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Bookphoria with Victoria – On Social Justice

Social justice is intertwined with human rights, with social justice often serving as the practical manifestation of human rights principles.

Human rights encompass a set of inherent rights and freedoms that every individual is entitled to, regardless of race, religion, nationality, gender, or any other characteristic. They provide a framework for ensuring the dignity and worth of every person. Social justice, on the other hand, focuses on rectifying systemic injustices and disparities within society, particularly those stemming from unequal distribution of resources, power, and opportunities. It seeks to address issues of inequality, discrimination, and marginalization to create a society where everyone can fully participate, prosper, and enjoy their human rights. Social justice initiatives encompass a wide range of efforts, including advocacy for fair wages, access to affordable housing, healthcare, education, and combating discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and socioeconomic status.

Social justice movements often draw upon human rights frameworks to advocate for systemic change and challenge injustices. For example, movements for LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and disability rights have utilized human rights language and mechanisms to advance their causes and demand recognition of their inherent dignity and rights.

The connection between social justice and human rights lies in their shared goal of promoting equality, dignity, and justice for all individuals. Social justice serves as the practical implementation of human rights principles, working to dismantle barriers and structures that prevent people from fully exercising their rights. Conversely, human rights provide the normative foundation upon which social justice initiatives are built, offering a framework for identifying and addressing violations of individuals’ rights within societal structures.

Books on Social Justice available in the library:

The global clinical movement : educating lawyers for social justice

Edited by Frank S. Bloch.

13 GLO

ISBN 9780195381146

Cover of the book containing its title and books in the image. From the publisher: Clinical legal education is playing an increasingly important role in educating lawyers worldwide. In The Global Clinical Movement: Educating Lawyers for Social Justice, editor Frank S. Bloch and contributors describe the central concepts, goals, and methods of clinical legal education from a global perspective, with a particular emphasis on its social justice mission.

With chapters written by leading clinical legal educators from every region of the world, The Global Clinical Movement demonstrates how the emerging global clinical movement can advance social justice through legal education. Professor Bloch and the contributors also examine the influence of clinical legal education on the legal academy and the legal profession and chart the global clinical movement’s future role in educating lawyers for social justice.

The Global Clinical Movement consists of three parts. Part I describes clinical legal education programs from every region of the world and discusses those qualities that are unique to a particular country or region. Part II discusses the various ways that clinical programs and the clinical methodology advance the cause of social justice around the world. Part III analyzes the current state of the global clinical movement and sets out an agenda for the movement to advance social justice through socially relevant legal education.

The Social Rights Jurisprudence in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights : Shadow and Light in International Human Rights

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ISBN 9781788113038

Cover of the book containing its title and stones in the image background.From the publisher: The Inter-American Court of Human Rights continues to build justiciability to determine the social rights of marginalised individuals and groups in the Americas. In this engaging book, Isaac de Paz González unveils the abilities, and the practices of the Inter-American Court’s contribution to human rights policy in the Global South.This innovative book offers a thorough and complete examination of the Inter-American Court’s jurisprudence over its forty years of existence, within the framework of Economic and Social Rights (ESR). The author offers a concise discussion of both the historic and landmark cases in regards to ESR, and its theoretical basis, as well as giving insight into how to further improve and protect the lives of the most vulnerable people in the Americas. This book also exposes the possibility of enforcing legal remedies for poverty and structural discrimination in order to seek social justice.Contemporary and insightful, this book will be vital reading for legal scholars and students interested in human rights more broadly, as well as social justice and social rights specialists. Judges, practitioners and policymakers will also find this book a thought-provoking read.

International Human Rights Law as a Global Foundation for Social Justice: Promise and Challenges

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ISBN 978-1-349-45013-8

Cover of the book containing its title and an edficio in the image background.From the publisher: Notions of human rights and social justice have become so intertwined that today one can enroll in an academic program that leads to an MA degree in “Social Justice and Human Rights.” The emergence of this interdisciplinary field of study, on the one hand, seems a perfectly natural recognition of the long-standing affinity shared by these two concepts. Yet, on the other, the merger also reasonably may strike one as an exceedingly amorphous frame of reference for advanced education, if only because both concepts are subject to a myriad of, and sometimes contesting, definitions. For example, viewed from the perspective of Glenn Beck, such a program could be equated with the curriculum of a Marxist re-education camp if it dared move beyond a one-dimensional, religiously infused mission of helping the poor! (Fox News, 2010). At the same time, restricting the definition of social justice in this manner would appear to run against the spirit underpinning the very term. Likewise, human rights, almost from the outset, have been subject to competing visions that grapple, among other things, between the political and economic as well as the universalist and relativist.

Global views on climate relocation and social justice

Idowu Jola Ajibade and A.R. Siders.

86 AJI

ISBN: 9781003141457

Cover of the book containing its title and a green image with white curved lines in the background image.From the publisher: This edited volume advances our understanding of climate relocation (or planned retreat), an emerging topic in the fields of climate adaptation and hazard risk, and provides a platform for alternative voices and views on the subject.

As the effects of climate change become more severe and widespread, there is a growing conversation about when, where and how people will move. Climate relocation is a controversial adaptation strategy, yet the process can also offer opportunity and hope. This collection grapples with the environmental and social justice dimensions from multiple perspectives, with cases drawn from Africa, Asia, Australia, Oceania, South America, and North America. The contributions throughout present unique perspectives, including community organizations, adaptation practitioners, geographers, lawyers, and landscape architects, reflecting on the potential harms and opportunities of climate-induced relocation. Works of art, photos, and quotes from flood survivors are also included, placed between sections to remind the reader of the human element in the adaptation debate. Blending art – photography, poetry, sculpture – with practical reflections and scholarly analyses, this volume provides new insights on a debate that touches us all: how we will live in the future and where?

Challenging readers’ pre-conceptions about planned retreat by juxtaposing different disciplines, lenses and media, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental migration and displacement, and environmental justice and equity.

Justice and the politics of difference : with a new forward by Danielle Allen

Iris Marion Young.

64 YOU

ISBN 9780691152622

From the publisher: In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice. It critically analyzes basic concepts underlying most theories of justice, including impartiality, formal equality, and the unitary moral subjectivity. The starting point for her critique is the experience and concerns of the new social movements about decision making, cultural expression, and division of labor–that were created by marginal and excluded groups, including women, African Americans, and American Indians, as well as gays and lesbians. Iris Young defines concepts of domination and oppression to cover issues eluding the distributive model. Democratic theorists, according to Young do not adequately address the problem of an inclusive participatory framework. By assuming a homogeneous public, they fail to consider institutional arrangements for including people not culturally identified with white European male norms of reason and respectability. Young urges that normative theory and public policy should undermine group-based oppression by affirming rather than suppressing social group difference. Basing her vision of the good society on the differentiated, culturally plural network of contemporary urban life, she argues for a principle of group representation in democratic publics and for group-differentiated policies.

Danielle Allen’s new foreword contextualizes Young’s work and explains how debates surrounding social justice have changed since–and been transformed by–the original publication of Justice and the Politics of Difference.

 

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