Global Agenda For Social Justice

The Global Agenda for Social Justice provides accessible insights into some of the world’s most pressing social problems and proposes international public policy responses to those problems. Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), chapters examine topics such as criminal justice, media concerns, environmental problems, economic problems, and issues concerning sexualities and gender. They offer recommendations for action by governing officials, policy makers, and the public around key issues of social justice. It will be of interest to scholars, practitioners, advocates, and students interested in public sociology, the study of social problems and the pursuit of social justice.

The Global Agenda for Social Justice provides accessible insights into some of the world’s most pressing social problems and proposes practicable international public policy responses to those problems. Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), chapters examine topics such as education, violence, discrimination, substance abuse, public health, and environment. The volume provides recommendations for action by governing officials, policy makers, and the public around key issues of social justice. The book will be of interest to scholars, practitioners, advocates, journalists, and students interested in public sociology, the study of social problems, and the pursuit of social justice.

Examining topics from criminal justice to media concerns, environmental problems, economic problems and issues concerning sexualities and gender, the 2020 agenda provides accessible insights into some of the most pressing social problems in the United States and proposes public policy responses to those problems.

The book relates three years of history of social movements from Asia and Europe who work on social justice, as a rough overview. The work for the book is mainly done on the ground, day after day, working in villages and cities, with people and their organisations, organising resistance and preparing alternatives. It is based on the fact that European and Asian concerns are identical, in spite of divergent levels of development and wealth, and that the existing international initiatives, such as the ILO’s social protection floors, or the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are perfectly compatible with neoliberal policies. The book goes beyond and sees social commons as a strategic tool for transforming societies. It is basically a project for the sustainability of life, of humans, of societies, and of nature. The book describes the ideas at the basis of the work in different sectors. It is not about the practice of social policies but about the ideas and discourses that can in the end shape the political practices. In sum, this book, presents a new social paradigm. It concretely shows how social justice and environmental justice do go hand in hand.

Winner of the International Studies in Poverty Prize awarded by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and Zed Books. Poverty has become the central focus of global development efforts, with a vast body of research and funding dedicated to its alleviation. And yet, the field of poverty studies remains deeply ideological and has been used to justify wealth and power within the prevailing world order. Andrew Martin Fischer clarifies this deeply political character, from conceptions and measures of poverty through to their application as policies. Poverty as Ideology shows how our dominant approaches to poverty studies have, in fact, served to reinforce the prevailing neoliberal ideology while neglecting the wider interests of social justice that are fundamental to creating more equitable societies. Instead, our development policies have created a 'poverty industry' that obscures the dynamic reproductions of poverty within contemporary capitalist development and promotes segregation in the name of science and charity. Fischer argues that an effective and lasting solution to global poverty requires us to reorient our efforts away from current fixations on productivity and towards more equitable distributions of wealth and resources. This provocative work offers a radical new approach to understanding poverty based on a comprehensive and accessible critique of key concepts and research methods. It upends much of the received wisdom to provide an invaluable resource for students, teachers and researchers across the social sciences.

For over 70 years, the United Nations has worked to advance human conditions globally through its historic agenda for a more peaceful, prosperous, and just world. Through the work of the General Assembly and other programs like the UNESCO World Conferences on Adult Education, the organization has taken a leading role in bringing world leaders together to dialogue on world issues and to set agendas for advancing social and economic justice among and within the regions of the world. The underlying themes of the United Nations’ agenda over the years have been world peace, economic justice, addressing the needs of the world’s most vulnerable populations, and protecting the environment. We draw from the two last two declarations from which the Millennium Development Goals (September 2000) and the Sustainable Development Goals (September 2015) were adopted by world leaders with a focus on addressing the needs of the most vulnerable populations. In this declaration, world leaders committed to uphold the long-standing principles of the organization and to combat extreme poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination and violence against women. The overall objective of the book is to highlight the conditions of vulnerable populations from various contexts globally, and the role adult and higher education can play (and is playing) in advancing the United Nations agenda of social and economic justice and environmental sustainability. Adult education, through research, teaching, and service engagements is contributing to this ongoing effort but as many scholars have noted, our work remains invisible and undocumented. Therefore, this book highlights adult education’s critical partnership in addressing these global issues. It will also begin to fill the void that exists in adult education literature on internationalization of the field.

This informative and incisively written edited collection brings together experts from around the world to discuss issues which the social work and social welfare sectors face every day and to ensure a closer link between evidence-based practice, policy objectives and social development goals. Furthermore, this book reveals how these may affect the conditions of people and demonstrate how the social work and social development community can contribute to sustainable development.

Social workers have been involved in social development for many years, but it is only recently that these ideas have been explicitly applied to social work practice. The result is that a new and distinctive approach to social work practice known as developmental social work has emerged. Developmental social work emphasizes the role of social investment in professional practice. These investments meet the material needs of social work's clients and facilitate their full integration into the social and economic life of the community. Developmental social workers believe that client strengths and capabilities need to be augmented with public resources and services if those served by the profession are to live productive and fulfilling lives. Although developmental social work is inspired by international innovations, particularly in the developing countries, it highly relevant to practice in the United States and other Western nations. In the first book to lay out a clear framework for developmental social work practice, chapters will focus on the traditional fields of social work practice, showing how social investment strategies can be adopted by social workers in their daily practice with populations including families and children, people with mental illness, homeless youth, people with disabilities, the elderly, and those in the correctional system. By facilitating clients' full social and economic participation through a variety of strategies, such as microenterprise or asset-building programs, practitioners can help bring about meaningful changes in clients' lives and throughout their communities. The editors and contributors offer a highly original exposition of developmental social work theory and practice, providing a definitive guide to an emerging and exciting new approach to practice.