Teaching for Social Justice and Social Action

Social justice education involves promoting critical awareness of social inequalities and developing skills that work against these inequalities. This article describes a general theoretical framework for social justice education, describes general strategies for facilitating students' social justice awareness and engagement, identifies challenges to social education, and highlights articles in the special issue that address these themes.     

When Identifying Health Disparities as a Problem Is a Problem: Pedagogical Strategies for Examining Racialized Contexts

The current study presents a critical discussion on community responses to health disparity research and the need for utilizing pedagogical strategies to prepare students to understand and address health disparities in racialized contexts. Qualitative research methods were used to examine community responses to media stories on two health disparity research projects, and four themes emerged: naming health disparities is a tool for dividing, structural racism does not exist, naming of health disparities is a political act, and health disparities exist because of individual-level deficiencies. The implications for teaching students about racial health disparities are presented and discussed.     

Global and Urban Engagement to Promote Social Justice: Reflections of One’s Faith Tradition

The current study compared perceptions on self-report measures of university mission identity and social justice attitudes between general university students (151 women, 63 men; M age = 19.72, SD = 1.91) and campus ministry students (64 women, 24 men; M age = 19.85, SD = 1.71). Results demonstrated that campus ministry students scored significantly higher on each of four social justice and global/urban engagement subscales. Implications suggest that perceptions of university mission-identity are linked to social justice attitudes, yet campus ministry students compared to regular student samples may be linked to a stronger emphasis on social justice through campus activity.     

国家财政性教育经费地区分配问题研究

2012年国家财政性教育经费占国内生产总值比例达到4%,这是我国教育史上的一座丰碑。随着国家财政性教育经费数量的不断增长,经费的地区分配问题就越显突出。文章对我国东部、中部和西部地区过去14年间的国家财政性教育经费分配状况进行实证研究,发现经费分配自身及其所引发的问题,提出合理分配国家财政性教育经费应做到"一延续、二提高、三扩大、四发展"。     

Ideals of justice: goals vs. constraints

Amartya Sen describes John Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness’ as ‘transcendental institutionalism’ and develops his realization-focused approach in contrast. But Rawls is no transcendental institutionalist, and Sen’s construal of their opposition occludes a third, relation-based position and a valuable and practical form of ideal theory. What Sen calls transcendental institutionalism and realization-focused comparative theory each treat justice as something to bring about, a problem for experts. A third position treats justice in terms of how we relate to one another rather than of achievement. This position, called ‘justice as reciprocity,’ is consistent with Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness’ and Sen’s normative aspirations, and might form the basis of new and fruitful dialogue between them. By treating justice as a question of how we relate to one another, and treating relation-based ideals as the basis of respectful behavioral constraints (rather than of ends to pursue), ‘justice as reciprocity’ grounds an everyday form of just democratic citizenship.     

Tackling invisible frontiers of global justice: an extension of Sen’s ‘Comparison View of Justice’ into IR

A central challenge of Amartya Sen’s comparative view of justice is to bring cultural diversity to bear on conceptualizing global justice, which includes building bridges across cultures that enable effective action, and rendering compatible the most beneficent of Rawlsian (or transcendental) intentions with irreducible cultural diversity. For social scientists meeting this challenge requires, first, taking account of variation of social practices in the social construction of meaning, and second, uncovering invisible frontiers of global justice that remain hidden due to conceptual or empirical oversight. The latter is especially true for contemporary International Relations (IR) theory, which assumes state actors to be the main interlocutors in the global realm, and thus precludes consideration of micro-level forms of inter-national relations (understood as interaction among all types of actors that takes place across country borders and that bears traits of national identity). Alternatively, Sen’s micro-perspectival approach offers a welcome support for pluralist approaches that both appreciate non-state access to contestation in the international arena, and account for the meaning-in-use of fundamental norms (democracy, rule of law, human rights) in different cultural and inter-national contexts.     

劳动教养制度之存与废——以效率和正义为视角

《立法法》颁布以来,劳动教养制度存在的法理基础受到了挑战,效率与正义作为两种重的法的价值,以此角度分析劳动教养制度之存废具有重价值。     

欧洲恢复性司法概述：以比利时为视角

恢复性司法在欧洲的分布版图并不均匀,有些国家,如奥地利、比利时、芬兰等国在恢复性司法的研究和实务方面处于主导地位,但在法国、意大利、西班牙等国的推行并不理想。与大多数欧洲国家一样,比利时的恢复性司法的主要形式是刑事调解。其刑事调解项目启始于20世纪80年代末,从未成年人司法领域开始实践,尔后运用到成年人的轻微刑事案件中,最后推及到整个刑事程序并适用于任何案件。     

Centralized planning and economic reforms in a mountainous region of Vietnam

This study contributes to an understanding of the diversity of agrarian systems in the mountainous regions of northern Vietnam. By examining over 100 small family farms, we identified the major changes in production systems that have occurred over the last 50 years. Access to land, population migration, and individual initiative were the three major factors driving household differentiation. State policies had substantial impacts on all three factors, making the State the key driving force of differentiation. After years of central planning, farmers are now free to make their own choices as they interact with their new environment: the market economy.

Effective farmers' organizations need to be established to provide farmers with the information and decision-making tools they need to adjust their production to fit the market. Somewhere between State control and total independence, community-based natural resource management schemes are needed to ensure that small family farms in the isolated mountainous areas are sustainable in the face of ineluctable macroeconomic changes.     

Remembering the Southeast Asian Chinese massacres of 1941-45

This article examines a series of wartime massacres (sook chings) conducted at various Southeast Asian sites with a view to teasing out broader lessons about justice, compensation, apology and the uses of memory both on the side of the victims as well as the nation that perpetrated the crimes. Characteristically, the sook chings of Southeast Asia, occurring in ethnically complex societies with mostly Chinese as victims, displayed a planned character of strictly ethnic and political “cleansing” that meets broad definitions of genocide. This article also considers historical memory. Obviously, as with Japanese war crimes in China, the sook chings of Southeast Asia are remembered locally. But also, as in China, remembrance of the sook chings has been modulated by the state, mostly in the interest of good relations and business links with Japan (with some notable exceptions). But, alongside the Nanjing Massacre, much contested in Japanese historiography, the sook ching massacres remain virtually unknown to the Japanese public, and have not become an issue between Japan and the Southeast Asian countries where these events occurred.