Reproducing Inequities

Residents of Haiti face a grim reality of starvation, violence, lack of economic opportunity, and minimal health care. For years, aid organizations have unsuccessfully attempted to alleviate the problems by creating health and family planning centers, including one modern (and, by local standards, luxurious) clinic of Cité Soleil. In Reproducing Inequities, M. Catherine Maternowska argues that we too easily overlook the political dynamics that shape choices about family planning. Through a detailed study of the attempt to provide modern contraception in the community of Cité Soleil, Maternowska demonstrates the complex interplay between local and global politics that so often thwarts well-intended policy initiatives.

Develops a new account of historical injustice and redress, demonstrating why a consideration of history is crucial for gender equality.

This comprehensive Handbook examines public policy evaluation in democracies. Focusing on the political dimension of the evaluation process, it argues that policy evaluation can be an emancipatory tool, reducing social inequalities and exclusion, and offers novel suggestions on how evaluations can be used to improve democratic policymaking.

Contemporary racism, sexism, and heterosexism all share an important feature: they rely on less overt forms of discrimination that preserve, protect, and mask the power of the dominant group. In this context, racism is colorblind, sexism is gender blind, and heterosexism is sexuality blind. This, however, creates all manner of issues for people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ folks who must navigate a culture that sees discrimination and inequality as a thing of the past. Indeed, despite the multitude of legal, social, and political advances made by these groups, inequality continues to persist, but often in a more subtle, covert, and often invisible manner. This edited book makes visible the multitude of subtle ways racism, sexism, and heterosexism persist in an era where many believe such inequalities are in the past. To do so, the authors contributing to this book focus on interpersonal relationships--as interpersonal relationships are one of the fundamental places where inequality is reproduced. The value of this edited volume comes from giving academics, students, and activists a more comprehensive understanding of what inequality looks like in the contemporary United States, and how this inequality is reproduced in our everyday relationships. This information will also be useful for social justice activists and policy makers who can rely on our research to make more informed decisions that benefit marginalized groups. This book serves as an insightful resource for academicians who are interested in better understanding the ways inequality is reproduced in the contemporary United States, and instructors teaching about how inequality has changed over time, what contemporary inequality/discrimination looks like, and social justice-oriented faculty who want to expose and identify inequalities in order to better make social change.

With contributions from leading researchers in 14 different European countries, this volume provides a comprehensive source of reference for the reader interested in what really works in the field of health promotion.

A university education has long been seen as the gateway to upward social mobility for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and as a way of reproducing social advantage for the better off. With the number of young people from the very highest socio-economic groups entering university in the UK having effectively been at saturation point for several decades, the expansion witnessed in participation rates over the last few decades has largely been achieved by a modest broadening of the base of the undergraduate population in terms of both social class and ethnic diversity. However, a growing body of evidence exists in the continuation of unequal graduate outcomes. This can be seen in terms of employment trajectories in the UK. The issue of just who enjoys access to which university, and the experiences and outcomes of graduates from different institutions remain central to questions of social justice, notably higher education’s contribution to social mobility and to the reproduction of social inequality. This collection of contemporary original writings explores these issues in a range of specific contexts, and through employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. The relationship between higher education and social mobility has probably never been under closer scrutiny. This volume will appeal to academics, policy makers, and commentators alike. Higher Education and Social Inequalities is an important contribution to the public and academic debate.

Argues that racial inequality reproduces itself automatically over time because early unfair advantage for whites has paved the way for continuing advantage This book is designed to change the way we think about racial inequality. Long after the passage of civil rights laws, blacks and Latinos possess barely a nickel of wealth for every dollar that whites have. Why have we made so little progress? Legal scholar Daria Roithmayr provocatively argues that racial inequality lives on because white advantage functions as a powerful self-reinforcing monopoly, reproducing itself automatically from generation to generation even in the absence of intentional discrimination. Drawing on work in antitrust law and a range of other disciplines, Roithmayr brilliantly compares the dynamics of white advantage to the unfair tactics of giants like AT&T and Microsoft. With penetrating insight, Roithmayr locates the engine of white monopoly in positive feedback loops that connect the dramatic disparity of Jim Crow to modern racial gaps in jobs, housing and education. Wealthy white neighborhoods fund public schools that then turn out wealthy white neighbors. Whites with lucrative jobs informally refer their friends, who refer their friends, and so on. Roithmayr concludes that racial inequality might now be locked in place, unless policymakers immediately take drastic steps to dismantle this oppressive system.

Collection uses ethnographies of globalization to explore the consequences of interactions between global processes and national structures on human reproduction and reproductive health in a range of contexts.