Rethinking Social Justice

The discourse of social justice has been much contested in India ever since the time of the Mandal Commission report. Nearly four decades on, debates on culture and identity remain strong. Rather than studying the concept of social justice in isolation, in distinct social, political or economic terms, Rethinking Social Justice offers a more transdisciplinary approach to envisioning a just society that encompasses the intersecting issues of caste, capital, nationalism, gender, region, urban planning and visual representation. Divided into five broad thematic sections Politics of Culture and Identity; Critical Social History; Nation and the Region; Political Economy; and Cinema and Society this volume brings together perspectives from across disciplines to rethink the question of social justice, in the process opening up a view of the panorama of Indian politics. This collection is an homage to M. S. S. Pandian who, through his writings on political economy, Dravidian politics, film studies, and social and intellectual history, interrogated questions of caste, identity and cultural elitism in his broader quest for social justice. In this volume, eminent scholars friends and colleagues of Pandian enter into a dialogue with Pandian s life-work, cut short by his untimely demise in 2014. They build upon his legacy to not only critically evaluate politics and society, but also subject mainstream culture to an equally critical evaluation. Social scientists, activists, journalists, policymakers and film critics will find immense value in this insightful collection of essays.

The dominant approach to economic policy has so far failed to adequately address the pressing challenges the world faces today: extreme poverty, widespread joblessness and precarious employment, burgeoning inequality, and large-scale environmental threats. This message was brought home forcibly by the 2008 global economic crisis. Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice shows how human rights have the potential to transform economic thinking and policy-making with far-reaching consequences for social justice. The authors make the case for a new normative and analytical framework, based on a broader range of objectives which have the potential to increase the substantive freedoms and choices people enjoy in the course of their lives and not on not upon narrow goals such as the growth of gross domestic product. The book covers a range of issues including inequality, fiscal and monetary policy, international development assistance, financial markets, globalization, and economic instability. This new approach allows for a complex interaction between individual rights, collective rights and collective action, as well as encompassing a legal framework which offers formal mechanisms through which unjust policy can be protested. This highly original and accessible book will be essential reading for human rights advocates, economists, policy-makers and those working on questions of social justice.

Peter Pericles Trifonas has assembled internationally acclaimed theorists and educational practitioners whose essays explore various constructions, representations, and uses of difference in educational contexts. These essays strive to bridge competing discourses of difference--for instance, feminist or anti-racist pedagogical models--to create a more inclusive education that adheres to principles of equity and social justice.

An anthology of more than 60 articles documenting the history and the how-tos of social justice unionism. Together, they describe the growing movement to forge multiracial alliances with communities to defend and transform public education.

The contributors to this edited volume explore the effects of various development strategies and associated macroeconomic policies on women’s well-being and progress towards gender equality. Detailed analyses of major UN reports on gender reveal the different approaches to assessing absolute and relative progress for women and the need to take into account the specifics of policy regimes when making such assessments. The book argues that neoliberal policies, especially the liberalization of trade and investment, make it difficult to close gender wage and earnings gaps, and new gender sensitive policies need to be devised. These and other issues are all examined in more detail in several gendered development histories of countries from Latin America and Asia.

Culture.

"Darrow Miller and his colleagues strip away the ideological baggage that the term social justice has acquired over time to reveal its heart: compassion that is firmly rooted in a biblical worldview. Their invitation to the church to embrace it as a key component of its mission is a clarion call that must not and cannot be ignored."--Abraham George, director of International Church Mobilization, International Justice Mission (IJM).

In Rethinking Poverty, James P. Bailey argues that most contemporary policies aimed at reducing poverty in the United States are flawed because they focus solely on insufficient income. Bailey argues that traditional policies such as minimum wage laws, food stamps, housing subsidies, earned income tax credits, and other forms of cash and non-cash income supports need to be complemented by efforts that enable the poor to save and accumulate assets. Drawing on Michael Sherraden’s work on asset building and scholarship by Melvin Oliver, Thomas Shapiro, and Dalton Conley on asset discrimination, Bailey presents us with a novel and promising way forward to combat persistent and morally unacceptable poverty in the United States and around the world. Rethinking Poverty makes use of a significant body of Catholic social teachings in its argument for an asset development strategy to reduce poverty. These Catholic teachings include, among others, principles of human dignity, the social nature of the person, the common good, and the preferential option for the poor. These principles and the related social analyses have not yet been brought to bear on the idea of asset-building for the poor by those working within the Catholic social justice tradition. This book redresses this shortcoming, and further, claims that a Catholic moral argument for asset-building for the poor can be complemented and enriched by Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach.” This book will affect current debates and practical ways to reduce poverty, as well as the future direction of Catholic social teaching.