Covid-19 and the decolonisation of education in Palestinian universities

Despite the severe social, health, political and economic impacts of the outbreak of Covid-19 on Palestinians, we contend that one positive aspect of this pandemic is that it has revealed the perils and shortcomings of the teacher-centered, traditional education which colonizes students' minds, compromises their analytical abilities and, paradoxically, places them in a system of oppression which audits their ideas, limits their freedoms, and curtails their creativity. While Israeli occupation has proven to be an obstacle in the face of the Palestinian government's attempt to combat and contain the Corona crisis, on-line education, the sole arena that escapes this colonial system, has forced many instructors to give up their domination over the process of education and to create a more collaborative atmosphere of education that is based on dialogue, research and flexibility of the curriculum content. This study is designed to gauge English literature students' responses to this mode of digital learning. We interviewed a hundred students from six English literature programs between March and August, 2020. Thus, through critically examining students' answers, and by drawing on Freire's concepts of banking education, consciousness and dialogue, we propose that online education is an important step towards the decolonization of education and a call for a paradigm shift on the account that the existing paradigm of traditional education is stifling students' creativity and critical thinking.

Black women and girls: Racism and intersectional oppression

The duel systemic societal harms of the COVID-19 pandemic and violent racial injustice have reexposed centuries-long oppression and violence that affects Black people in the United States. These systemic harms, however, are not unilaterally distributed across racial lines, as Black women and girls endure intersectional oppression, including the unique amalgamation of racism and sexism. It is within these interlocking oppressions that sexual abuse flourishes. This chapter opens with critical visioning regarding how we understand inequality in social justice movements. It introduces scholarship on anti-Black racism, intersectional oppression, and Crenshaw's (1991) theories of intersectionality to frame the contextually oppressive experiences of Black women and girls. The chapter provides an application for examining intersectionality within the field of psychology. It details what such intersectional oppression can actually look like in the lives of Black women and girls. Finally, the chapter closes with summary bullet points of the main takeaway messages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Opportunistic oppression: U.S. migration restrictions and public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in Spring 2020, the Trump administration invoked war against the coronavirus to severely restrict admission of migrants and asylum seekers into the United States. At the same time, it declined to enact national measures to control viral community spread and sharply criticised public health policies. We analyse this notable inconsistency as a case of opportunistic oppression whereby policymakers take advantage of a crisis to pursue pre-existing, and often unrelated, policy preferences. We identify how the securitisation of health and the crisis-enabled politics of enmity allowed the Trump administration to cynically erode migrant human rights protections while simultaneously failing to contain the pandemic. Opportunistic oppression represents an attractive strategy for states facing real and imagined emergencies to pursue political agendas that are not necessarily part of a coherent and effective response to the crisis at hand. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Human Rights is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Opinion: Democracy as a Noble Experiment: Where Do We Go from Here?

The rise of Donald J. Trump as president of the US and the occurrence at the end of his term of the Jan 6, 2020, insurrection, as a stunningly violent event, have gained increasing traction in contemporary public discourses as the harbingers of dramatic societal crises and, arguably, as bellwethers of the disastrous decline of our nation as a noble experiment in democracy. In effect, these two major events are functioning within the confluence of a seemingly endless stream of occurrences--from outrageous efforts to suppress voting rights, to efforts to increase, rather than decrease, guns on the streets, to the persistent resistance to COVID-19 vaccinations in support of public health, to the most toxic public discourses that we have seen in recent history, and more. A frequent mantra has become the statement that these crises are pushing to reflect on where many might be going from this incredibly sobering era forward.

The CCP after the Zero-Covid Fail

China has two repressive systems that exist simultaneously: the highly coercive and surveilled system in Xinjiang, and the trust-based model of everyday repression prevalent throughout the rest of the country. The trust-based model has undergirded grassroots governance in China and facilitated the routine implementation of Zero-Covid. Drawing on a protest event dataset, I analyze the key characteristics of the covid protests erupted in November and December of 2022, before situating them in the larger context of China's political future under Xi Jinping's rule. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has responded to the protests with a combination of concession and repression. But neither the carrot nor the stick is able to fundamentally address the deep-rooted social problems or halt the tide of dissent. Coupled with structural economic challenges, these protests could be the harbinger of a new era of contentious state-society relations in China, the seeds of which were sown years ago–only precipitated and underscored by the CCP's covid debacle.

Editorial Comment: Feminist Methodologies at Play

Discourse concerning the Atlanta Spa Shootings, which happened around the time that this issue first started to come together in March of 2021, has renewed the urgency of thinking about performance and feminism together.1 Given that this issue's publication roughly coincides with the first anniversary of those murders, the violent events in Atlanta have loomed in the background of the editorial process. [...]although the essays in this issue address quite distinct forms of performance and paratheatrical phenomena from state surveillance to fan groups to online participatory audiences, all of the essays use feminist methodologies either explicitly or implicitly. [...]this editorial highlights some of their convergences to think through how the interventions of each author might speak to a feminist knowledge project that is critical in this historical moment. Fans watch events transpire in Wanda's magically created world, which is itself surveyed in the narrative by an extra-governmental agency (elaborated in the comic books if not so much in the television miniseries itself);these source materials give Wanda and Vision their names and provide many backstories for the roster of secondary characters. Barnette suggests that the series also provided a platform to see the ethical conundrums of real-life individuals whose positions of power grant their words authority;witness former president Donald Trump inciting the attack on the Capitol.

Thinking Resistance, "Emergency,” and Kismet: A Response to Dylan Rodríguez's Presidential Address

The battles over masking only amplified preexisting culture and race wars in which entrenched libertarianism and neoliberal individualism evaded the economic and existential precarity caused by degraded social welfare and state health care. Counterterrorism projects such as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) introduced by Barack Obama have relied on recruitment of community members, social service providers, and educators for self-surveillance and self-regulation of political expression and community organizing: a liberal counterterrorism approach for "reformist reform.” 5 Nabeel Abraham and Will Youmans provide important analyses of the "Containment System” in response to the War on Terror, based on "entrepreneurial opportunism” (Rodríguez) by Arab and Muslim American educators, professionals, and community leaders (including in the nonprofit industrial complex), some of whom collaborated with federal and state agencies.6 Academic Containment Reckoning with these critiques from critical Arab American or Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) studies requires grappling with the long history of anti-Arab/Muslim state policies of surveillance, policing, and mass incarceration that preceded 2001. The Zionist lobby and anti-Palestinian organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League have increasingly deployed the language of tolerance and civility to tar critics of Israel with charges of anti-Semitism.7 These liberal strategies, illustrating Rodríguez's argument, can be more damaging than frontal attacks on the Palestine justice movement because the language of racism is harder to challenge

Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege by Dominique DuBois Gilliard (review)

Labberton poses a question central to Gilliard's work: "How do we hold, deploy, or sacrifice what is ours for the justice and thriving of others?" (xv) In his introduction, Gilliard establishes a framework for the reader to "see privilege, address discrimination, and share power" in ways that "equally prioritize the Great Commission and the Greatest Commandment" (xviii;xxi). In this vein, as Gilliard's message is important for the world and the global Church, it will be appropriate to have translations of this book in multiple languages. Gilliard's experience as an ordained minister shines in this prophetic book: he not only exegetes these passages to reveal their biblical truths to a world hurting from abuse of privilege, social injustices, and the COVID-19 pandemic, but also, he reads current events into his interpretation of the biblical stories. [...]as Gilliard writes about biblical figures leveraging privilege to witness to God's salvific power, he exhorts readers to do the same and shows how by his example.

Queering Diasporic Desi Solidarity: South Asian Activism in US and UK Multiracial Social Movements

This article explores the linkages between queerness, racialization, activism, and community care in the South Asian diaspora. It examines activism, organizing, and social movement work practiced by queer diasporic South Asians in the UK and the United States. By analyzing the South Asian activist relationship to, and solidarity and partnership with, Black liberation activism, this article conceptualizes a framing of queer South Asian diasporic solidarity. This solidarity is framed through contrasting articulations of joint struggle, allyship, and kinship in queer communities. To articulate this struggle, the article contrasts histories of South Asian racialization, politicization, and queerness in the UK and the United States, and synthesizes first-person activist accounts of modern-day queer South Asian activists in the diaspora. Finally, it argues that queer feminist South Asian activists in both countries are employing a model of queered solidarity with Black activists and Black liberation, though in differing forms in each country, that centers queer intimacies and anti-patriarchal modes of organizing for liberation across queer communities of color.

Addressing anti-semitism in social work education

Antisemitism, one of the oldest forms of prejudice and oppression is surging throughout the world. It ranges from verbal abuse to the destruction of property to murder. In the last two years, attacks against Jews in the United States were the overwhelming target of religion-based hate crimes. Stereotypes and myths continue to fuel prejudice and antisemitism in society. Factors such as anti-Israel sentiments, remarks by persons in power, the use of social media, white nationalism, and even the Covid 19 pandemic have contributed to its escalation.As a result of the increasing violence, the U.S. legislature held a hearing on confronting antisemitic terrorism with one outcome being that social workers and community advocates were needed to join law enforcement in the effort to heal and work for justice. Social work with its mandate to promote social justice and human rights and challenge oppression cannot ignore antisemitism and its impact on individuals and societies. However, the subject is basically ignored in the curriculum. This paper offers a brief history of antisemitism and presents guidelines and models for integrating it into social work programs.

Embodied conversations: Culturally and trauma-informed healing practices in dance/movement therapy

We are in the 14th month of an unprecedented public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. Brutality against Brown and Black bodies, systemic racism, oppression, and white supremacy continue sustaining the foundation of white domination and privilege in all of our institutions. As dance/movement therapists, educators, students, and supervisors, we are coming to terms with the fact that our field is no different: the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our profession and harmful educational content/practices in our programs are a reflection of this reality. Living through trauma-filled times continuously filtered our conversations and themes emerged as important and necessary to unpack and explore: How do we engage in authentic relationships when we might be reinforcing dominant structures? How do we include, listen, and support those from marginalized identities both from a theoretical stance and a social action stance? How can we be held accountable? The authors came to this work with their own experiences, stories, memories, personal trauma, identities, and cultural backgrounds. Living through identity differences and acknowledging personal and political issues, this dialogue provides insight into our own healing journeys and offering a structure to remind ourselves how to recognize our shared humanity in the spaces we occupy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Universal Basic Income, Social Justice, and Marginality: A Critical Evaluation

Struggles for economic justice have historically centered around the fight for jobs and higher wages, but universal basic income (UBI) seeks to distribute wealth outside of labor by giving every citizen an unconditional and universal minimum income. This paper critically assesses the policy ofUBI and asks what ought to be taken into consideration and addressed before the first practical implementation ofUBI on a broad scale. Three issues are outlined: UBI in relation to histories of oppression and the danger of a neoliberal universal basic income;UBI and the issues of citizenship, border imperialism, and social solidarity;and how UBI could affect the carceral system and the incarcerated. The essay argues that UBI runs the risk of reproducing precarity and inequality if not crafted with the needs of marginalized communities in mind and theorizes what a socially just UBI might look like if it was designed to confront these challenges.

Laughing while Black: Resistance, coping and the use of humor as a pandemic pastime among Blacks

For centuries Africans were captured and brought to America in bondage and forced to forge a new culture. The development of a Black culture gave rise to humor as a coping mechanism against the oppressive state they found themselves in. For centuries, humor became a way to protest their conditions by creating various humorous styles that infused social political commentary on oppression as a sign of defiance, while also providing hope for the hopeless. This commentary seeks to introduce leisure scholars to how Black Twitter (Sharma, 2013) users' expressions of humor during the COVID-19 pandemic serve as a form of resistance to injustices and inequalities, while simultaneously adopting coping strategies to reclaim power and control in order to speak their truth all while cultivating individual and collective identity in/through leisure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

COVID-19, gender and health: Recentring women in African indigenous health discourses in Zimbabwe for environmental conservation

In precolonial Africa, women were the major authorities in herbal remedies within their own homes and at the community level, where they focused on disease prevention and cure. Such roles were pushed to the periphery of Africa's health discourse by the introduction of Western modes of healing. Furthermore, missionaries branded African indigenous medicine (AIM) as evil and categorised it within the sphere of witchcraft. However, the emergence of new diseases which conventional medicine has found difficult to cure seems to have caused Africans to rethink their position on AIM. For example, there appears to have been a resurgence of interest in utilising AIMs during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Greater utilisation, while positive, may lead to herbs and plants becoming extinct if the harvesting is done haphazardly. Therefore, the intention of this article is to examine the intersections of gender and health in the COVID-19 context. The article seeks to establish the role that was and continues to be played by women in the utilisation of AIM within the context of COVID-19. The focus of the paper is on finding out the ways in which women are safeguarding plants and trees whose leaves, roots and barks are envisioned as effective in preventing infection as well as curing the disease. Data were gathered through informal interviews. Theoretically, the article makes use of gender and Afrocentricity as theories informing the study. Contribution: The article highlights the need for placing women at the centre of both health and environmental discourses for sustainable development. It argues for the recentring of women in Earth discourses. Hence, its contribution is in retrieving women's voices in health and Earth discourses in Zimbabwe for sustainable development to be achieved.

Tremor: Shaken and stirred

Thoughts of family bring to mind the extent to which, fundamentally, we are prosocial, attachment-orientated and proximity-seeking beings. Child-centred play therapy is about presence;it is a relational, embodied process, informed by the implicit interpersonal qualities of attunement and attachment, on both verbal and non-verbal levels. Covid subverted the very essence of our inherent, attachment-orientated nature as the nation, the world, had to suddenly adapt to the post-viral rules of social distancing, self-isolation and quarantine. Fear of infection and enforced lockdown meant that physical contact-touch-became something of an anathema, to be feared and avoided. Children experienced the loss of friends, extended family, structure, routine, education as well as grieving for those close to them who died or became seriously ill through infection. Furthermore, the Covid pandemic starkly exposed a range of intersectional, societal fault-lines around poverty, ethnicity, age, oppression, disability, systemic racism and social justice, the virus unforgiving in its capacity to lay bare the inequalities of our society. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The Remnants of Giorgio Agamben: The Omnibus Homo Sacer upon Its Completion

Just as they did two decades earlier during the so-called war on terror, they inflamed the public's fear over a miniscule threat to declare a "state of exception" and radically expand oppressive capacities.1 Merely a week later, when the pandemic's terrible advance was overwhelming Italy's health system, it became clear how wrong Agamben had been and how necessary sweeping social restrictions were. The Hungarian parliament transferred legislative authority to the cabinet, establishing a de facto dictatorship;the Israeli police forced individuals to install tracking aps (ignoring courts' rulings that deemed those illegal);and the United States government harshly restricted the processing of student and immigrant visas, all of which were blatantly unrelated to any health consideration. If Viktor Orban, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump used the pandemic to pursue goals beyond improving the health of their subjects (a task in which all of them showed remarkable lack of interest), it was not because they embodied the universal logic of state power. According to Agamben, the homo sacer was not a marginal character nor was he an anachronistic remnant of ancient rites;he was the very center of the Roman system.

Implications of the UN Common Agenda for Australia: Renewing Multilateralism

In flagrant violation of international law, Russia has invaded Ukraine. It invokes a right to intervene on humanitarian and security grounds despite the necessary pre-conditions, including UN Security Council endorsement, being absent. In Myanmar, the February Citation2021 military coup has ushered in a new era of serious repression of citizens, violent conflict and human rights violations. ASEAN's 2021 five-point consensus to end the violence and promote conciliation has been largely ignored. These are but two of a number of current global threats which defy unilateral resolution and demand multilateral responses. Others are the looming disasters provoked by climate change;the ongoing Covid pandemic;conflict and the threat of conflict from Syria and Yemen to the South China Sea;the return of repressive Taliban rule in Afghanistan;ferocious civil war in Ethiopia;historically high refugee displacement;and mass migratory movements.At a time when ‘the only certainty is more uncertainty', countries must unite to forge a new, more hopeful and equal path, UN Secretary-General António Guterres (SG) told the General Assembly on 21 January 2022. In laying out his priorities for 2022, he observed, "We face a five-alarm global fire that requires the full mobilisation of all countries”, – the raging COVID-19 pandemic, a morally bankrupt global financial system, the climate crisis, lawlessness in cyberspace, and diminished peace and security. He stressed that countries must go into emergency mode.

Women Suffering from Multiple Sources of Oppression in Upper Egypt: A Case Study of Intersectional Targeting and Integrated Development Interventions as the Way Out

Scholars in the field of gender and development are strong advocates of the concept of "intersectionality," first coined by Crenshaw in 1989, as a way of thinking about how marginalized groups may be subjected to oppression from various sources. The main purpose of this research is to make a case for how intersectional targeting, together with integrated development interventions, can be useful in helping vulnerable individuals, specifically women, suffering from multiple sources of poverty and oppression. A case study, coupled with in-depth field interviews, was the method employed for assessing the application of an intersectional lens by a nonprofit development organization (ENID) that targets vulnerable poor, illiterate, and unemployed women living in marginalized rural communities in South Egypt and employs integrated development interventions to get them out of poverty. Working on upgrading basic services, promoting small and micro enterprises, fostering sustainable agricultural development, initiating a program for knowledge dissemination and policy advocacy were some of the features of the integrated development approach utilized by ENID. The research findings indicated that ENID activities may have had a positive impact on reducing poverty and empowering women in the rural villages of South Egypt. Many challenges were faced related to government bureaucracy, restrictive cultural norms, and the COVID-19 pandemic. However, on the positive side, poverty was reported to have declined by 14.5% in absolute terms from 2015-2018 in Qena governorate where ENID works. More investments are being directed to the region, and the women beneficiaries attest to lifechanging experiences, enhanced self-confidence, and empowerment.

Neurodiversity, Networks, and Narratives: Exploring Intimacy and Expressive Freedom in the Time of Covid‐19

The Narratives of Neurodiversity Network (NNN) is a neurodivergent academic, creative, and educator collective that came together with allies during the Covid‐19 pandemic to create a network centred around emerging narratives about neuro-diversity and exploring new ways of learning and socialising. The network focuses on exploring the roles of written, spoken, and visual narratives across cultural locations about neuro‐atypical experiences in generating improved agency and self‐advocacy for those who have been subject to pathologization through neuro‐normativity and intersecting oppression. During the last year, widening access to digital platforms has provided a space to explore these issues outside of traditional academic spaces. We run a monthly "Salon,” our mixed‐media "reading, listening, and watching” group, in an effort to find positive representation within contemporary culture. Discussions have moved beyond mimesis and into a consideration of how narrative and storyworlds can question the supposed naturalness of certain ways of being in and perceiving the world. This article interrogates the network's core principles of nonhierarchical co‐production, including the roles of creativity, community, identity, and emancipatory research which were animated by the new techno‐social context. We consider the cultural lives of neurodiversity in the West and beyond, including ethical and aesthetic dimensions. We share a faith in the power of storytelling to inform new social identities for neurodivergent people and to inform scientific understandings of atypical cognition. In exploring this, we speak through a porous first‐person plural narrator, to unsettle the idea that there is a hegemonic "we” speaking on behalf of all neurodivergent people.