Reflexive Research Ethics for Environmental Health and Justice: Academics and Movement-Building

Community-engaged research on environmental problems has reshaped researcher-participant relationships, academic-community interaction, and the role of community partners in human subjects protection and ethical oversight. We draw on our own and others' research collaborations with environmental health and justice social movement organizations to discuss the ethical concerns that emerge in community-engaged research. In this paper we introduce the concept of reflexive research ethics: ethical guidelines and decision-making principles that depend on continual reflexivity concerning the relationships between researchers and participants. Seeing ethics in this way can help scientists conduct research that simultaneously achieves a high level of professional conduct and protects the rights, well-being, and autonomy of both researchers and the multiple publics affected by research. We highlight our research with community-based organizations in Massachusetts, California, and Alaska, and discuss the potential impacts of the community or social movement on the research process and the potential impacts of research on community or social movement goals. We conclude by discussing ways in which the ethical concerns that surface in community-engaged research have led to advances in ethical research practices. This type of work raises ethical questions whose answers are broadly relevant for social movement, environmental, and public health scholars.     

Towards an Insurrectionary Power/Knowledge: Movement-Relevance,Anti-Oppression,Prefiguration

Despite ongoing efforts to articulate radical methods and theoretical frameworks for social movement research, the field remains embedded in exploitative, oppressive, and hierarchical modes of knowledge production. Following Foucault, I argue that this is because societies like ours, founded through racial and patriarchal violence, are invested in a regime of truth supportive of that violence. In light of this, I argue that social movements scholars need to adopt a radically different form of knowledge practice. Building on anarchist, anti-racist feminist, and anti-colonial scholarship, this paper begins by analysing how liberalism constrains social justice organizing and how academic norms foreclose accountable social movements scholarship. I then introduce three unique ethics emerging in resistance to this situation: movement-relevant, anti-oppressive, and prefigurative. The first confronts the extractive imperatives of enlightenment truth-making; the second resists its neutral and disinterested tendencies; and the third models a rejection of its hierarchical and exclusive mode of authority. I argue that together they provide scholars with a strategy for re-/orienting their research towards what Foucault theorizes as an insurrection of knowledges. These three ethical frameworks combine to facilitate an insurrectionary power/knowledge that fosters collective struggle as it progressively dismantles the regime of truth underlying social movements research.     

Ethical practice and evaluation of interventions in crime and justice. The moral imperative for randomized trials

In considering the ethical dilemmas associated with randomized experiments, scholars ordinarily focus on the ways in which randomization of treatments or interventions violates accepted norms of conduct of social science research more generally or evaluation of crime and justice questions more specifically. The weight of ethical judgment is thus put on experimental research to justify meeting ethical standards. In this article, it is argued that just the opposite should be true, and that in fact there is a moral imperative for the conduct of randomized experiments in crime and justice. That imperative develops from our professional obligation to provide valid answers to questions about the effectiveness of treatments, practices, and programs. It is supported by a statistical argument that makes randomized experiments the preferred method for ruling out alternative causes of the outcomes observed. Common objections to experimentation are reviewed and found overall to relate more to the failure to institutionalize experimentation than to any inherent limitations in the experimental method and its application in crime and justice settings. It is argued that the failure of crime and justice practitioners, funders, and evaluators to develop a comprehensive infrastructure for experimental evaluation represents a serious violation of professional standards.     

Empowering Communities Through Public Work,Science, and Local Food Systems: Revisiting Democracy and Globalization*

Abstract Communities are the foundation of our society and of our overall well‐being. Unfortunately they are experiencing rapid transformations that may significantly erode their capacity to remain viable and sustainable both domestically and internationally. Issues of empowering communities are examined in regard to social justice, challenges to democracy, and globalization of the economy and other sectors of society. It is argued that the ways in which we view and structure work, generate and disseminate knowledge through science and technology, and produce, distribute, and consume food are essential factors affecting our self‐identity and the empowerment of our communities. How we shape decisions and actions around work, science and technology, and food, as well as other key factors affecting our communities, is crucial to achieving a just and sustainable agenda for the future. Finally, it is proposed that all citizens be engaged in a procedural process called discourse ethics, which is guided by the principles of justice, recognition, respect, and accountability.     

Which transition concept is useful for describing the process of young people leaving state care? A reflection on research and language

The transition of adolescents from state care to independent living is receiving increased research attention in many countries. Despite this interest, the concept of ‘transition’, though central, still remains relatively undeveloped. One main issue in comparative work is how we use language to define concepts as well as use them to analyse our findings and shape practice. ‘Transition’ over the last decade has become a key concept in the research and practice field of social work with adolescents, therefore we need to reflect on its use, its possibilities and its limitations. This paper examines selected research literature on the transition from state care to adulthood. The paper suggests that more theorisation needs to be done within the field.     

Drug markets,violence, and the need to incorporate the role of race

While race has proven to be a critical variable in the sociological understanding of multiple social outcomes, scholars have yet to fully appreciate the nature by which it shapes drug‐related violence. Empirical responses to the 1980s urban proliferation of illicit drugs generally relied on systemic explanations of drug market violence and how participants, by virtue of social positioning, are unable to use the criminal justice system to address grievances. Contrarily, the contingent causation hypothesis suggests that drug markets engender violence in settings where socioeconomic conditions are already favorable for violence. In spite of the contributions of these two themes, we argue that both represent oversimplifications of the complex ways by which race structures drug‐related violence. To truly understand drug market violence, the dominant narrative of emerging research must contextualize the proliferation of illicit drugs within the socio‐historical context of race and institutional racism. Only if and when that happens will the field move towards realistic solutions to ameliorate this social problem.     

“WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?” The Psychological and Social Well‐Being of Multiracial Adolescents

We used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the social and psychological well-being of multiracial adolescents. Using two different measures of multiracial identity, we investigated the ways in which these adolescents compare to their monoracial counterparts on five outcomes: depression, seriously considering suicide, feeling socially accepted, feeling close to others at school, and participating in extracurricular activities. We found that multiracial adolescents as a group experience some negative outcomes compared to white adolescents, but that this finding is driven by negative outcomes for those with American Indian and white heritage. We found no consistent evidence, however, that multiracial adolescents as a group face more difficulty in adolescence than members of other racial and ethnic minority groups. The results were similar, whether the multiracial population is defined by self-identification or by their parents' racial identifications.     

Fields,Logics, and Social Movements: Prison Abolition and the Social Justice Field*

This essay argues that field analyses of social movements can be improved by incorporating more insights from Pierre Bourdieu. In particular, Bourdieu’s concepts of logic, symbolic capital, illusio, and doxa can enrich social movement scholarship by enabling scholars to identify new objects of study, connect organizational‐ and individual‐level effects, and shed new light on a variety of familiar features of social movements. I demonstrate this claim by delineating the contours of one such field, the “social justice field” (SJF). I argue that the SJF is a delimited, trans‐movement arena of contentious politics united by the logic of the pursuit of radical social justice. Drawing upon existing scholarship, as well as my own research on the prison abolition movement, I argue that the competitive demands of the field produce characteristic effects on organizations and individual activists within the field. I conclude by considering how a Bourdieuian approach can provide fresh insights into familiar problematics within the social movements literature.     

Reconstructing Adolescence after Displacement: Experience from Eastern Africa

In this article I am concerned to explore the ways in which war and forced migration have impacted on traditional ideas and practices surrounding adolescence and, as a consequence, influenced actual lives. A particular focus is given to the roles and responsibilities of adolescents, for whom a tension often exists between the pressures to achieve social adulthood and to gain assistance through presenting themselves as children. Their quest to achieve adulthood is often hampered by the abandonment of initiation practices due to the conditions of conflict and displacement. At the same time military mobilisation and the work of international humanitarian organisations provide new avenues for the possible enhancement of their social status. This article provides examples from across the region that illustrate the ways in which adolescence itself is being reconfigured as a result of these changes.     

Change Research: Narrating Social Change from the Bottom-Up

This essay provides a review of Bent Flyvbjerg’s critique of conventional social science research, including its limitations in applied fields such as social work, followed by a specification of his alternative for a “phronetic social science.” I detail how I with two colleagues practiced phronetic social science in our collaboration with Philadelphia housing activists, including most especially the role of interpretive narrative analysis as part of our case study research. In conclusion, I discuss the somewhat ironic challenges of trying to increase the legitimacy of such activist research in applied fields like social work where an obsession with being seen as scientific is prevalent as a means to improve prestige of applied research. I discuss how we need less top-down research which focuses on a “what works” agenda that serves the management of subordinate populations and more research that provides bottom-up understandings of a “what’s right” agenda tailored to empowering people in particular settings. Real social science research needs to listen to how people on the bottom experience their own subordination so that we can help them overcome their subjugation. Good social science includes taking the perspective of the oppressed in the name of helping them achieve social justice. In the end, there are a number of tension points between the model of conventional social science and phronetic social science that starkly highlight how we need to change research in order do research that promotes positive social change.     

Publics,We Need You! Social Work Researchers and Educators as Public Sociologists

The recent revival of public sociology has created a unique space for social work researchers within its enterprise. As public sociologists, we are committed to engaging various publics that invigorate our work and hold us accountable. As social work researchers, we are specifically committed to engaging disenfranchised publics given our pursuit of social justice. Using examples from the USA, I discuss practical ways in which social work researchers can engage publics while still remaining connected to the academy.     

Justice in Indonesia: The Social Life of a Momentous Concept

In this article we argue that efforts in Indonesia to improve access to justice for the disadvantaged would greatly benefit from a pragmatic approach that takes local circumstances of custom, values and social relations into account at least as much as legal reform and bureaucratic transparency. We maintain that in post-Suharto Indonesia ‘justice’ can be conceptualised as the inverse of injustice and is manifested in terms of sovereign interests. Ideal justice, such as associated with rule of law implementing programs, assumes a functioning of government and judiciary that might bring about such results. Building on our own research as well as on the articles in this special issue we argue that engaging with the role and meaning of justice should involve solid ethnography of justice-seekers' life-worlds, understanding of the strategies and institutions that provide justice, and paying attention to the networks and interactions that connect actors in an ever moving field.     

Adolescents’ Friends,Parental Social Closure,and Educational Outcomes

There is a growing recognition of the importance of the social resources accessed through friends on adolescents’ educational outcomes. However, the research on the influence of these social resources remains inconclusive, due primarily to the different ways in which social resources have been conceptualized and measured. Using panel data from the Educational Longitudinal Study, we estimate the association between two measures of adolescents’ social resources in the Educational Longitudinal Study base-year, their high school grade point average in the first follow-up, and the likelihood of attaining a four-year college degree by the third follow-up. Grounded in the literature on social capital, our findings show that friendships that provide access to high social closure parental networks are favorably associated with grade point average and college completion. We discuss results in terms of their implications on school reform efforts intended to manufacture adolescents’ access to norm-reinforcing networks.     

Operationalizing Social Justice in Social Studies Education

Although social justice is an overarching goal of most every department of teacher education, college of education, and US College or University, it is rarely an identified goal for K–12 schools. We contend that the field of social studies education also substantively focuses on social justice, and as such, this article clarifies the ways in which classrooms can provide a social justice education. In particular, we explore the role of dispositions, reflective thinking, and controversial issues, and the ways in which they position students to understand, confront, and undermine social injustices. Finally, we provide specific curricular ideas and points of departure for middle school and high school social studies teachers to operationalize social justice education within their classes.     

Giving to Friends,Classmates, and Strangers in Adolescence

This study examined how perspective taking and sensitivity to social rewards predict giving to friends, classmates, and strangers in adolescence. Five hundred and twenty adolescents aged 12–17 years completed questionnaires on perspective taking and social rewards and played three Dictator Games in which they divided coins between themselves and a friend, classmate, and stranger. We found that, irrespective of age, adolescents donated most to a friend, less to their classmate, and least to a stranger, and females donated more than males. Individual differences in perspective taking and social reward sensitivity moderated how much adolescents donated, especially to strangers. These findings suggest that perspective taking and sensitivity to social rewards influence giving behavior in adolescence, especially to unknown others.     

Toward a Free Information Movement

The past decade witnessed the emergence of numerous Internet‐based social justice groups, some of which have readily apparent social roles and follow traditional organizational paths, while others occupy more ambiguous spaces, and blur any clearly demarcated lines of classification. Groups such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks present researchers with difficulty in strict categorization and as such are often labeled in ways that obscure their classification and understanding. Situating these two groups within network society and social movement literatures, this study offers a sociological explanation for the rise of these groups and attempts to knit their disparately understood practices of “hacktivism” and “journalism” together in a coherent framework. Frame analysis is employed to examine how each group attends to core framing tasks, finding that both groups do so in substantially similar ways, employing complementary frames concerning the asymmetrical distribution of information. Moreover, their embeddedness in digital information networks, and their particular opposition to information asymmetry, acts as a unifying thread that enables these apparently disparate actors to be studied within a single analytical framework as part of an emerging digital, peer‐produced movement concerned with the asymmetrical distribution of information.     

Navigating the Road to College: Race and Class Variation in the College Application Process

College attendance brings significant financial gain in lifetime earnings, and in order to reap those benefits more students are attending college than ever before. At the same time as more students have been applying to college, the application process itself has changed dramatically in the last few decades. As the last hurdle on the road to college, the application process is a critical step in the overall college‐choice process. However, until recently much of the research on college choice gave little attention to the actual steps of college application and did not always attend to variations by race and class. Considering the increasing importance of a college education and the consistent inequalities by race and class in who attends college, research examining how social background affects the ways in which students navigate the college application process is crucial. This review examines what we do know about race and class variation in college application, drawing from literature across sociology, economics, and higher education. This review addresses three questions: how does the admissions and application process affect race and class inequalities in college attendance? How have scholars modeled this process and do these models capture the experiences of students across race and class? And finally, how do students from different social backgrounds vary in their approach to applying to college?     

Educating for Social Justice: Making sense of multicultural and antiracist theory and practice with Canadian teacher activists 1

This paper presents an argument for further engagement between educational scholars and school-based social justice activists. An analysis of one segment of the broad field of social justice education focuses on multicultural and antiracist education, particularly as they are understood in the Canadian socio-political context. A brief overview of the literature from UK and US sources highlights their complex and often overlapping concerns, and the need for more dialogue across national boundaries toward progressive social change. Excerpts from in-depth interviews with four Canadian teacher-activists reveal the potential for educators to take up various debates and findings from the academic literature in their daily struggles to work for social justice.     

Rethinking Gender and Violence: Agency,Heterogeneity, and Intersectionality

This paper is a consideration of the increasing diversity of images of gender violence and its victims, as both the grassroots antiviolence activists, and the scholars of the movements and the violence that inspires the activism, engage with cultural codes and feeling rules that tend to narrow the criteria for what constitutes gender violence and victimization. We are coming to better understand that social location, including but not limited to positions within patriarchal systems of stratification, shapes violence and victimization in many different ways. Since the inception of the women’s movement, the discourse of victimization has grappled with the implications of constructing ‘pure victims’, and despite the tremendous progress in the resources available to survivors of gender violence, we find the tensions between victimization and agency, and between simplicity and complexity, reemerging repeatedly in the stories victims, activists, and scholars tell about this social problem. Below, we review the sociological research and activism, in conjunction with the collective narratives in the social movements against gender violence, to show how the issues of perceptions of women who are framed as victims began and remain central to feminist research in this area. We also explore the newest visions of gender violence, that broaden theorizing and activism to include multiple dimensions of inequality and their intersections. Taken together, these debates reveal multifaceted layers of complexity that inform the contexts and lived experience of violence, and that continue to enter into our storytelling.     

Articulating selfhood through the therapeutic: Teaching for justice and social transformation in contradictory spaces

In this article, we argue that it is in engaging with the particularly socio-politically loaded topics such as racism, gender-based violence, homophobia, and classism, where we urgently need to find new ways of simultaneously opening up, holding, and containing the visceral responses of students in relation to continuously renegotiating boundaries of the learning environment. Specifically, we contend that under the current conditions of calls for decolonization in South African higher education and elsewhere, the university as a whole (its curriculum, the classroom and its dynamics, teaching methodologies, and its governance structures) needs to be questioned and its pedagogical practices in general need to be reviewed. We take as the point our separate, but related experiences of teaching in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Some of the questions that frame our theoretical and methodological concerns are: How do we actually teach social justice related topics in diverse classrooms; how can we teach within, across, and beyond our own situatedness, especially where privileges and experiences of discrimination intersect and; how does one, ultimately, hold a space where the collective engagement with structural violence in its multiple intersecting expressions and the factual complexity of a dialogical pedagogical practice often lead to both moments of productivity and also repressive chaos? What we struggle with in this article, then, including the incidents foregrounded in it, are the complexities of engaging with social justice within the South African higher education context that is constantly grappling with being both the best and the worst example of political imagination.