohn, Victor Ernesto Méndez, Roseann Cohen, Laura Trujillo, Christopher M. Bacon, Roberta Jaffe

Environmental Studies and Sciences

En este artículo se define agroecología como la aplicación de los conceptos y prinicipios ecológicos al diseño y manejo de los sistemas alimentarios sostenibles. Se presentan los argumentos principales que sostienen la validez, importancia y pertinencia del enfoque agroecológico, no solo para entender los procesos involucrados en la producción de alimentos, sino para proponer alternativas que conduzcan a esos procesos para operar en sistemas sostenibles. El concepto clave, que guía el razonamiento metodológico y epistemológico en este an álisis, es el de sostenibilidad. Para alcanzar sostenibilidad la metodología agroecológica no solo se ancla en la Ecología, lo cual se describe …

The Digital Divide, Chad Raphael

Communication

Many have argued that inequalities of access to the Internet in an information-driven society pose a serious social problem and that public investment is needed to solve it. Others contend that the digital divide is a minor concern that will resolve itself without government involvement and spending. The positions we take on this debate depend upon our understanding of how new technologies spread throughout society, whether we think Internet access is a frill or a necessity, and our vision of whether government can and ought to help broaden access.

The Impact Of College Student Immersion Service Learning Trips On Coping With Stress And Vocational Identity, Brad A. Mills, Richard B. Bersamina, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

This study examined the impact of service learning immersion trips on vocational identity and coping with stress among college students. Fifty-one students (15 males, 36 females) who participated in immersion trips and 76 students (25 males, 51 females) in a non-immersion control group completed a series of questionnaires directly before and immediately after both fall and spring break immersion trips, and during a four-month follow up. Results suggest that, after returning from an immersion trip, students report a greater ability to cope with stress and a somewhat stronger sense of vocational identity relative to students who do not participate in …

The ‘We Say What We Think’ Club: Rural Wisconsin Women And The Development Of Environmental Ethics, Nancy Unger

History

The “We Say What We Think” Club: This article discusses the radio program “We Say What We Think Club” which aired on WIBA radio from 1937 to 1957. Though aimed at a female audience, it did not focus on homemaking tips or relationship advice but rather featured a topic-of-the-day. These included a wide range of subjects, such as "Better Clubs for Women" or "Feeding the Family in War Time,” about which the women held a folksy discussion. The author contends that the program reflected an increasing separation of gender spheres that emerged on farms during that era. The five Dane …

Portrayals Of Information And Communication Technology On World Wide Web Sites For Girls, Chad Raphael, Christine Bachen, Kathleen-M. Lynn, Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Kristen A. Mckee

Communication

This study reports a content analysis of 35 World Wide Web sites that included in their mission the goal of engaging girls with information and communication technology (ICT). It finds that sites emphasize cultural and economic uses of ICT, doing little to foster civic applications that could empower girls as citizens of the information age. The study also finds that sites foster a narrow range of ICT proficiencies, focusing mostly on areas such as communication, in which girls have already achieved parity with boys. An examination of the role models portrayed in ICT occupations indicates that the sites show females …

Edward Said, John Berger, Jean Mohr: In Search Of An Other Optic, John C. Hawley

English

We have no known Einsteins, no Chagall, no Freud or Rubenstein to protect us with a legacy of glorious achievements.
-Said, After the Last Sky ( 17)

This humble epigraph spoken on behalf of the Palestinian people by one of its most visible apologists now serves ironically as his own epitaph, for Edward Said surely has achieved as impressive a position in academia as anyone in the twentieth century, and he now enters the lists of memorable contributors to the human project. One notes that such a sentence, relatively brief as it may be, nonetheless & bristles with the combative …

Gendered Approaches To Environmental Justice: An Historical Sampling, Nancy Unger

History

While race and class are regularly addressed in environmental justice studies, scant attention has been paid to gender. The environmental justice movement formally recognized in the 1980s in no way, however, marks the beginning of the central role played by women in the long history of its concerns.' Abuses based in gender as well as race and class have subjected women to a variety of environmental injustices. However, women's responses to the ever-shifting responsibilities prescribed to their gender, as well as to their particular race and class, have consistently shaped their abilities to affect the environment in positive ways. Especially …

Importing Extended Producer Responsibility For Electronic Equipment Into The United States, Chad Raphael, Ted Smith

Communication

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy approach that holds manufacturers accountable for the full costs of their products at every stage in their life cycle. EPR typically involves requiring that producers take back their products at the end of their useful lives, or pay a recycling contractor to do so, thereby internalizing the costs of recycling or disposal in a manufacturer’s bottom line. When companies know that they will bear the costs of product return and recycling, they are more likely to redesign their products for easier and safer handling at each step in the life cycle. This approach …

Invisible Points Of Departure: Reading Rothko’S Christological Imagery, Andrea Pappas

Art and Art History

Jewish identity increasingly figures in new histories of modernism in general, analyses of American art, and, recently, abstract expressionism.1 Although abstract paintings have signified “Jewishness” only since the late sixties, this essay looks at the antecedents of such re-identification in one canonical figure, Mark Rothko, examining three paintings from a narrow range of time in the early days of World War II. His Antigone of 1940 (Figure 1) remains one of his most familiar paintings from the formative period spanning 1940 to mid-1943. It is one of a small handful of works canonized from his early production: paintings that traditionally …

The War Of The Worlds, Wells, And The Fallacy Of Empire, John C. Hawley

English

In his summary of the contemporary reviews of The War of the Worlds (1898), William J. Scheick notes that their extensive number suggests that readers now recognized that Wells was an emerging writer whom they could not ignore. "There were, again," Scheick notes, "reservations about slipshod style, hasty plotting, vulgar content and cheap effects; but these doubts were overrun by the general verdict that this romance was one of the most ingenious stories of the year and the best work to date of an author who was one of the most original of the younger English novelists" (Scheick 5). Earlier …

How Did Belle La Follette Resist Racial Segregation In Washington D.C., 1913-1914?, Nancy Unger

History

Beginning in 1913, progressive reformer Belle Case La Follette wrote a series of articles for the "women's page" of her family's magazine, denouncing the sudden racial segregation in several departments of the federal government. Those articles reveal progressive efforts to appeal specifically to women to combat injustice, and also demonstrate the ability of women to voice important political opinions prior to suffrage.