The Politics of Illegal Dumping: An Environmental Justice Framework

Studies of the intersection between environmental hazards and community demographics have concluded that environmental inequality is prevalent in communities across the United States. While these studies offer persuasive indicators of environmental inequality, we still have little understanding of the social forces involved in the production of these unequal outcomes. Drawing on a case study of a community of color facing illegal dumping, I propose an environmental justice framework to explain the social dynamics that produced this outcome.     

Immigrant Children: Their Experience of Violence at School and Community in Host Country

This article describes our qualitative sociological study of immigrant children's life experiences of violence. We conducted interviews with 42 first‐generation immigrant children from any country, aged 9–13 years old, living in the Quebec City region (Canada). Results from three main themes are presented: representations of violence and concrete violent acts experienced; perceived effects of violence on children health and well‐being; and reactions and coping strategies. Overall, the narratives show that they may experience racist peer violence in school that leads to suffering situations, and they consequently have to develop strategies to maintain their well‐being. Social implications are discussed.     

“It’s not just talk”: ideas,discourse, and the prospects for transformational change in a homogenous nation-state

ABSTRACT

Despite decades of large-scale immigration, systemic and institutionalized racism and ethnonationalism remain very strong in South Korea. One reason is obvious: South Korea is the quintessential homogeneous nation-state. Many observers, in fact, believe that it is one of the few societies in the world that is naturally homogenous. For this and other reasons, the prospect that South Korea can or will transform from homogenous nation-state to multicultural society is generally given very short shrift. I argue, however, that small but extremely significant steps toward a multicultural society have already been made and that the key reason is due to the introduction of ‘multiculturalism’ as an idea and discourse in Korean society. While a focus on ideas/discourse is hardly new, this paper contends that it has been seriously underappreciated, particularly in analyses of South Korea, as a cause of institutional stability on the one hand, and of institutional change and transformation, on the other hand.     

Oscar Pistorius and the melancholy of intersectionality

The alleged shooting by Paralympian and Olympian athlete Oscar Pistorius of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp has led to strong reactions worldwide. Scholars in the field of disability studies have expressed shock and disappointment in response both to the death itself and to its implications for the representation of disability. In South Africa in the wake of the death of Ms Steenkamp, much has been made both by critics of Pistorius and by his defenders about his status as a white South African man, but little has been said about disability issues. This silence in South Africa about disability as a possible identity factor in this case draws attention to the extent to which disability questions remain profoundly raced and gendered, and influenced by the colonial and apartheid past. The tragic alleged shooting by Oscar Pistorius draws attention back to how important intersectionality is to understanding disability in South Africa and other unequal societies.     

White-Knuckle Research: Emotional Dynamics in Fieldwork with Racist Activists

Current understandings of emotions as relational expressions rather than individual states have made it possible to reconsider the role of emotion in the research process. This article proposes two ways that qualitative research on social movements can benefit from greater attention to the emotional dynamics of fieldwork. First, by examining the strategic use of various emotions by informants as well as by researchers, scholars are in a better position to explore how informants and researchers jointly shape knowledge and interpretation in qualitative research. Second, exploration of emotional dynamics in interviewing relationships can be used as data to deepen understanding of both the interpretative process and of the emotional content of social movements. I examine these issues in the context of a life history project with activists in contemporary U.S. racist movements.     

Lost in translation – A case study of a public debate on freedom of expression and a neo-Nazi rally

ABSTRACT

This is a case study of a neo-Nazi public gathering in Sweden and the debate the event caused in Swedish media. The debate focused on the fact that the police gave the neo-Nazis permission to demonstrate and on how this could have been avoided. The study thus concerns the dilemma that emerges when freedom of speech clashes with hate speech and the sense of jeopardized public safety that occurs when neo-Nazis are allowed to march. The study is based on Critical Discourse Analysis and strives to discover how this debate is embedded in more complex ideological contexts. The study helps shed light on how the growing neo-Nazi movement contributes to normalizing general racism. Under the banner of engaging in the fight against racism, public opinionmakers, cited in the articles under study, were willing to suspend freedom of speech for neo-Nazis and accused the police of being too hesitant. At the same time, as shown in the study, the police had other internal priorities that were never exposed. Internally, the police authority debated whether or not the neo-Nazi movement should be given some lenience, based on the assumption that severe handling of the neo-Nazis would cause them to radicalize into violence.     

How is ‘racism’ understood in literature about black and minority ethnic social work students in Britain? A conceptual review

ABSTRACT

This conceptual review interrogates a body of literature concerned with black and minority ethnic (BME) social work students in Britain since 2008. This period has coincided with an increasing focus on diversity in Higher Education, but also lower prominence being given to race in social work. In social work education, there has been increased attention to the needs and experiences of BME students. While most of this literature acknowledges racism, what constitutes racism and how it can be understood usually remain implicit. This review aimed to explore influential concepts in the literature and the ways these affected how racism is understood and identified. A search was carried out for articles in peer-reviewed academic journals between 2008 and 2018. In this article, we discuss four recurring concepts of racism in this literature: subtle racism, institutional racism, cultural difference and pedagogical solutions. The article analyses the assumptions underpinning these concepts, and the implications for how racism has been understood and investigated in this literature. The subsequent discussion calls for a more reflexive approach and identifies questions that future research could explore, which could lead to improved understandings of racism in social work education.     

Not Thinking Ethnicity: A Critique of the Ethnicity Paradigm in an Over-Ethnicised Sociology

The many critical approaches to an 'ethnicity framework' have fallen short of a very possible conclusion—that the language of ethnicity provides, for the most part, a poor paradigm with which to work. In the present paper we seek not only to re-state some key weaknesses of this paradigm but also to suggest that these weaknesses are more general in an over-ethnicised sociology. There are numerous critiques of particular models or elements of ethnicity thinking, including critiques of primordialist approaches (Fenton 2003), of multiculturalism ( Barry 2000 ), and of the over-objectification of groups (Brubaker 2004; see also Jenkins 2008). The major critiques constitute a strong case against 'thinking with ethnicity'; the broader weaknesses are more general in contemporary 'identitarian' sociology. From this position we turn to the question of offering an alternative approach in a sociology which emphasizes agency, and is grounded in an analysis of actors in material situations. This is allied to the concept of ideational resources, social categories and identities upon which actors draw, and a middle-range view of causality and tendency in social change. Ideas of ancestral belonging are among those ideational resources, and these ideas and assumptions are played out in a context of material and political change. The subject of study is not ethnicity, but power, resources, social relations and institutions (which may and may not be) informed by cultural identities and ideas of ancestry. The strategy of the paper will be first to re-state the deficiencies of 'ethnicity thinking' and second to offer an alternative framework for thinking about social action and social structure.     

西尔斯“象征政治”述评简

美国标榜为民主和人权的国家，美国的学者西尔斯提出了象征政治，对民主和人权提出了批评。他认为选民在投票时，往往不是基于自己的利益得失，而是多年积淀的情感对候选人和相关政策所表现出来的象征进行投票。体现在人权上，主要表现为种族歧视，尽管种族歧视从生理和法理的角度已经消失，但白人对黑人的负面情感依然存在，并体现在对相关政策的态度上。     

The over-representation of Black children in the child protection system: possible causes, consequences and solutions

This paper considers the controversial area of child protection with Black families. It begins by addressing the question of why the issue of child protection and ethnicity is important to social work. It then goes on to consider the current and related research in this field, and supports the arguments that Black families are likely to be over-represented in the child protection system. The reasons for this over-representation are explored in-depth as themes: these include issues around language and interpreting services; child-rearing differences; poverty; and social work assessments. Racism and discrimination are central concepts that underpin each theme. The final section looks at ways forward for social workers and their agencies with regard to working sensitively and appropriately with Black families.