Downriver Detroit: The Working Class, the Environment, and the Bonds of Place

Lisa M. Fine

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, communities in the Downriver region of the Detroit River have forged an enduring claim to the well-being of waterways that are central to where they live, work, and play.

A creative merger of labor and environmental history, Downriver Detroit shows that working people have a right to live in and protect the places they love.

The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy

Jeremy Brecher

A visionary program for national renewal, the Green New Deal aims to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice.

A call for hope and a better tomorrow, The Green New Deal from Below offers a blueprint for reconstructing society on new principles to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Ogoni Women’s Activism: The Transnational Struggle for Justice against Big Oil and the State

Domale Dube

In 1995, Nigeria’s dictatorial government executed nine Ogoni leaders fighting for civil rights and against Shell Oil’s depredations of Ogoni land. Domale Dube draws on interviews and participant observation to tell the long-ignored story of how women carved out a role in the Ogoni pursuit of justice.

Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education

“K–12 Music Educators’ Perceptions of Social Media Use and Social Justice Engagement” by Sandra Sanchez Adorno, Candice Davenport Mattio, and Melissa J. Ryan

This study explored how kindergarten through 12th grade music educators perceive their engagement with social media platforms and their engagement with social justice when using social media. Results from open-ended responses found that participants argued about the appropriateness of social media for professional learning as well as social justice’s place both online and in the music classroom.

Graceful Resistance: How Capoeiristas Use Their Art for Activism and Community Engagement

Lauren Miller Griffith

Capoeira began as a martial art developed by enslaved Afro-Brazilians. Today, the practice incorporates song, dance, acrobatics, and theatrical improvisation-and leads many participants into activism.

An innovative look at capoeira in America, Graceful Resistance reveals how the practice of an art can catalyze action and transform communities.

Women’s Activist Theatre in Jamaica and South Africa: Gender, Race, and Performance Space

Nicosia M. Shakes

Theater is an essential theoretical and practical site for forging Black radical thought, Africana feminisms, and womanism. Nicosia Shakes draws on ethnographic research in Jamaica and South Africa to analyze the vital relationship between activism and theater production. Concentrating on four performance events, Shakes situates the work of theater groups and projects within a trajectory of women-led social justice movements established in Jamaica, South Africa, and globally from the early 2000s to the present.

Music Making Community

Edited by Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol

Making music offers enormous possibilities–and faces significant limitations–in its power to generate belonging and advance social justice. Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol edit essays focused on the forms of interplay between music making and community making as mutually creative processes.

Diasporic Italy: Journal of the Italian American Studies Association

“Teaching Italian Immigration in the US South: A Redesign of the Italian American Studies Curriculum through Inclusive Teaching and Social Justice Pedagogy” by Alessia Martini

This essay presents a syllabus redesign for a course in Italian American studies. This project was conceived within the framework of social justice pedagogy and inclusive teaching, and it is based on the notion that inclusion requires intentional and deliberate strategies.

For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman

Cathryn J. Prince

From her start as one of the youngest activists in US history, Pauline Newman helped shape the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) into a dominant force in industrial America. Cathryn J. Prince tells the story of a self-educated Jewish immigrant who dedicated herself to a legion of causes and lifelong battles against sexism and classism.

Engaging and panoramic, For the Love of Labor is the first major biography of an important figure in labor and women’s history.

In the Spirit of Alinsky: Community Organizing’s Fight to Strengthen Democracy

Robert T. Gannett Jr.

Community-based organizing stands at a crossroads at a time when anti-democratic headwinds and authoritarian impulses threaten American society as never before. Robert T. Gannett Jr. draws on a forty-year career as a grassroots activist to make an impassioned plea for citizens to create the robust infrastructure of organizing that is necessary to sustain modern-day democracy.

Hard-headed but hopeful, In the Spirit of Alinsky distills decades of on-the-ground experience into a guide for effective radical action.

Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities

Karma R. Chávez

The battles for LGBTQ rights and immigrant rights have captured significant attention in the U.S. public sphere throughout the twenty-first century. Both movements, which are largely understood to be separate, have advocated a politics of inclusion in and assimilation to mainstream national values. Delineating an alternative approach to activism at the intersection of queer rights, immigration rights, and social justice, Queer Migration Politics examines a series of “coalitional moments” in which contemporary activists discover and respond to the predominant rhetoric, imagery, and ideologies that signal a sense of national identity.

Journal of Appalachian Studies

“Exhaustion as Affective Alignment: Social Justice Work in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven” by Jill Fennell

This article uses Denise Giardina’s 1987 novel, Storming Heaven, as a case study to look at how labor is represented aesthetically in fiction for political ends. The narrative depicts the theft of an Appalachian pastoral scene, which quickly devolves into mine work, abuse, and death. Giardina’s novel is a political novel that challenges unfair working conditions and neoliberal exploitation

Power and Just Transitions: Struggles for a Post-Coal Future in an Appalachian Valley

John Gaventa and Gabe Schwartzman

Published in 1982, John Gaventa’s award-winning Power and Powerlessness examined the dominance of the absentee coal industry in Central Appalachia. Gaventa and Gabe Schwartzman update the story through coal’s decline and into the present while focusing on how power relations and community mobilizing have changed and evolved during this era of transition.