Liberty,slavery, and the transformation of British identity in the eighteenth‐century West Indies

This article challenges the notion that black militias were of little consequence in the antebellum United States. The establishment, personnel and equipment of these militia units, and their importance for local black organization, has largely escaped scholarly attention. The significance of armed companies of young black men at a time when they were not officially sanctioned by federal and state authorities has also not been explored.

The article makes three arguments. First, there was a trajectory towards militarization from vigilance committees to independent companies to enrolment in union armies. Second, links between self-defence and rights of citizenship were already being struggled over at local and state levels before the more famous national expression in black union soldiers fighting for the union. Third, national narratives concerning the origins of the American civil war, African American slavery, and British Canadian history, obscure the multiple roles played by people of African descent during this period. It is only through transnational approaches towards fugitives, military formation and antislavery mobilization that we realise the role of blacks in challenging American slavery in the Atlantic world.

The organization of the article is as follows. It begins with fugitives and the organization of vigilance committees of self-defense in North America. It continues with states rights of self-defence, the exclusion of black men from these rights, and the resulting organization of independent companies. The public parade of these black militias on West India Day, the most important commemoration by Americans of African descent between the early 1830’s and 1860’s, is the next section. It concludes with the continental destruction of American slavery and its consequences for the post-emancipation era.

This article has several objectives. It examines important black institutions hitherto unexamined. It aims to broaden the conventional temporal and spatial dimensions of the civil war era. The third task is to reveal the limitations of nationalist narratives by seeking out connections among people of African descent as well as in the ways in which individuals and organizations provide alternative means for comparison. Finally, this article is part of a broader project examining political mobilization against slavery in the Atlantic world.     

Black-White Differences in Attitudes toward Homosexuality and Gay Rights

Black homophobia has been cited as a contributing factor inslowing mobilization against AIDS in the African-American community,as an obstacle to black lesbians and gay men in coming to termswith their sexuality, and as a challenge to the legitimacy ofthe gay rights movement. Yet evidence that blacks are more homophobicthan whites is quite limited. This article uses responses fromalmost seven thousand blacks and forty-three thousand whitesin 31 surveys conducted since 1973 to give more definitive answerson black-white attitudinal differences and their demographicroots. Despite their greater disapproval of homosexuality, blacks'opinions on sodomy laws, gay civil liberties, and employmentdiscrimination are quite similar to whites' opinions, and AfricanAmericans are more likely to support laws prohibiting antigaydiscrimination. Once religious and educational differences arecontrolled, blacks remain more disapproving of homosexualitybut are moderately more supportive of gay civil liberties andmarkedly more opposed to antigay employment discrimination thanare whites. Yet religion, education, gender, and age all haveweaker impacts on black than on white attitudes, suggestingthat black and white attitudes have different roots.     

Democratic Governance and Actors’ Conceptualization of “Civil Society” in Africa: State–Civil Society Relations in Ghana from 1982–2000

Despite civil society’s ambiguity, many scholars tend to focus on the economic reasons for the apparent conflict between state and civil society, with little or no attention to the conceptual differences that may be influencing the behavior of public and civil society actors. Using Ghana under J. J. Rawlings as a backdrop, this article argues that state–civil society relations are partly shaped by the divergent conceptualizations of “civil society” held by state and civil society actors. It suggests that the issue is not just the African state’s limited understanding of the multiple roles that civil society organizations can legitimately play in the polity; it is also civil society’s lack of recognition and acknowledgment of the legitimate functions of the African state.     

VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATION MEMBERSHIP AMONG BLACK AMERICANS: THE POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA

This article discusses voluntary association membership among black Americans in the post-civil rights era. Previous empirical studies comparing black to white social participation are critically assessed. A model composed of social class and intragroup regionality variables is offered to explain membership patterns as a manifestation of vertical and horizontal differentiation in the black American social structure. The analysis of empirical data collected by telephone interviews (N= 321) in a southwest Chicago community revealed that education most accurately predicts membership across associations but that occupation and regionality are also important variables. The analysis showed that members of church groups and civil rights groups are likely to be women from the rural South with at least 12 years of education. These findings suggest that explanations of black American life in the post-civil rights era may wish to consider vertical as well as horizontal differentiation.     

The Effects of Work and Community Resources and Demands on Family Integration

This paper uses interviews with 1,156 married dual-earner parents of children aged 10–17 from the 1992–1994 National Survey of Families and Households to examine relationships between work and community resources and demands and two aspects of family integration: activities with adolescents and family cohesion. The results indicate that mothers' shorter paid work hours and fathers' lower participation in community-professional organizations and moderate and high levels of informal helping are positively related to activities with adolescents, whereas moderate and high levels of participation in organized youth activities are positively related to family integration. Community-based subjective resources are positively related to family integration, whereas work-based subjective demands are negatively related to family cohesion. The findings generally are similar for mothers and fathers.     

The Contribution of Law and Social Work to Interdisciplinary Community Development and Peace Building in the Middle East

SUMMARY

Reducing inequity and strengthening civil society are both intrinsically related to peace building. This article outlines how social work and legal theory, coupled with an interdisciplinary practice framework, advance the development of community networks for the promotion of social rights as a medium for peace building in the Middle East. The combined effect of human rights advocacy, civic engagement, and the structuring and building of community, work to reduce inequality and promote civil society. Examples of interdisciplinary practice as implemented through the initiative of the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building are presented. Finally, implications for interdisciplinary training for schools of social work are discussed.     

Democratizing the Refugee Regime Complex

This article considers how civil society organizations (CSOs) may be understood in relation to the global refugee regime complex. It describes how several leading scholars have conceptualized refugee/internally displaced person (IDP) governance and explores how the neoliberal cognitive frame is impeding the possibility of democratic agency among IDPs/refugees. It argues that CSOs can play essential roles in encouraging democratization of the refugee regime complex by working to reshape their prevailing frame or orientation. Civil society organizations can also work to foster critical reflexivity among the parties that govern refugees and within that population as well. As an example of one such effort, the article employs Fraser’s (Scales of justice: reimagining political space in a globalizing world. Columbia University Press, New York, 2010) democratization framework in a brief case analysis of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Deshodaya initiative in Sri Lanka that has sought to enable IDPs in that nation to embrace critical reflexivity to reimagine themselves as governing agents who can redefine state and international organization-based definitions of refugee protection. Overall, the analysis suggests that civil society organizations can act successfully and intentionally to open democratic spaces in which refugees/IDPs may find possibilities to exercise their innate agential possibility.     

Civic Engagement and Latina Immigrant Mothers' Remote Learning Involvement During COVID-191

Immigrant incorporation scholars have established that racialized immigrant parents encounter several barriers in their children's schooling: namely, language and cultural differences, discrimination, unfamiliarity with the U.S. schooling system, and unhelpful school agents. However, less is known about the mechanisms that lessen these challenges. Drawing on insights from immigrant incorporation and civic engagement literature, this study examines how advocacy organizations can mediate the barriers racialized immigrant parents face in their children's schooling. A case study of 20 Latina immigrant mothers is used to demonstrate how civically engaged parents drew on their participation with a local advocacy organization—Parent's Choice—to overcome the barriers that emerged during the transition to remote learning due to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Findings suggest that immigrant mothers leveraged their connection to Parent's Choice to learn how to use technology, get district-related updates, secure devices necessary for at-home learning, create complaints or demands for services at their children's school, fill out paperwork, and access community-based referrals. Parent's Choice provided support and empowered Latina immigrant parents by minimizing the overwhelming barriers they faced during online learning. These findings complicate our understanding of immigrant civic engagement patterns and provide implications of how civic engagement can facilitate the incorporation of marginalized parents in educational institutions.     

Parents, Politics and the Public Purse: activists in the special education arena in Germany

Using a 'social interest' approach, this paper details the advocacy strategies of parents of children with disabilities in the Federal Republic of Germany during the 1980s. Parents developed grass-roots organizations beginning in the 1970s in the former West Germany in response to the stigma and isolation of the well-developed system of Sonderschulen (special schools). Parent groups described here include both those with children already in the Sonderschulen working to ensure its promise of special help for their children and those working to bypass the Sonderschule system by establishing model integration programs in the general schools. The collective actions that led to local successes for both these parent advocate approaches are documented, but so, too, are the obstacles the parents encountered in the broader political arena. Politicians continue to cite limited education budgets, especially following the unification of the two Germanys, and they also raise concerns which some parents share: that significant expansion of special educational support into the general schools could undermine the viability of the Sonderschulen . Thus, one political response to the integration movement has been to find places for some children with disabilities in the general schools, but accompanied by only minimal special education support.     

Embracing the new disability rights paradigm: the importance of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

In 2008 the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) commenced operation. The CRPD has created a dynamic new disability rights paradigm that empowers disability people’s organizations and creates a new paradigm for disability scholars. This paper analyses the impact of the CRPD and provides practical guidance as to how this convention can be used to drive change. Prior to this convention, persons with disabilities were protected by a range of general human rights conventions. Despite receiving nominal protection under general human rights conventions, persons with disabilities have had many of their human rights denied to them. The CRPD goes further than merely re-stating rights. It creates a new rights discourse, empowers civil society and renders human rights more obtainable for person with disabilities than any time in history.     

Politics and Youth Gangs: a Follow-up Study*

Scholarly interest in the political relationships of youth gangs recently has revived, following mass media reports of the politicization of some gangs and federal and private funding in support of economic and socially constructive programs in which a few large gangs participated. Unlike earlier gang political activities (which supported entrenched political power) recent reports suggest that youth gangs and their young adult counterparts have become radicalized, alienated from traditional political approaches and ideologies. This paper focuses on the political attitudes and activities, especially with respect to civil rights programs of young men. now aged 21 to 35, who were members of black youth gangs studied initially between 1959 and 1962. Assimilationist organizations and approaches receive higher recognition and support than do protest, black nationalist, and other groups, and violent methods. Variations in response reflect gang and community differences. The crientation to politics reflected in the findings appears more pragmatic than ideological. The potential for effective organization is related to recent reports of militant organization within prisons, a common experience for gang members.     

Ten years of the CRPD’s adoption in China: challenges and opportunities

This article examines the challenges and opportunities of implementing the CRPD's rights-based model in China, especially the effects of the diminishing space for civil society on the nascent disability rights movement. A disability rights movement emerged as a direct result of the CRPD’s adoption in 2008. Two recent restrictive civil society legislations, however, undermined this process. While the diminishing space of civil society has posed great challenges to the movement by marginalizing the rights advocacy approach, it has created an opportunity for service-oriented disability associations to thrive. While service-oriented associations are often ignored by disability studies scholarship and the disability rights movement, I argue that, through these organizations, persons with disabilities in China have done critical identity work and substantively increased their level of independence in their daily lives. As a result, a disability rights consciousness continues to be built in China, despite governmental hostility to political advocacy.     

Teachers’ Attitudes about the Integration of Roma:the case of Spain

This article, taking data from my thesis dissertation, examines the attitudes of Spanish teachers towards Roma children (and other ethnic/cultural minorities) in their schools, and the role that teachers, schools, parents and the community play with regard to the integration of Roma in schools and in society. Although teachers’ views of Roma are, on the whole, positive, confusion between acculturation and integration exists in some cases. With the intention of shedding some light on these attitudes, the Roma community within Spain's multicultural context is introduced, and general data provided.

This work is based on original research undertaken in 1996/97, mainly through questionnaires distributed in state primary schools consisting of 25% or more ethnic/cultural minorities. The questionnaire included both closed and open questions.

     

Sponsoring Civil Society: State and Community Movement in Taiwan*

This article contributes to the growing literature on the synergic production of civil society in newly democratized countries. State sponsorship can be effective when clientelism, as a form of social dominance, continues to frustrate purposive organization from below. Three elements are necessary for this scenario. First, a group of reform‐minded officials must be able to pursue an independent agenda that deviates from local elites. Second, reformers have to create new institutional avenues to channel resources downward by bypassing local politicians. Lastly, civil society organizations must be capable of effectively responding to the initiatives from above. I use Taiwan’s community movement to understand the logic and consequences of sponsoring civil society. State endorsement is critical to legitimatize community organizations’ presence in local politics. With a detailed analysis of a local case, the Qiaodou community movement, I argue that state sponsorship is critical for the growth of civil society organizations. Sponsored movement activism maintains its political independence by leveraging the incoherence in bureaucratic division of labor, and its professional expertise offers an advantageous bargaining position when facing officials.     

Decentering technology in discourse on discrimination*

ABSTRACT

Algorithmic discrimination has become one of the critical points in the discussion about the consequences of an intensively datafied world. While many scholars address this problem from a purely techno-centric perspective, others try to raise broader social justice concerns. In this article, we join those voices and examine norms, values, and practices among European civil society organizations in relation to the topic of data and discrimination. Our goal is to decenter technology and bring nuance into the debate about its role and place in the production of social inequalities. To accomplish this, we rely on Nancy Fraser’s theory of abnormal justice which highlights interconnections between maldistribution of economic benefits, misrecognition of marginalized communities, and their misrepresentation in political processes. Fraser’s theory helps situate technologically mediated discrimination alongside other more conventional kinds of discrimination and injustice and privileges attention to economic, social, and political conditions of marginality. Using a thematic analysis of 30 interviews with civil society representatives across Europe’s human rights sector, we bring clarity to this idea of decentering. We show how many groups prioritize the specific experiences of marginalized groups and ‘see through’ technology, acknowledging its connection to larger systems of institutionalized oppression. This decentered approach contrasts the process-oriented perspective of tech-savvy civil society groups that shy from an analysis of systematic forms of injustice.     

A Movement’s Legacy: Southern Echo and the Continued Struggle for Racial Justice in the Delta

Recent research has complicated popular understandings of the civil rights movement, calling into question its timeline, key players, and biggest victories. Scholars have highlighted the role of community organizing, arguing that capacity-building and leadership development were the movement’s real wins. Yet little research has examined how contemporary organizers view and use this history in their current work. Drawing upon interview and observational data from a qualitative case study, this article explores how one Delta organization, Southern Echo, responds to the movement of the 1950s and 1960s in its organizing today. We argue that Echo organizers and leaders see the civil rights movement as an ongoing struggle, and we show that Echo adopts a critical stance in analyzing past civil rights work; Echo’s structure and strategies are a direct response to this history. Our analysis offers a new, critical perspective to understandings of the civil rights movement.     

Social Capital, Resource Mobilization and Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract  This article critiques the contradictory claims of Robert Putnam and Aldon Morris in relation to the American civil rights movement. Putnam identifies the South as the American region most lacking in social capital, and argues more generally that the 1960s marked a watershed beyond which social capital in the United States declined in all regions. Morris identifies the indigenous resources of southern African American communities as fundamental to the civil rights movement's emergence in the late 1950s and sees the social networks and cultural assets of the African American church in particular as central to the movement. The article disputes Putnam's negative judgment of the South by highlighting the role played by various types of social capital in the movement's launch. It also challenges Morris's over-emphasis on the ability of charismatic, black church leadership to deliver mass support and re-affirms the role played by female lay figures, such as beauticians.     

Social Equality and the Mobilization of the Law

Sociolegal scholars refer to the invocation of law or rules during a dispute as the mobilization of law. Most studies of the mobilization of law focus on the mobilization of law by people in non‐official capacities, particularly by persons of relatively low social status or in positions of social disadvantage. Early studies debated the effectiveness of court‐centered strategies for social justice, examining whether real social change could be achieved through formal judicial means. Scholars now largely agree that law can be effectively mobilized for social change through both direct formal legal action and the indirect radiating effects of legal mobilization. This is because the influence of law goes beyond the courtroom; rights consciousness and legal mobilization help to transform culture and understandings of social status and power. Currently scholars are turning their attention to the mobilization of law within organizations such as schools and workplaces and the mobilization of rights talk and justice talk in unofficial arenas domestically and internationally.     

Integration, integrity and effectiveness

Until the mid-1990s, debates about integration tended to focus on the rights of disabled children to attend mainstream schools. However, more recent research has raised new concerns about the politics of integration from the 'standards' perspective. This Internet-based research project was designed to follow the 20 secondary schools in England, where more than 10% of the pupils had statements of special educational needs (SEN). Several of these schools are now being threatened with closure. This is either because they are failing to meet the Government's benchmark targets of 5+GCSEs at grades A-C, or because they are failing to attract sufficient numbers of mainstream pupils. However, these schools may well be seen as popular and successful by the parents of pupils with statements of special educational needs. Little appears to be known about how schools juggle these competing priorities successfully, and the author calls on readers of this journal to promote our understanding and their survival through a national conference.