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Rights Movement (right + movement)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	92%

Selected Abstracts

ENGAGING WITH THE IMMIGRANT HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN A BESIEGED BORDER REGION: WHAT DO APPLIED SOCIAL SCIENTISTS BRING TO THE POLICY PROCESS?

ANNALS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL PRACTICE, Issue 1 2009
Josiah McC.
Engagement with immigration goes beyond work directly with immigrants to include involvement in the immigration policy process. The chapter describes work on immigration and human rights policy grounded in issues facing the U.S.,Mexico border region. A policy coalition with regional and national presence, the Border and Immigration Task Force, combines an organized social movement with bases in immigrant communities with a diverse policy coalition whose members have varied skills, constituencies, and political connections. As applied social scientists in this coalition, we bring a number of skills, including effective writing, synthesis of secondary sources, teaching skills applied to public interaction and communication, and application of the sociological and anthropological imagination to understand the implications, on the ground, of detailed policy recommendations. Our work has not involved community-based primary research, but this form of practice is also mentioned for its relevance to policy formation and advocacy. The literature on public anthropology and public sociology needs to include discussions of engagement in practical policy processes. [source]

When Equality Justifies Women's Subjection: Luce Irigaray's Critique of Equality and the Fathers' Rights Movement

HYPATIA, Issue 4 2008
SERENE J. KHADER
The "fathers' rights" movement represents policies that undermine women's reproductive autonomy as furthering the cause of gender equality. Khader argues that this movement exploits two general weaknesses of equality claims identified by Luce Irigaray. She shows that Irigaray criticizes equality claims for their appeal to a genderneutral universal subject and for their acceptance of our existing symbolic repertoire. This article examines how the plaintiffs' rhetoric in two contemporary "fathers' rights" court cases takes advantage of these weaknesses. [source]

Hitting Below the Bible Belt: The Development of the Gay Rights Movement in Atlanta

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 4 2004
Arnold Fleischmann
Gays and lesbians benefited from a changing political opportunity structure as they overcame severe pressures to develop their own neighborhoods, build a wide range of organizations, and become an important electoral bloc. The movement built upon the city's civil rights legacy and benefited from the dissipation of it opponents, but it has not posed a major threat to what has been labeled Atlanta's regime. [source]

Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on the Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa and the Americas

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 4 2002
Dorothy L. Hodgson
Using ethnographic case studies, these "In Focus" articles explore the indigenous rights movements in two regions, Africa and the Americas, where the histories, agendas, and dynamics of the movements are at once similar and different. They consider a range of relevant questions about the politics of representation, recognition, resources, and rights as these movements engage shifting political and economic landscapes; transnational discourses, alliances, and organizations; and the complicated cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion invoked by the term indigenous. As such, they offer a critical, comparative perspective on the issues of culture, power, representation, and difference inherent in the complicated alliances, articulations, and tensions that have produced and transformed the transnational indigenous rights movement. This introduction provides a brief history of the movement, highlights some major themes in previous anthropological work, reviews the insights of the section articles, and explores some of the ways in which anthropologists have engaged with the movement. [Keywords: indigenous peoples, social movements, cultural politics, ethnography] [source]

The Making of ,African Sexuality': Early Sources, Current Debates

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 8 2010
Marc Epprecht
The notion that Africans share a common sexual culture distinct from people elsewhere in the world has for many years been a staple of popular culture, health, academic, and political discourse in the West as well as in Africa. Sometimes overtly racist (Black Peril) but sometimes intended to combat patronizing or colonialist stereotypes, the idea of a singular African sexuality remains an obstacle to the development of sexual rights and effective sexual health interventions. Where did the idea come from, and how has it become so embedded in our imaginations right across the political spectrum? This article traces the idea back in time to its earliest articulations by explorers, ethnographers, and psychiatrists, as well as to contestations of the idea in scholarship, fiction, and film influenced by Africa's emerging gay rights movement. It asks, what can we learn about the making of ,African sexuality' as an idea in the past that may suggest ways to challenge its enduring, harmful impacts in the present? [source]

Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on the Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa and the Americas

The Mothers of La Plaza de Mayo: A Peace Movement

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2002
Viviana M. Abreu Hernandez
On April 30, 1977, at 3:30 in the afternoon a historical transformation began in Argentina. This transformation was carried out by Argentinean women acting in the social and political spheres against a military regime that directly affected them and their futures. The Mothers of La Plaza de Mayo have reshaped the concepts of motherhood, feminism, activism, resistance, and social action in Argentina and the rest of the world. This study looks at the Mothers of La Plaza de Mayo as a peace movement instead of a human rights movement, resistance movement, or feminist movement, as it has been previously analyzed. Looking at the literature analyzing peace movements and nonviolent direct action, I propose that the Mothers of La Plaza de Mayo should be seen as a peace movement. [source]

The adult North and the young South: Reflections on the civilizing mission of children's rights

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 3 2009
Karen Valentin
The civilization of the children of the "savages" in the colonial world was seen as a crucial issue from early on was an inherent part of the colonization project in Africa, America and Oceania in the 19th century. The idea of civilizing "the savages," today's South, through children has continued in the post-colonial era with the development of mass-schooling systems and various child-focused development projects. This has led to an export of internationally defined standards for a "good childhood" through various foreign funded development programs in South. While many NGOs, legitimizing their work on the basis of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), are genuinely working for an improvement of children's conditions, they have also taken on the role as a second guardian in order to cultivate "proper" children and parents who can live up to the supposedly universal ideals of a "good childhood." The article adopts a critical view on the child rights movement by shedding light on the crucial role, which NGOs play as civilizing institutions in the South. The article specifically draws attention to the double-sided patronization of children and parents, and "infantilization" of nations in South, which implicitly lies beneath CRC and the child rights movement. [source]

Front and Back Covers, Volume 24, Number 3.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 3 2008
June 200
Front cover and back cover caption, volume 24 issue 3 Front cover Front cover: Front cover In this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Adrian Peace takes a critical look at the way in which neo-evolutionary theories and anthropological concepts are brought together in an award-winning campaign to sell more meat in Australia (his article is debated by four respondents on pp 23,25). Among others adopting a critical perspective, the animal rights movement was outraged at claims made about red meat as a ,natural', ,healthy' and ,essential' part of the average Australian diet. Just as a prominent film star was recruited to the ,Red Meat , Feel Good' campaign, the hugely popular Missy Higgins was deployed to front the response from the animal rights movement. The youthful and fresh-faced Australian singer-songwriter, cuddling the vulnerable white piglet, iconically represents an informed, intelligent and humane vegetarian approach to the future in the relationship between human and non-human animals. Higgins here makes a striking plea for ,enlightenment'. Enlightenment of a different kind is offered by the poster reprinted on the back cover, where an Indian transvestite celebrates the joy of a minority gender identity. Although the rights of both human minorities and non-human animals may be ,universal', they must be rendered in culturally specific terms in order to be politically effective. Back cover Back cover: modern enlightenment in ancient sacred sites ,Be enlightened!' In 2006 ,Shelly Innocence' launched a new phone service in Bodhgaya, Bihar, offering customers the opportunity to receive personal text messages of EnlightenmentÔ on their mobile phones. Large billboards with images of this virtual transgendered guru were erected outside the main temple to advertise the service. Not only is Bodhgaya a site of inspiration for millions of Buddhists around the world, but the seat of enlightenment has also come to mean very different things as this cosmopolitan pilgrimage town goes global. For many decades the state of Bihar, where Bodhgaya is located, has been one of the least attractive destinations for pilgrims, tourists and anthropologists because of its notorious reputation as one of the most impoverished and ,lawless' states in the country. However in recent years the Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bodhgaya has become the object of global attention as a UNESCO World Heritage site, setting in motion a series of initiatives to encourage tourism and city development plans. As a result of new conservation policies and demands on the built environment, the World Heritage designation has become invested with a diverse set of claims and meanings by various stakeholders and religious communities. As a site of dense historical, religious and political significance, Bodhgaya today is a unique locus where spiritual and digital worlds collide in the shade of the bodhi tree. [source]

Front and Back Covers, Volume 23, Number 2.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 2 2007
April 200
Front cover caption, volume 23 issue 2 Front cover ,The greatest predators on earth', writes the anthropologist Alan Macfarlane in his advice to his granddaughter, Letters to Lucy: On how the world works (Profile Books), ,munch their way through the animal kingdom. We are caught in a dilemma. For we are a meat-eating species, which gains much of its protein from consuming other animals. It is almost impossible to imagine that we will change, but we may, with sufficient will, find ways to minimise the pain we inflict on our fellow species.' Our front cover photo is taken from a publicity poster produced by SARC, the Southern Animal Rights Coalition, which is organizing the Southampton Cruelty Free Festival on 12 May (see www.crueltyfreefestival.com). In this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Jonathan Benthall asks why it is that, while anthropologists have studied most other social movements including environmentalism, little attention has been focused on the animal liberation and rights movement. The movement is underpinned by serious philosophical reflection and by its acknowledgment of Darwinism. This suggests that the shock caused by Darwin's discoveries is still being worked through nearly a century and a half later. Benthall's guest editorial outlines the ideological manifestations of the movement and also considers the implications of taking it seriously. Macfarlane's view, meanwhile, is that ,perhaps it will not be until some new and superior species emerges on earth, some computerised android, which breeds humans in tiny cages, force-feeds them, drains their bile, eats them, that we will seriously begin to crusade for the abolition of animal-on-animal cannibalism.' [source]

The promise of the Internet for disability: a study of on-line services and web site accessibility at Centers for Independent Living,

BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES & THE LAW, Issue 1 2003
Heather Ritchie M.S.W.
The Internet provides individuals with disabilities numerous tools to live independently. In the convenience of the home, a person can access an abundance of information, an electronic community, updates on the latest disability advocacy news, education through distance-learning classes, and on-line shopping for books, clothes, assistive technology, and a host of other consumer goods. Centers for Independent Living (CILs) are consumer-run, non-profit grassroots disability service organizations at the forefront of the disability rights movement. Providing services to individuals across the range of disabilities, CILs have begun to use the Internet as a complement to their traditional service delivery methods. This article examines the emerging trend of independent living services on the web. The investigation examines 200 CIL Internet sites across the United States during the period of April to August 2001. Information is collected and analyzed about how CILs are using the Internet to provide their services and programs. In addition, the article examines the technological accessibility of their web sites. Implications of the findings for CILs, consumers with disabilities, and disability policy are examined. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Women's rights in Peru: insights from two organizations

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 4 2009
ROSA ALAYZA MUJICA
Abstract In this article we explore the appropriation of ideas about women's rights in Lima, Peru through an ethnographic study of two non-governmental organizations. SEA is a local NGO grounded in the Catholic Church's liberation theology movement, which seeks to promote integrated human development, and is linked to the worldwide Catholic Church. DEMUS, the second NGO, with feminist roots, actively fights gender discrimination and belongs to networks of international women's human rights movements and UN organizations. We argue that the struggle for women's rights is part of a broader struggle for recognition and equality for the poor, shaped by changing notions of national identity, citizenship and diversity. Our research revealed clear examples of vernacularization, whereby local context, values and culture played a decisive role in the adoption of women rights ideas. Encounters with other concepts and movements, including social justice, family violence and women's mobilization, intimately shaped the vernacularization of women's rights. Ultimately, the adoption of rights ideas involved changes in women's individual and collective empowerment. [source]

Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on the Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa and the Americas

Shamans versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 4 2002
Beth A. Conklin
This article explores how the recent rise of shamans as political representatives in Brazil addresses tensions and contradictions associated with the internationalization of indigenous rights movements. Identity politics and transnational organizational alliances concerning issues of environmentalism and human rights have greatly expanded the political leverage and influence of indigenous activism. However, some transnational environmentalist discourses collide with Brazilian discourses of national sovereignty, and the 1990s witnessed a nationalist backlash against Indians, whom politicians, military leaders, and media commentators have frequently portrayed as pawns of foreign imperialists. Opponents of indigenous rights also seized on apparent contradictions between rhetoric and action to discredit indigenous claims to environmental resources. The analysis examines how the shift to redefine knowledge as the core of indigenous identity circumvents some of these liabilities by shifting the basis for indigenous rights claims from environmental practices to environmental knowledge. As shamans mobilize and speak out against the threat of biopiracy, they blunt the nationalist backlash, repositioning indigenous peoples as defenders of the national patrimony and solid citizens of the Brazilian nationstate. [Keywords: Brazil, indigenous peoples, identity politics, shamans, biopiracy] [source]