Social media provides ethno-racial immigrant groups—especially those who cannot vote due to factors such as lack of citizenship and limited English proficiency—the ability to mobilize and connect around collective issues. Online spaces and discussion forums have encouraged many Asian Americans to participate in public policy debates and take action on social justice issues. This form of digital group activism serves as an adaptive political empowerment strategy for the fastest-growing and largest foreign-born population in America. Asian American Connective Action in the Age of Social Media illuminates how associating online can facilitate and amplify traditional forms of political action. James Lai provides diverse case studies on contentious topics ranging from affirmative action debates to textbook controversies to emphasize the complexities, limitations, and challenges of connective action that is relevant to all racial groups. Using a detailed multi-methods approach that includes national survey data and Twitter hashtag analysis, he shows how traditional immigrants, older participants, and younger generations create online consensus and mobilize offline to foment political change. In doing so, Lai provides a nuanced glimpse into the multiple ways connective action takes shape within the Asian American community. ; https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1523/thumbnail.jpg
This literature review examines the potential of collaborative art making as a tool to foster a sense of belonging in today's gender and sexual minority youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ). Living with a unique layer of minority stress, LGBTQ youth are at high risk for developing mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation due to ostracization and rejection from their families and communities. By reviewing the implementation of collaborative art making to bring together other marginalized groups across cultural backgrounds as well as the use of art making with LGBTQ youth for purposes such as political activism, community outreach and self advocacy, it is concluded that collaborative art making could be a useful method to combat thwarted belongingness and diminish resulting mental health issues. The author is a queer white millenial woman living in north eastern United States of America.
ABSTRACT Objective: to discuss the role of Brazilian nursing to face political, economic and sanitary challenges that compose the crisis situation related to Covid-19 pandemics. Methods: Critical-thinking study with analytics characteristics, based on latin-american critical epidemiology and on the concept of social determination of health. Results: the central issues related to the Brazilian political-economic and health scenario are problematized, with emphasis on the impacts in terms of social inequality deepening. Nursing role is discussed considering the impacts in these worker's health, and the relevance of nurses' actions in the several professional practice scenarios to defend social protection. Conclusions: the role of Brazilian nursing as a social practice for the defense of life and universal access to health is reaffirmed as a way of achieving social justice.
Securitization theory (ST) makes an insightful and significant contribution to security studies. Through the use of discursive speech act, ST provides an innovative strategy for understanding the application of security's distinctive character and dynamics to any issue in order to make it a security issue. Valuable as the theory is to security studies, the subaltern appear missing in existing securitization analyses. Even when the subaltern are examined, for instance in critiques of classical ST, they are conceived and presented as passive, lacking agency, voice, and power, and suffering from security silence problem. ST's reliance on discursive speech act and focus on state political elite prevent it from capturing the subaltern and subaltern securitization process. Furthermore, while existing ST and critiques of securitization studies offer some direction regarding how the subaltern actors may securitize threats to their security, these perspectives are incidental and grossly underdeveloped. In order to resolve this problem, the current study takes a novel approach to securitization studies by investigating how subaltern actors engage in securitizing discourses and practices. By combining the Fanonian decolonial theory of emancipatory violence, where the nature of the (post)colonial context becomes visible with the theoretical insights of ST, the study shows that the subaltern are able to securitize using protest and violence. The subaltern use protest and violence to show their perception and identification of security threats, mobilize the subaltern audience, and challenge and confront the threatening subject – often times, the subaltern's significant audience – to ensure that action is taken on issues concerning subaltern security. In addition to discourse, therefore, protest and violence serve as the subaltern's instruments of political communication used by the subaltern to move issues beyond normal to the point of extraordinary politics. Consequently, protest and violence can force audiences – including the common people and the political elite – to imagine threats to subaltern security, typically perceived but sometimes real, and accept subaltern securitization moves, and where possible take actions that may amount to an alteration or a change in the order of things. Such change may either be in favour of subaltern's perception of security or not. To uncover the essential dynamics of subaltern securitization, this study synthesizes a version of decolonial theory with elements of existing ST and focuses on the subaltern actors from below the state in Nigeria, a non-Western, postcolonial context. The results reveal that subaltern securitization is possible when members of the subaltern successfully mobilize themselves to collectively identify (real or perceived) threat to their security and in so doing challenging and confronting the threat. This makes their security concerns an issue of priority. The study concludes that desirable as subaltern securitization may be, especially to the subaltern, there is a tendency for subaltern securitization to obfuscate the danger that may lurk around subaltern's attempts to securitize certain issues.
Transitioning into a sustainable energy system is becoming ever more pressing as the reality of an anthropogenic ecological crisis becomes difficult to ignore. Due to the complexity of the matter, proposed solutions often address the symptoms of the current socioeconomic configuration rather than its core. To conceptualise possible future energy systems, this Perspective focuses on the disconnect between science and technology and engineering studies. On the one hand, this disconnect leads to social science research that passively critiques rather than contributes to tackling societal issues in practice. On the other, it produces technical work limited by the incumbent conceptualisations of economic activity and organisational configurations around production without capturing the broader social and political dynamics. We thus propose a schema for bridging this divide that uses the "commons" as an umbrella concept. We apply this framework on the hardware aspect of a conceptual energy system, which builds on networked microgrids powered by open-source, lower cost, adaptable, socially responsible and sustainable technology. This Perspective is a call to engineers and social scientists alike to form genuine transdisciplinary collaborations for developing radical alternatives to the energy conundrum.
ABSTRACT Objectives: this theoretical essay aims to present classic and contemporary fundamentals of the optimal tax theory (OTT) and to problematize its presence and possibilities in the scenario of tax policy in Brazil. Context: such objectives are located in the contemporary context that discusses tax reforms aimed at efficient and socially responsible public management. Methods: after surveying the state of knowledge of optimal taxation in Brazil, and from the perspective of economics and political law, we sought to identify secondary data on tax distribution in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in relational analysis with data from Brazil. Results: the text draws attention to the fact that OTT is able to bring social issues to the discussion of public tax management policies in a structured way, with the perspective of inclusion and social responsibility, based on the importance of different treatment of economic agents, physical and legal, based on their needs and possibilities. Conclusion: it is concluded that, like in other countries, OTT is present in the Brazilian debate expressing as possible and necessary to advance in a tax policy that responds to the needs of public collection articulated and reconciled to social well-being through responsible management, modern and transparent.
