“We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly.”
John Pilger

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Human rights 'progress' hailed

China Daily - December 24, 2014

China has been working effectively toward goals set by the National Human Rights Action Plan (2012-15), with most quantitative targets at least half fulfilled in the past two years, a senior official said on Tuesday.
"China has made considerable progress in human rights protection," said Cai Mingzhao, director of the State Council Information Office, at a meeting during which an interim review of the action plan was conducted.
Last year, the disposable income of urban residents grew by 7 percent, while per capita net income of rural residents rose by 9.3 percent, and the country's poor rural population decreased by 16.5 million compared with 2012, according to Cai.
In 2013, the ratio of elected deputies to represented population in the National People's Congress, the national legislature, was the same for rural and urban areas for the first time.
Meanwhile, the interests and rights of ethnic minorities, women, children, the elderly and disabled have been better protected, and international exchanges and cooperation in the field of human rights have also progressed, Cai said.
READ MORE....

Monday, December 22, 2014

Argentine court extends human right to freedom to orangutan

Russia Today - December 22, 2014

In an unprecedented decision, an Argentine court has ruled that the Sumatran orangutan 'Sandra', who has spent 20 years at the zoo in Argentina's capital Buenos Aires, should be recognized as a person with a right to freedom.
The ruling, signed by the judges unanimously, would see Sandra freed from captivity and transferred to a nature sanctuary in Brazil after a court recognized the primate as a "non-human person" which has some basic human rights. The Buenos Aires zoo has 10 working days to seek an appeal.
The "habeas corpus" ruling in favor of the orangutan was requested last November by the Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights (AFADA) alleging that Sandra suffered "unjustified confinement of an animal with proven cognitive ability."

READ MORE....

Saturday, December 20, 2014

A second response to Meredith Tax - straw men make poor argument By Saadia Toor

Open Democracy - 19 December 2014  

Tax's misleading interpretation of my arguments do little to counter the central realities - that liberals and imperialist feminists have been prominent supporters of authoritarianism and state violence.

In November we published Deepa Kumar's widely read essay, 'Imperialist Feminism and Liberalism'. In response, 5050 published an essay by Meredith Tax, 'The Antis - anti-imperialist or anti-feminist?' Deepa Kumar's response to Tax can be read here. This second response is from Saadia Toor.
Meredith Tax’s response is exactly what one would have expected it to be. It exemplifies the ‘straw man’ style of argumentation, and of necessity misrepresents our arguments, our critique and our politics. I say ‘of necessity’ because it is only through misrepresentation that Tax can get away with not actually having to address the actual substance of our critique and answer our charges against today’s imperialist feminists.
I’d like to begin by addressing some of Tax’s claims before moving on to articulating the substance of our critique of imperialist feminism.
Tax caricatures our argument when she claims that we ‘reduce the problems of women to side effects of "capitalism and imperialism"’. I have never made the absurd claim that women’s problems are either side-effects or even products of capitalism or imperialism alone. But I do hold, following in the footsteps of socialist/Marxist/materialist feminists, that to fail to pay attention to political economy when discussing gender/sexuality is to commit a huge error. Women’s ‘problems… involving the family, cultural traditions, religious institutions, and systematic institutionalized sexism’ do not simply ‘[predate] capitalism’ or imperialism, as Tax helpfully points out. They are transformed by them, even as capitalism and imperialism create new problems for women and feminist politics. It is especially important to invoke political economy when discussing women’s status and issues within the context of Pakistan specifically, and the ‘Muslim world’ generally, precisely because it tends to be absent from feminist analysis pertaining to this region. Tax’s charge of reductionism is ironic given that in fact it is liberal/imperialist feminists who tend to reduce the various issues faced by Muslim women (especially in Muslim majority countries) to ‘Islam’, and/or ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. 

READ MORE....

Imperialist feminism: a response to Meredith Tax By Deepa Kumar

Open Democracy - 17 December 2014  

A new generation of thinkers and activists are actively seeking a larger framework than the one liberals such as Tax can provide.

Meredith Tax seems very keen to discredit my arguments about Imperialist Feminism. In her essay on the “Antis”—a term she coins to describe me, Saadia Toor, and our ilk—she charges us with being anti-feminist, sectarian, and reductionist. She further states that we are largely irrelevant, since “few will read us,” but that we are nevertheless dangerous because we focus our “attack exclusively on liberal feminism” and don’t understand how to fight against fundamentalism and for women’s rights. 
Before I debunk Tax’s various distortions of my arguments, let me state clearly where I stand on the question of Imperialist Feminism.
As I described in my essay titled “Imperialist feminism and liberalism,” the key focus of Tax’s attack, the framework of Imperialist Feminism is “based on the appropriation of women’s rights in the service of empire.” This framework has a long history that goes back to the 19th century. A range of scholars such as Lila Abu-Lughod, Reina Lewis, Leila Ahmed, Marnia Lazreg, Rana Khabani, Saba Mahmood, Lata Mani, and others have written extensively about what has variously been called colonial feminism, gendered Orientalism and imperial feminism. If Gayatri Spivak coined the phrase “White-men-saving-brown-women-from-brown-men,” to describe this phenomenon, Abu-Lughod in her recent book Do Muslim Women Need Saving analyzes the development of imperial feminism since then. She argues that since the Afghan war a new ubiquitous commonsense has emerged that sees militarism as the means to advance women’s rights.

READ MORE....

The Antis: anti-imperialist or anti-feminist? By Meredith Tax

Open Democracy - 19 November 2014  

A recent article on "imperialist feminism" accuses the US women's movement of being a cheerleader for American empire from the war in Afghanistan to the present. Is this a sectarian strategy that misses the target and attacks the liberals instead of the right?

A leftwing analysis that blames the suffering of women in Muslim-majority countries on the feminist movement - variously identified as "white feminists", "liberal feminists", or "colonial feminists" and their "native informants" or "comprador intellectuals in the South" - has become influential in US academic feminist circles. While its proponents call themselves "anti-imperialist feminists", in the interests of brevity I will call them simply the Antis, in tribute to the anti-suffrage leftists who considered women's rights a bourgeois distraction from socialist revolution.
A recent article by Deepa Kumar titled "Imperialist feminism and liberalism" argues that US liberals and feminists supported the invasion of Afghanistan and ignored the victims of the war in Iraq because of their "ubiquitous, taken-for-granted ideological framework that has been developed over two centuries in the West...based on the appropriation of women’s rights in the service of empire".

READ MORE....

Imperialist feminism and liberalism By Deepa Kumar

Open Democracy -  6 November 2014

Colonial feminism is based on the appropriation of women’s rights in the service of empire and has been widely utilised in justifying aggression in the Middle East. But is it liberal?

In a recent CNN interview, religion scholar Reza Aslan was asked by journalist Alisyn Camerota if Islam is violent given the “primitive treatment in Muslim countries of women and other minorities.” Aslan responded by stating that the conditions for women in Muslim majority countries vary. While women cannot drive in Saudi Arabia, elsewhere in various Muslim majority countries, women have been elected heads of states 7 times. But, before he could finish his sentence pointing out that the US is yet to elect a woman as president, he was interrupted by co-host Don Lemon who declared: “Be honest though, Reza, for the most part it is not a free and open society for women in those states.”
How is it that people like Camerota and Lemon, who very likely have never travelled to “free and open” Turkey, Lebanon or Bangladesh, or read the scholarship on women’s rights struggles in Morocco, Iran and Egypt, seem to know with complete certainty that women are treated “primitively” in “Muslim countries”? On what basis does Lemon believe that he has the authority to call Aslan out for supposed dishonesty? How is it that with little or no empirical evidence on women’s rights in Muslim majority countries (which vary widely based on country, regions within a country, social class, the history and nature of national liberation movements, the part played by Islam in political movements etc.) Western commentators routinely make such proclamations about women and Islam?

READ MORE.....

Monday, December 15, 2014

About Half See CIA Interrogation Methods as Justified

Democrats Divided over CIA’s Post-9/11 Interrogation Techniques

PEW RESEARCH - December 15, 2014

Following the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogation practices in the period following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 51% of the public says they think the CIA methods were justified, compared with just 29% who say they were not justified; 20% do not express an opinion.
The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Dec. 11-14 among 1,001 adults, finds that amid competing claims over the effectiveness of CIA interrogation methods, 56% believe they provided intelligence that helped prevent terrorist attacks, while just half as many (28%) say they did not provide this type of intelligence.

READ MORE....

Majority in U.S. say CIA interrogation methods were justified

By David Lauter

The Los Angeles Times - December 15, 2014

Just over half of Americans say they believe the interrogation methods the CIA used against terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, polling data released Monday showed. About 30% said they believed the tactics were unjustified, and the remaining 20% said they did not know, according to the survey by the Pew Research Center.
Opinion on the CIA's torture of its prisoners differs notably by partisanship. Democrats were split, the poll found, with liberals much more likely to say that the CIA's tactics were not justified. Republicans across the board said the interrogations were justified.
President Obama banned the CIA's use of methods such as waterboarding, extended sleep deprivation and beatings, which had been authorized under President George W. Bush. Obama and other Democratic elected officials have referred to the CIA's actions as "torture."

READ MORE....

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

An Academic Journal:Humanity & Society

Humanity & Society
Editor: David Embrick
Loyola University Chicago
http://www.sagepub.com/journals/Journal202112

Humanity & Society, the official journal of the Association for Humanist Sociology, was first published in 1977 and has been published quarterly since 1978. Humanity & Society is a peer-reviewed Sage journal with abstracts of published articles appearing in Sociological Abstracts. It features “humanist sociology,” which is broadly defined as a sociology that views people not only as products of social forces but also as agents in their lives and the world. We are committed to a sociology that contributes to a more humane, equal, and just society.
Please direct your inquiries and ideas to:

David G. Embrick, Editor-In-Chief, at dge.has(at)gmail.com  &
Kasey Henricks, Managing Editor, at kasey.henricks(at)gmail.com

Friday, November 7, 2014

Ways to write a good book review - Mohammed A Bamyeh


From the editor: Ways to write a good book review
By Mohammed A Bamyeh
I would like to use this introduction as an opportunity to outline some basic strategies of reviewing that produce good, readable, and useful book reviews. Following these will maximize the benefit and readability of a book review.
1. Focus on what the book actually says, not on what you want to say. You can, of course, give us your opinion of it, but this should never come at the expense of ignoring the book’s argument. After all, you are reviewing someone else’s work, not your own. Even if you disagree with a book, readers generally expect the review to tell them at least what the argument is, how it is justified, and how it relates to other literature in a certain field. You can tell the reader that while tell- ing us why you like it or dislike it. But typically few readers appreciate a review- er’s opinion if they have no idea what that opinion is responding to. Do not evaluate a book in terms of what you would have written. Try to understand what the authors you are reviewing have tried to do, and whether they have succeeded on their own terms, before you tell us why or not they have succeeded on yours.
2. Avoid a mechanical, chapter-by-chapter description of the book. This approach usually produces uninspired reviews. Some parts of the book may be more impor- tant than others, and you can focus on those. But the best reviews sketch out the overall thesis of the book. The review may, of course, explain how the book is structured and how its argument progresses, but keep in mind that reviewing a book is not the same as reading it.
3. Pay attention to language and meaning. Avoid jargon, and do not worry too much about what you think specialized academics like to hear. Do not use complex sentences; be short, concise, and to the point. If the book is complex, do not reproduce its complexity. Tell us what you are able to get out of it. It is better not to do the review than to write gibberish. Do not try to sound needlessly profound. Be concise and to the point. Your language needs to make sense.
4. Keep in mind that your audience is international, not local or regional. Do not assume that all our readers are familiar with the minutia of local or national debates, even if you happen to live in a large country or feel that your country (or its social science community) is important.
5. Keep in mind that your audience is general. Write for a general audience of soci- ologists, not specialists in your own area. Our readers come from all the subfields in sociology. Think of your review as an opportunity to explain debates in your own specialty area to a larger audience of social scientists. Get out of your national, regional, and subdisciplinary shell, even your sociological shell. Think of the ability to communicate across various divides as a calling.
6.     Although publishing reviews may add to your professional credentials, reviews should never be done exclusively for that purpose. It is easier to write reviews if you are genuinely interested in the ideas and debates in the books.

7.     Keep notes and references to an absolute minimum; it is preferable to avoid them altogether. A book review is not the place for an extended thesis. Save that for a full-length article. 
In general, a review is an opportunity to engage in debates and ideas, learn some- thing new, and provide a valuable service to a large, educated audience. But it should also be an enjoyable activity. The best reviews are usually written by those who enjoy writing them.
 
Mohammed A Bamyeh

Thursday, November 6, 2014

CALL FOR BOOK REVIEWERS - Societies Without Borders

CALL FOR BOOK REVIEWERS

Societies Without Borders( http://societieswithoutborders.org/), an online journal published by Sociologists Without Borders, is seeking book reviewers in the fields of sociology, international studies, political science, economics and cultural studies. In keeping with its mission to make the scholarly analysis of economic, political, social, cultural, and environmental rights accessible to as wide an audience as possible, Societies Without Borders is a peer-reviewed journal.

If you are interested in reviewing books for our Journal, please send your short CV to tugrulkeskin (at) pdx.edu. We have a list of books to review that you will find below; please contact me in the event that you are interested in any of the titles. Alternatively, you may also propose titles that you are willing to review.

Submissions deadlines for the coming year are March 1, June 1, and September 1, 2015. See attached for complete submission information.

I will mail any of the following books to you if you express interest:
  
Women's Rights to Social Security and Social Protection  Edited by: Beth Goldblatt, Lucie Lamarche Hart Publishing, 2014. 

Moral Systems and the Evolution of Human Rights. Bruce K.  Friesen Springer, 2014.

Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach. Tanya Maria Golash-Boza. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Human Rights as Social Construction. Benjamin Gregg. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

The Human Rights Enterprise.  William T. Armaline , Davita S. Glasberg and Bandana Purkayastha 2014.

Failing to Protect The UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights. Rosa Freedman. Hurst Publishing, 2014.

Social Movements and Globalization How Protests, Occupations and Uprisings are Changing the World. Cristina Flesher Fominaya. Palgrave, 2014.

Expulsions Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy.  Saskia Sassen. Harvard University Press,  2014. 
 
Making Human Rights Intelligible Towards a Sociology of Human Rights Edited by: Mikael Rask Madsen, Gert Verschraegen Hart Publishing, 2013.

Call for Reviews of Human Rights Films: Societies without Borders

From: LaDawn Haglund <LaDawn.Haglund (at) ASU.EDU>
Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2014 at 2:15 PM
To: <HUMANRIGHTS@LISTSERV.MIAMIOH.EDU>
Subject: Call for Reviews of Human Rights Films

Dear colleagues:

Fourth-quarter reviews of human rights-related films for SWB are now being accepted (deadline December 1). Please see the attached CFP.
This is a great opportunity for students to publish as well!

Call for Reviews of Human Rights Films: Societies without Borders

This picture is posted by Tugrul Keskin
The editors of Societies Without Borders: Human Rights and the Social Sciences would like to invite scholars, teachers, students, practitioners, and activists to review submit to our Film Reviews section. Reviews should be original and accessible to a broad readership. Preference will be given to reviews of more recent films, and those for which the human rights content is most apparent.

Submissions deadlines for the coming year are December 1, 2014 and March 1, June 1, and September 1, 2015. See attached for complete submission information.

Please forward to others who may be interested.

All the best,

LaDawn Haglund
Chair, ASA Section on Human Rights
Associate Professor, Faculty of Justice and Social Inquiry, SST
Lincoln Fellow of Human Rights and Sustainability
ArizonaState University

Mailing address: PO Box 876403
Ground delivery address: 240 E. Orange Mall
In-person address: Wilson Hall Rm 265

Tempe AZ 85287-6403
Phone: 480-965-7083
Fax: 480-965-9199

A New Book: Moral Systems and the Evolution of Human Rights

Moral Systems and the Evolution of Human Rights

Friesen, Bruce K.

Springer, 2014
  • Presents a unique sociological perspective on moral social change
  • Offers an account for the development of human rights
  • Illustrates how moral systems exist apart from religion

This volume offers a comprehensible account of the development and evolution of moral systems.  It seeks to answer the following questions: If morals are eternal and unchanging, why have the world’s dominant religious moral systems been around for no more than a mere six thousand of the two hundred thousand years of modern human existence?  What explains the many and varied moral systems across the globe today?  How can we account for the significant change in moral values in one place in less than 100 years’ time? Using examples from classical civilizations, the book demonstrates how increasing diversity compromises a moral system’s ability to account for and integrate larger populations into a single social unit. This environmental stress is not relieved until a broader, more abstract moral system is adopted by a social system.  This new system provides a sense of belonging and purpose for more people, motivating them to engage in prosocial (or moral) acts and refrain from socially disruptive selfish acts.  The current human rights paradigm is the world’s first universal, indigenous moral system.  Because moral systems can be expected to continue to evolve, this book points to current boundaries of the human rights paradigm and where the next major moral revolution might emerge. 

CONTENTS:

Introduction
Sociology as Naturalist Inquiry
Convergence
The Never-Ending (Back) Story
The Evolution of Human
Lenski’s Taxonomy
Hunting and Gathering Societies
Simple Horticultural and Pastoral Societies
Advanced Agrarian Societies
Industrial Societies
2 The Moral
Secularizing Durkheim: Key Concepts
The Bummer of Being Human
A Theory of Moral Change
3 Moral Systems in Traditional Societies

Hunter-Gatherer Society: Pre-religious Morality
Horticultural Societies: Religion as Moral System
Agrarian Societies: Legitimizing Hierarchy
The Axial Age
The Growth of Monotheism Research on Monotheism.
4 Biological Underpinnings .
A Theory of Emotions
Research on Primates
Research with Babies and Children
Experimental Economics: The Ultimatum References
5  Secularizing Morality
Rights as the New Moral System
Human Rights as a Global, Moral System Institutionalizing Human Rights
6  Convergence and Frontiers
Scenario 1: Human Rights as Myth and Ceremony
Scenario 2: Further Expansion of Rights
Human Rights: An Applied Sociology.
FOR MORE INFORMATION.....

Friday, October 17, 2014

Traveling While Arab

By Alaa Al Aswany

The New York Times – October 16, 2014

Some years ago, I was invited to a literary festival in London whose slogan was “change the world.” I had some festival brochures in my hand as I went through the usual entry process at Heathrow Airport. But before I reached the exit, I was surprised to be stopped by a police officer. He examined my passport and leafed through the brochures. Then he asked, “How do you wish to change the world?”

His demeanor was apprehensive, so I took the question seriously and started explaining, in simple terms, that I was an author invited to the festival, that I had not personally chosen the slogan but it implied changing the way people think by means of writing. He seemed persuaded but, all the same, took my passport and I had to wait half an hour before it was returned.

I could provide scores of similar anecdotes. My literary works have been translated into 35 languages, and so I have traveled to various countries for numerous seminars and book signings. Despite the amicable way I am treated by people in the book world, in airports I am just another Arab, a potential terrorist.


READ MORE....

From Miasma to Ebola: The History of Racist Moral Panic Over Disease

By Stassa Edwards

Jezebel – Tuesday October 14, 2014

On October 1st, the New York Times published a photograph of a four-year-old girl in Sierra Leone. In the photograph, the anonymous little girl lies on a floor covered with urine and vomit, one arm tucked underneath her head, the other wrapped around her small stomach. Her eyes are glassy, returning the photographer's gaze. The photograph is tightly focused on her figure, but in the background the viewer can make out crude vials to catch bodily fluids and an out-of-focus corpse awaiting disposal.

The photograph, by Samuel Aranda, accompanied a story headlined "A Hospital From Hell, in a City Swamped by Ebola." Within it, the Times reporter verbally re-paints this hellish landscape where four-year-olds lie "on the floor in urine, motionless, bleeding from her mouth, her eyes open." Where she will probably die amidst "pools of patients' bodily fluids," "foul-smelling hospital wards," "pools of infectious waste," all overseen by an undertrained medical staff "wearing merely bluejeans" and "not wearing gloves.”

Aranda's photograph is in stark contrast to the images of white Ebola patients that have emerged from the United States and Spain. In these images the patient, and their doctors, are almost completely hidden; wrapped in hazmat suits and shrouded from public view, their identities are protected. The suffering is invisible, as is the sense of stench produced by bodily fluids: these photographs are meant to reassure Westerners that sanitation will protect us, that contagion is contained.

Pernicious undertones lurk in these parallel representations of Ebola, metaphors that encode histories of nationalism and narratives of disease. African illness is represented as a suffering child, debased in its own disease-ridden waste; like the continent, it is infantile, dirty and primitive. Yet when the same disease is graphed onto the bodies of Americans and Europeans, it morphs into a heroic narrative: one of bold doctors and priests struck down, of experimental serums, of hazmat suits and the mastery of modern technology over contaminating, foreign disease. These parallel representations work on a series of simple, historic dualisms: black and white, good and evil, clean and unclean.

READ MORE....

Monday, October 6, 2014

Who Are ‘We the People’?

By ERIC L. LEWIS

The New York Times - OCT. 4, 2014 

WHO is a person? How do you qualify for basic human rights? What is required for you to be able to speak or worship freely or to be free from torture?

Throughout American history, the Supreme Court has considered and reconsidered the criteria for membership in the club of rights, oscillating between a vision limiting rights to preferred groups and another granting rights to all who require protection. These competing visions have led to some strange results.

Corporations (as well as unions) can spend on political speech to further their group interests as though they were individual political actors. Corporations can assert religious rights to gain legal exemptions from laws that would otherwise apply to them. Muslim detainees at Guantánamo Bay, however, have none of these rights.

As a corporate litigator who has also spent more than a decade defending Guantánamo detainees, I have been trying to figure out why corporations are worthy of court protection and Muslims held in indefinite detention without trial by the United States at a naval base in Cuba are not.

The direction of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. over the past decade has been anything but consistent. As the court readies itself for another term, it may not be possible to speak of a Roberts court jurisprudence at all. Even within the conservative and liberal blocs there are a range of views on the limits of executive power, the relationship between the federal government and the states, the protection of politically expressive speech and the applicability of the Constitution abroad. But the bulk of the most controversial cases come down to 4-to-4 bloc voting, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s worldview defining the court’s path.

READ MORE....

Sunday, October 5, 2014

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS SPECIAL ISSUE OF CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY A CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

We are constantly confronted by competing and contradictory narratives concerning the importance of education. On one hand, a steady mantra stresses success in the new economy requires at least a college degree—and evidence shows that workers with a college degree earn more and get better jobs over their working lives. On the other hand, the educational system in the US is under assault as public sector funding at all levels is cut, teachers as public sector workers are demonized, and by everyone’s assessment the US is rapidly moving towards a society where a select few receive an elite education and the rest are being left behind. The editors of Critical Sociology are looking for scholarship that delves into the nature and consequences of education—both within the US and comparatively. At a time when costs to students in public universities in the US double while state governments cut allocations, we read that Germany has decided higher education for all will be free of fees and tuition costs. Are any colleges educating underserved students without leaving them with crippling debts, and if so how? Students and teachers in Colorado resisted revisionist changes to the high school curriculum, are these strategies for institutions of higher education? What is the future for the next generation in the US? How can we understand the logic and role of education (and not pedagogy) under advanced capitalism in the neoliberal era?
Some suggestive topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
* 600,000 students in the US attend colleges where the dropout rate is 85 percent
* many students amass debt but leave without a degree, facing a life of indentured work
* by some estimates three quarters of all college instruction is done by casualized faculty
* school budgets are driven by administrative and not instructional costs
* slashed public sector support for education shift costs onto students
* corporate logic (failed and successful) reshapes governance and decision-making
* faculty are silenced under rules of "civility"
* faculty should avoid "disturbing" students with content that may raise challenges
* graduate program recruit students without funding and few job prospects
* institutions fail to recruit underserved faculty and students
Potential contributors should send a proposal containing a tentative title, a short (100-150 word) abstract, and contact/affiliation details to critical.sociology (at) gmail.com by 1 December 2014; please put EDUCATION SYMPOSIUM in your subject line. All authors will be notified by 15 January and first drafts of papers will be due by 15 June. We plan on having a session at the annual Critical Sociology one-day conference after the SSSP annual meetings in Chicago, where authors will discuss their draft papers and get feedback.
Depending on the number of submissions, we anticipate producing an edited volume to augment the journal symposium. Contact David Fasenfest, Editor, at the email above with any questions.

Monday, September 29, 2014

A New Book: Human Rights as Social Construction

Human Rights as Social Construction

Benjamin Gregg

Cambridge University Press - August 2013

Most conceptions of human rights rely on metaphysical or theological assumptions that construe them as possible only as something imposed from outside existing communities. Most people, in other words, presume that human rights come from nature, God, or the United Nations. This book argues that reliance on such putative sources actually undermines human rights. Benjamin Gregg envisions an alternative; he sees human rights as locally developed, freely embraced, and indigenously valid. Human rights, he posits, can be created by the average, ordinary people to whom they are addressed, and that they are valid only if embraced by those to whom they would apply. To view human rights in this manner is to increase the chances and opportunities that more people across the globe will come to embrace them.

Table of Contents 
Part I. This-Worldly Norms, Local Not Universal:
1. Human rights: political not theological
2. Human rights: political not metaphysical
3. Generating universal human rights out of local norms
Part II. This-Worldly Resources for Human Rights as Social Construction:
4. Cultural resources: individuals as authors of human rights
5. Neurobiological resources: emotions and natural altruism in support of human rights
Part III. This-Worldly Means of Advancing the Human-Rights Idea:
6. Translating human rights into local cultural vernaculars
7. Advancing human rights through cognitive re-framing
Part IV. Human Rights, Future Tense: Human Nature and Political Community Reconceived:
8. Human rights via human nature as cultural choice
9. The human-rights state
Part V. Coda:
10. What is lost, and what gained, by human rights as social construction.

READ MORE....

A New Book: The Human Rights Enterprise

The Human Rights Enterprise: Political Sociology, State Power, and Social Movements

William T. Armaline , Davita S. Glasberg and Bandana Purkayastha

Polity Press - September 2014

Why do powerful states like the U.S., U.K., China, and Russia repeatedly fail to meet their international legal obligations as defined by human rights instruments? How does global capitalism affect states’ ability to implement human rights, particularly in the context of global recession, state austerity, perpetual war, and environmental crisis? How are political and civil rights undermined as part of moves to impose security and surveillance regimes?
This book presents a framework for understanding human rights as a terrain of struggle over power between states, private interests, and organized, “bottom-up” social movements. The authors develop a critical sociology of human rights focusing on the concept of the <em>human rights enterprise</em>: the process through which rights are defined and realized. While states are designated arbiters of human rights according to human rights instruments, they do not exist in a vacuum. Political sociology helps us to understand how global neoliberalism and powerful non-governmental actors (particularly economic actors such as corporations and financial institutions) deeply affect states’ ability and likelihood to enforce human rights standards.
This book offers keen insights for understanding rights claims, and the institutionalization of, access to, and restrictions on human rights. It will be invaluable to human rights advocates, and undergraduate and graduate students across the social sciences.

Table of Contents
1. The Human Rights Enterprise and a Critical Sociology of Human Rights
2. Power and the State: Global Economic Restructuring and the Global Recession
3. The Human Rights Enterprise: A Genealogy of Continuing Struggles
4. Private Tyrannies: Rethinking the Rights of “Corporate Citizens”
5. Current Contexts and Implications for Human Rights Praxis

READ MORE....

Saturday, September 20, 2014

The real problem with the Canadian Human Rights Museum

Why have we built a $300-million tribute to human rights just a few kilometres away from one of Canada’s most destitute neighbourhoods?

Umut Özsu  

THE STAR.COM - Wed Sep 17 2014

On Sept. 20, more than a decade after it was first conceived, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights will open its doors. A product of government funding and philanthropic donations, the museum dominates The Forks, a historically important section of downtown Winnipeg. Its very edifice — encased in glass and spiralling to a height of no less than 100 metres — has been designed as a “tower of hope.”
Much has been written over the years about the museum. Its supporters have claimed that Canada is an apt location for a human rights museum, and that the building will revitalize a city that has long been identified with its crippling winter, attracting large numbers of tourists and students in an effort to underscore Winnipeg’s diversity.
Its detractors have raised concerns about curatorial content and argued that it is a significant waste of resources, particularly as there is little evidence that the museum — which has cost more than $300 million — will contribute meaningfully to the local and provincial economy.

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CFP: Human Rights and Justice Conference

CFP: Human Rights and Justice Conference

Human Rights and Justice
The Hague Institute for Global Justice
8 – 10 June 2015
4th joint conference, organized by:
Human Rights Section, International Studies Association (ISA)
Human Rights Section, American Political Science Association (APSA)
Human Rights Research Committee, International Political Science Association (IPSA)
Standing Group on Human Rights and Transitional Justice, European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR)
In association with:
The Hague Institute for Global Justice (THIGJ)
Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS)
International Human Rights Law Interest Group, European Society of International Law (ESIL)
Transitional Justice and Rule of Law Interest Group, American Society of International Law (ASIL)
The human rights sections of the International Studies Association , the American Political Science Association, the European Consortium for Political Research, the International Political Science Association are pleased to announce the third joint international conference on human rights, on the theme “Human Rights and Justice ” to take place 8-10 June 2015 at The Hague Institute for Global Justice. The conference will take place immediately before the annual meeting of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (11 – 13 June), also in The Hague.
Contemporary human rights research and promotion encompasses the application and implementation of international human rights norms, standards as well as legal and political binding treaties. Yet, this is only one side of the coin of what we often claim human rights to achieve: justice. Apart from being a complex concept based on human rights and the rule of law, justice is closely linked to the full development, promotion and fulfilment of human rights and people. It moreover depends on the procedures of good governance and equal access mechanisms installed that can realize justice on a daily basis. Justice is a general notion that can be achieved through, i.e. a human rights based approach or legal and political instruments and mechanism.
This joint conference will ask researchers and policymakers from academia, think tanks, IOs and NGOs to deal with various aspects of justice and human rights. Papers should highlight how and to what extent human rights in all aspects and levels of governance, law and decision making allow or deny access to justice. This may include questions regarding whether and to what extent the international human rights regime can address adequately the challenges of human rights implementation and justice, as well as how regional, national, and local mechanisms may address human rights challenges. Paper and panel proposals that also address the issues such as climate justice, transitional justice or cyber justice as well as access to justice and global distributive justice are welcome. Some of the questions to be addressed at the conference include:
• Are human rights and justice always compatible?
• How do we conceptualize the relationship between human rights and justice?
• What role does global distributive justice play in advancing human rights?
• How do we ensure that domestic justice systems address a wide range of human rights issues?
• Are international justice institutions (e.g. International Criminal Court, European Court of Human Rights, Inter-American Court, African Court on Human and People’s Rights) adequate for addressing human rights issues?
• How have norms regarding justice and human rights evolved?
The conference format will be a mixture of small panels with plenary keynote sessions. We hope that small panels will facilitate discussion and interchange among the participants, and the overall conference format will contribute to an intimate and relaxed experience.
Consideration will be given to publishing an edited volume with some of the papers from the conference.
Submissions will open shortly. Please note that proposals must relate to the theme of the conference in some manner to be considered. Each full panel proposal should include exactly 4 papers plus a chair and discussant. The deadline for submissions is 14 November 2014. Notification of acceptances will be sent by e-mail by 20 December 2014.
A link to the submission system will be found here by mid-September:
http://global-human-rights.org/HRJ.html
This conference is being held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Academic Council on the United Nations System, which will have as its theme “The United Nations at 70: Guaranteeing Security and Justice.” Individuals registering for one conference will be eligible for a 20% discount on registration for the other conference. More information will be provided.
Conference Chairs
Anja Mihr, The Hague Institute for Global Justice & Utrecht University
Kurt Mills, University of Glasgow
Program Committee
Alison Brysk, University of California, Santa Barbara
Melissa Labonte, Fordham University
For more information please contact:
Program: HumanRightsandJusticeProgram@gmail.com
Registration: HumanRightsandJusticeReg@gmail.com
Other conference questions: HumanRightsandJustice2015@gmail.com

Decolonial Strategies and Dialogue in the Human Rights Field: A Manifestomore by Jose-Manuel Barreto

Human Rights from a Third World Perspective: Critique, History and International Law

Edited by José-Manuel Barreto

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012

Globalization, interdisciplinarity, and the critique of the Eurocentric canon are transforming the theory and practice of human rights. This collection takes up the point of view of the colonized in order to unsettle and supplement the conventional understanding of human rights. Putting together insights coming from Decolonial Thinking, the Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL), Radical Black Theory and Subaltern Studies, the authors construct a new history and theory of human rights, and a more comprehensive understanding of international human rights law in the background of modern colonialism and the struggle for global justice. An exercise of dialogical and interdisciplinary thinking, this collection of articles by leading scholars puts into conversation important areas of research on human rights, namely philosophy or theory of human rights, history, and constitutional and international law. This book combines critical consciousness and moral sensibility, and offers methods of interpretation or hermeneutical strategies to advance the project of decolonizing human rights, a veritable tool-box to create new Third-World discourses of human rights.

To Download the book.

Friday, August 29, 2014

The European Court of Human Rights: would Marx have endorsed it?

Başak Çalı

Open Democracy - 27 August 2014

It’s not hard to find a critic of the European Court of Human Rights these days. I have no intention, in this post, of joining this increasingly voluble choir of nationalists, fear-mongers and far right or authoritarian regimes. What I want to do is to approach the ECHR in the context of this series of articles on human rights and liberalism, in particular market liberalism, and ask whether Marx would have endorsed the Court as an ‘intrinsic human good’ for  Europeans?
Could the ECHR have convinced Marx that it has succeeded in lifting the veil on abstract rights masking substantive injustices as per his critique of rights in Capital? Could it persuade him it has fought against civil rights becoming a banner for liberal egoism and individualism as per On the Jewish Question?

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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Book Review: Failing to Protect: The UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights by Rosa Freedman

The United Nations was established to safeguard world peace and security, development, and human rights, yet it is undeniable that it sometimes fails to protect the rights of a great many people. This book aims to look at the reasons for that failure. Rosa Freedman offers explanations of how and why the organisation is unable, at best, or unwilling, at worst, to protect human rights. Ben Warwick recommends this read for the understanding of global inaction on grave rights abuses it brings.

Failing to Protect: The UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights. Rosa Freedman. C Hurst & Co. May 2014.

Imagine a family sitting warm, safe, and comfortable at home, when the six o’clock news beams pictures of desperation and gross human rights violations in to their living room. “Switch that off; change the channel”, someone says. “I don’t want to think about that while I eat my dinner”.
A stark, unpleasant, and disturbing picture. Yet Rosa Freedman, in Failing to Protect: The UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights, forces us consider whether the United Nations also ‘changes the channel’ when it is presented with accounts of systematic rights abuses. Freedman, a senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, is the author of authoritative works on the UN Human Rights Council and is very well placed to guide readers through the UN’s complexities. Freedman uses this expertise to uncover the conspicuous contrasts between the calculating, paralysing politics of countries at the UN, and the horrific violations of human rights they discuss. This book shatters any illusion that the UN as it currently stands is a wholly benign agent for change.
Designed to be accessible to non-specialists, the book avoids the endless acronyms, committee names and document numbers that are often a feature of works in this area The aim of the text is to encourage the public-at-large to ‘start asking questions’ (p. xi), and it remains true to this aim by equipping readers with the information needed to engage in central debates. Freeman details the relevant sources of law, and gives user-friendly analogies with domestic legal situations to make the complexities of international law comprehensible. The book is rich with examples of past failures of the UN, and reflects the author’s clear understanding of the finest details of UN architecture. Freedman also analyses the UN human rights machinery, and key conceptual debates (such as those surrounding cultural relativism (ch. 5)), in a way that empowers the reader to form their own view and become involved in the reform projects.

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A New Book: Failing to Protect The UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights

By Rosa Freedman



Every year tens of millions of individuals suffer grave abuses of their human rights. These violations occur worldwide, in war-torn countries and in the wealthiest states. Despite many of the abuses being well-documented, little seems to be done to stop them from happening. The United Nations was established to safeguard world peace and security, development, and human rights yet it is undeniable that currently it is failing to protect the rights of a great many people –– from the victims of ethnic cleansing, to migrants, those displaced by war and women who suffer horrendous abuse. This book looks at the reasons for that failure. Using concrete examples intertwined with explanations of the law and politics of the UN, Rosa Freedman offers clear explanations of how and why the Organisation is unable, at best, or unwilling, at worst, to protect human rights. Written for a non-specialist audience, her book also seeks to explain why certain countries and political blocs manipulate and undermine the UN’s human rights machinery. Failing to Protect demonstrates the urgent need for radical reform of the machinery of human rights protection at the international level.

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Tuesday, July 1, 2014

A New Website: Teaching Human Rights

An International Student-Teacher Collaboratory

Understanding world issues through interdisciplinary lenses.  The Summer Intensive in Human Rights will continue the discussion of interna­tional human rights in the 21st century, considering broad perspectives on what constitutes human rights in an increasingly diverse and global society. In addition to selecting from the courses below, students also have the opportunity to attend a speaker series and engage with a scholar-in-residence.

http://www.teachinghumanrights.org/node

Thursday, June 19, 2014

The Fetish of Staring at Iran’s Women

By HALEH ANVARI

The New York Times - JUNE 16, 2014

TEHRAN — I took a series of photographs of myself in 2007 that show me sitting on the toilet, weighing myself, and shaving my legs in the bath. I shot them as an angry response to an encounter with a gallery owner in London’s artsy Brick Lane. I had offered him photos of colorful chadors — an attempt to question the black chador as the icon of Iran by showing the world that Iranian women were more than this piece of black cloth. The gallery owner wasn’t impressed. “Do you have any photos of Iranian women in their private moments?” he asked.
As an Iranian with a reinforced sense of the private-public divide we navigate daily in our country, I found his curiosity offensive. So I shot my “Private Moments” in a sardonic spirit, to show that Iranian women are like all women around the world if you get past the visual hurdle of the hijab. But I never shared those, not just because I would never get a permit to show them publicly in Iran, but also because I am prepared to go only so far to prove a point. Call me old-fashioned.

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Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Não Vai Ter Copa Race, Class and the World Cup in Brazil

By MIKE LaSUSA

Counter Punch -  June 10, 2014

At 5pm local time on June 12, the national soccer teams of Brazil and Croatia will kick off the 2014 World Cup at the São Paulo Arena in Brazil’s largest city. The players will compete before a live crowd of tens of thousands and a televised audience of millions more.  At a total cost of roughly $11 billion - and at least eight workers’ lives – Brazil will host the most expensive World Cup in history. Though this is not to understate the scandalous unfolding atrocity in Qatar). Brazilians overwhelmingly supported bringing the event to their country when FIFA awarded them the honor in 2007 (no other nation in the Americas volunteered), but a recent poll from DataFolha indicates that a majority of citizens now oppose it.  Widespread anti-Cup protests have been roiling Brazil’s cities and social media networks for months. The demonstrators’ grievances range from public transportation fare hikes to inadequate wages, housing, education, security and healthcare, among other things. But as evidenced by their use of the slogan “Não vai ter Copa!” (“There will be no Cup!”), it is clear that they intend to use the lavish international spectacle both as a symbol of their concerns and a spotlight to shine on them.  On June 3, a group of anti-Cup activists inflated giant soccer balls in the capital city Brasilia. Protest organizer Antonio Carlos Costa told Agence France Presse, ”We want the Brazilian government to ask the nation’s forgiveness because it promised something it never delivered. It invested a fortune of public money in things that weren’t necessary.” A recent Pew poll found that 61% of respondents believed hosting the World Cup is a ”bad thing” “because it takes money away from public services.”

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Saturday, June 7, 2014

Open Letter to Human Right Watch

350 Fifth Avenue, 34th floor New York, NY 10118-3299 USA To the Board of Directors

We must remember the words of the song by Florence Reece

“Which Side Are You On?”

We, the undersigned, represent organizations dedicated to the defense of human rights, the provision of adequate healthcare, housing, and nutrition for all the world’s people–the 99%, as stated in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. We are writing to protest a series of reports by Human Rights Watch, which demean, malign, and slander the Government of Venezuela while constantly describing it as “repressive”, “dictatorial”, etc.

In your February 21, 2014 article you stated,

Nicolas Maduro government’s immediate response to the violence on February 12 was to blame Lopez and other opposition leaders. Minister of Foreign Affairs Elías Jaua declared that Lopez was the ‘intellectual author’ of the killings, and a judge promptly ordered that Lopez be detained. The government has not made public any credible evidence to substantiate these allegations.

Shocking is an understatement to this accusation. Both Leopoldo Lopez and Marina Corina Machado went on national television and declared war against the democratically elected government of Nicolas Maduro in what was called, La Salida. Is an all-out call to violence on national television insufficient “credible evidence”?

What would occur if U.S. citizens appeared on national television and made an all-out call to end President Obama’s second term? These people would have immediately been incarcerated, with or without charges, and the networks would have been shut-down for permitting it. Ironically, in Venezuela, the networks still continue their media distortion campaigns. And although Lopez should have been charged with terrorism because of the violence that has been unleashed on the country due to “La Salida”, he was only charged with inciting violence and so will be in jail for less than two years. Equally, It is outrageous that as a supposed defender of human rights, HRW has NEVER condemned the assassination of over 250 peasants who have been murdered by paramilitaries and mercenaries contracted by big-land owners in Venezuela. Do you not have sufficient “credible evidence” to denounce this? An evident attack rather than an objective evaluation is clearly seen by the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth, when he stated in 2012 that Venezuela is “the most abusive” nation in Latin America; even though, Colombia, the neighboring country, is known to have some of the worst human rights violations in all of Latin America.

These sweeping condemnations of the Venezuelan government consists largely of unsubstantiated claims by political opponents, examples taken out of context, gross exaggerations, and illogical arguments; it is a total usurp of your ethical and fact-finding standards which state, “We are committed to maintaining high standards of accuracy and fairness, including by seeking out multiple perspectives to develop an in- depth, analytic understanding of events.”

At the same time, Human Rights Watch has chosen to ignore or belittle the great achievements of the Venezuelan government in the areas of education, nutrition, health care, political participation, employment, and many other spheres of activity which are fundamental to the effective exercise of human rights and democracy.

By consistently echoing U.S. State department charges while ignoring, minimizing, or justifying the violent activities of the Venezuelan opposition, Human Rights Watch is defying its mission statement, “Human Rights Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and advance the cause of human rights for all.”

In other words, you have not condemned the opposition for the continual serious attacks on the human rights of all Venezuelan citizens: the guarimba violence by the opposition has killed over 47 people—including a young pregnant woman and caused over US$10 billion in damages.

Moreover, any Democratic Government in the world has the right and duty to protect its citizens and the government against violent protest. Objected evidence shows that the Venezuelan Government has allowed any and all peaceful protest to occur in 2014 and for the prior decade. What they cannot and will not allow is random or targeted violent attacks against individuals or property. Unfortunately, HRW’s reporting completely ignores the preplanned violence of many of the protests of the opposition and by doing this, you completely discredit any objectivity of your organization.

Not surprisingly, your biases are evidenced throughout the Americas: legitimizing the overthrow of democratically elected President Aristide in the 2004 coup in Haiti, the coup in 2009 in Honduras, when HRW did not denounce the killings, arbitrary detentions, physical assaults, or the attacks on the press, many of which have been thoroughly documented, including by the United States government, as revealed in Wikileaks documents.

In the case of Cuba HRW has never denounced that over 3000 Cubans have died in violent assaults and terrorist acts from counter-revolutionary Cuban-American exiles operating from US soil, against US formal law, but with the support or tolerance of US authorities since the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Economic sabotage and the impact of US sanctions have caused billions of dollars in physical damage to the Cuban economy. In the mid-1970s an official US Senate Report documented hundreds of assassination plots against Cuban leaders and even biological attacks against Cuban crops by CIA operatives. HRW NEVER has denounce the US hostility, aggression, and intervention which has not stopped for one second from President Dwight Eisenhower to President Barack Obama against Cuba.

Human Rights Watch's origins were in 1978 was as a propaganda arm of the US State Department's "Helsinki Watch," part of US-Soviet negotiations over bilateral relations. Since then it has become nominally independent, but its personnel and advisors regularly go back-and-forth between government-business-finance and the burgeoning "human rights" industry in the "West."

The "Advisory Committee" of HRW's "Americas Watch" in includes Myles Frechette, Washington's former Ambassador to Colombia, where right-wing paramilitaries carried out notorious massacres, not to speak of being linchpins of the cocaine industry, as well as Michael Shifter, who is a former director of the notoriously subversive National Endowment for Democracy, financed by the US government. Another stellar HRW operative has been Miguel Díaz, a Central Intelligence Agency analyst in the 1990s. Diaz sat on HRW advisory committee from 2003-11. He is now back at the art the State Department serving as “an interlocutor between the intelligence community and non-government experts.”

In October 2013 HRW's "Americas Watch" announced that Joel Motley, managing director at Public Capital Advisors, and Hassan Elmasry, managing partner at Independent Franchise Partners, would be elevated to the Board, two investment bankers, to the Human Rights Watch Board. Motley was a former aide to the late US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a notorious supporter of the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon and hero to conservatives who were alarmed by the growing movement for Black rights in the United States.

In 1981, following the triumph of the Nicaraguan Revolution and the collapse of the US-backed Somoza family dictatorship, HRW's was founded. Washington was anxious that the Sandinista triumph would not extend to El Salvador and Guatemala where revolutionary guerrilla wars were advancing against murderous US-backed regimes.

The Reagan Administration launched a bloody "contra" war against Nicaragua and stepped up its support to the military "death-squad" regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. HRW's "Americas Watch" was a propaganda arm of these renewed US counter-revolutionary policies. They pretended to be "balanced" but mainly aimed at discrediting the revolutionary forces and, as is standard policy, downplayed social and economic injustices and inequality.

The above demonstrates that Human Rights Watch disgracefully supports violent demonstrators who are attempting to overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected government and that HRW is simply another puppet of U.S. terrorism abroad.

Due to the fact that you choose not to denounce the human rights violations perpetrated on all Venezuelans, we ask for the resignation of Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, an end to your political anti-democratic agenda in Venezuela. For an institution such as yours to regain validity and to maintain honesty, credibility, and independence-- you need to close your revolving door to the U.S. government.

We ask that you defend all people’s human rights, and not lie, distort the truth, or manipulate to protect the 1%. And once and for all, take a stand: are you on the side of politics, or on the side of human rights?


Sincerely,

Fred Magdoff
Monthly Review Foundation
Soil Scientist / Writer

Amy B. Demarest
Vermont

Diane Hirsch-Garcia
Union Organizer
LA California

Fr. Luis Barrios
Co-Executive Director, IFCO-Pastor for Peace

Luis Barrios, Ph.D., BCFE
*Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice & Member of Ph.D. faculties in critical social/personality psychology, Graduate Center-City University of New York

Brian Tokar
Institute for Social Ecology
Vermont University

Chuck Kaufman, National Co-Coordinator.Alliance for Global Justice.

Claudia Chaufan, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, Health Policy / Sociology
University of California, San Francisco

Frederick B. Mills, Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and Professor of Philosophy at Bowie State University

Stephen Bartlett Food sovereignty organizer. Coordinates a volunteer agricultural collective and educational programs in Louisville, Kentucky.

Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

Diana Bohn
Nicaragua Center for Community Action (NICCA)
Berkeley, CA
Diana Bohn
NICCA Co-Coordinator

Bert Hestroffer
Teamsters Local #142
Gary, Indiana

Rosa Peñate
1509 Alabama St San Francisco CA 94110

Shirley Pate
Washington, DC