This introduction presents the main arguments of the book, develops a novel terminological framework, and situates the book in current research. First, from the perspective of international economic and social human rights, this is not an age of human rights triumphalism. The main human rights advocates featured in this book were concerned with international justice and redistributive justice, and theirs was a long quest to lift international economic and social human rights onto a level-playing field through three phases: internationalizing rights, criticizing global inequalities through rights, and attempting to secure the legitimacy of these rights once and for all. Second, on a broader egalitarian plateau, human rights advocacy can be situated on a redistributionist terrain. Third, this book supplements institutional, organizational, diplomatic, political, and movement-centered research on international human rights. There is a gap in existing scholarship in understanding historical interrelations between human rights and inequalities, which is where this book intervenes, above all from an intellectual historical perspective.

The case demonstrates how disproportionality and disparity for children and youth of color are significant concerns in child welfare. Black children in the United States experience higher rates of child welfare investigation, removal from their families of origin, termination of parental rights, placement moves, fewer appropriate services, and are less likely to be reunified with their parents compared to White children. Because African American children are less likely to exit foster care through reunification than White children, increasing reunification rates for African American families is one way to address racial disproportionality and disparity in child welfare cases. Considering intersectionality through a CRT lens is essential for providing culturally appropriate service in the foster care/child welfare system.

The case discusses how Black, Indigenous, Latine and Youth of Color (BILYC) and LGBTQQIA2S+ youth are at significantly greater risk for dating violence exposure and subsequent adverse health and social outcomes. The grand challenge of eliminating racism and intersecting oppression cannot be achieved without centering the voices of BILYC, LGBTQQIA2S+ Youth, and Communities of Color as experts in their experiences with racism and oppression and innovators in strategies for ending structural and institutional inequities. By advancing the voices of those who are marginalized, social workers promote a sense of mattering through validation, authentic care for the dignity and worth of those they are serving, and an expressed commitment to the advancement of Communities of Color and communities that are marginalized.

The term ‘social work’ was first coined by the American economist Simon Patten in 1900. He envisaged a new profession that would address the social problems of the modern world. These problems are neither timeless nor innate to human nature, but come into being at particular points in history as a result of people’s actions and the way they organise power in society. Looking at these issues historically enables us to see the way social problems (such as extreme inequality and poverty, mass urbanisation, industrial pollution, racism, sexism and different forms of violence) have been constructed and varied over time. More importantly, this lens may provide us with clues as to how people might un-make these problems and do something better. This historical perspective is vital for practice today because it locates critical social work as part of much wider and ongoing struggles for social justice and human rights.

Education changes lives. It opens doors and provides us with the skills and dispositions to achieve what we believe in. But not all students flourish in their educational settings. The ways students experience their education are shaped by the differences among them. Despite many years of equity-based reform in schools, the children most at risk of educational alienation, failure or withdrawal in the third decade of the twenty-first century are, for the most part, the same children who were most at risk 50 and 100 years ago. Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, rural and isolated areas, non-dominant cultural, language, or religious groups, students with disabilities, and many who don’t fit the stereotypes associated with a particular subject area, gender or culture have been shown to experience schools as places of alienation, not as places of growth, opportunity and learning. Issues of sexual and gender identity, mental health, and instability of citizenship, housing, and employment combine to make the situation even more complex.

In this chapter and the next, we will be switching gears to transition to less-technical but more social and governance related issues where satellite remote sensing of water can play a positive role. So far, we have learned up to chapter 10 are technical aspects of satellite remote sensing of water and their applications in water management. In this chapter, we will explore the potential of satellite remote sensing for social justice in water management.

In 2018, Hannah Gadsby created a sensation through her stand-up show Nanette. In it she shocked audiences by telling her hard-hitting trauma narrative, revealing the impact of sexual abuse, male violence, and homophobia on her mental health. Controversially, Gadsby also claimed that stand-up as a form and the mainstream stand-up industry itself were significant agents in deepening her psychological harm. This chapter examines Gadsby’s dramaturgical strategies and struggles in attempting to construct a means of speaking about the pain of her lived experience and seeking a therapeutic means of addressing her trauma through stand-up. Luckhurst analyses Gadsby’s interest in ethical story-telling and her notion of educating audiences about laughter and political complicity. Finally, Luckhurst argues that Gadsby draws on therapy models to transform her trauma narrative into a story of healing for herself and her audiences.

One of the most interesting, and rapid, recent changes in live stand-up comedy is the increased number of disabled comedians performing. This chapter examines the performances of two disabled comedians – Laurence Clark and Rosie Jones – to explore how their performances may be viewed as social justice comedy through an analysis of the techniques used, and themes explored, in their performances. The chapter begins by considering the ways in which disability has been represented in comedy across history. Attention then shifts to how stand-up comedy can be considered a tool for social justice. The focus then turns to the methodological framework used to gather and analyse performances by Laurence Clark and Rosie Jones, before examining how the techniques used, and themes explored, in their performances may have social justice potentials and impacts for disability and disabled people and how the limits to these potentials and impacts can be understood.

The subject areas that form the HASS learning area are founded on and around ‘values’, and values underpin everything we do in educational settings. This is not surprising, given that values are at the core of our thinking and actions. As human beings, we have core values to which we subscribe – things that we think are of importance and of worth. These values are diverse and influenced by a complex relationship between the individual and their social environment. As an example, consider the values listed by Burgh, Field and Freakley: friendship, security, health, education, beauty, art and wealth. You may disagree and think that holding one or more of the values listed would not in fact lead to a good life; or that an important value is missing from this list; that is, we may disagree that each of these values is of importance. The point, however, is that ‘[e]veryone has values, but there is not universal agreement about what is valuable’. In this chapter, the use of a community of inquiry will be explored as a means of supporting meaningful values inquiry in HASS. The community of inquiry is an approach that empowers learners to think critically about issues pertaining to values, ethics and social justice in a safe environment that promotes diversity and student voice.

With the criminal law’s duty to advance social justice at the site of culpability evaluation established, Chapter 2 provides the substance of that duty and offers a conceptual tool to aid in its fulfilment, in the form of the Real Person Approach (RPA). The chapter introduces the target of the RPA as the dominant construct of personhood represented by excuse doctrine, and identifies its contribution to both moral and social injustice, through the subversion of core criminal law principles of proportionality and parsimony, respectively. The RPA responds by offering a guiding framework which helps to identify and explain these injustices, and aids with the challenge of holding people to account for wrongdoing in a way that advances social justice. Finally, the chapter explains the core features of the RPA in terms of acknowledging agency as vulnerable, responding with recognitive justice, and maintaining conceptual feasibility.

In the majority of the cases examined, workers and communities sought to address their grievances through a range of host-country state institutions alongside their claims to transnational NJMs. Chapter 6 explores the conflicting roles of the state in enabling and constraining the ability of NJMs to support community struggles for redress. Non-judicial mechanisms sometimes enlisted useful support from various state agencies, drawing on the distinctive functional capacities and sources of legitimacy that state agencies possess. However, other state agencies also, at times in the same case, attempted to block or at least significantly impede NJM efforts to influence redress processes and outcomes. The chapter shows that because state actors often hold highly ambiguous roles as enablers as well as regulators of business-related human rights violations, opportunities for transnational NJMs to actively collaborate with national governments in addressing grievance claims were usually limited; instead, the ability of NJMs to support human rights redress often depended on indirect or unintended effects of their interactions with the state. Consequently, it was not primarily via efforts to actively collaborate with governments that transnational NJMs contributed to redress, but rather through shifting power balances among competing coalitions of actors engaged with grievance struggles, inside as well as outside the state.

Are non-judicial approaches to remedying business-related human rights violations a good use of the resources invested in them, or a counterproductive distraction from alternative legal or activist pathways to remedy? This chapter outlines the book’s approach to exploring this divisive question, drawing on field-work intensive case studies of human rights grievances across three industrial sectors in Indonesia and India. This introductory chapter launches the book’s argument that while NJMs are seriously limited in their ability to deliver adequate human rights redress, NJMs can nonetheless make small but useful contributions to broader struggles for human rights remedy, never by substituting for binding state-led regulatory and redress processes, but rather by providing entry points through which workers and communities can sometimes mobilise additional resources or sources of leverage in support of their struggles for redress. These findings imply the need for a responsive approach to NJM institutional design and regulatory strategy, in which NJMs are mobilised more explicitly as part of a wider field of struggle to counterbalance some of the entrenched inequalities that buttress recurring patterns of human rights grievances around the world.

School–university partnerships (SUPs) have the potential to create equitable outcomes for students in material and intentional ways. Our chapter includes a case study that exemplifies ways in which SUPs can be organized around equitable outcomes for students who have been historically marginalized. We tease apart specific aspects of this SUP with a focus on creating robust collaborative learning spaces for all partners in the SUP, building upon and honoring the unique contributions of each key role in the SUP, identifying the new teacher profile (knowledge, skills, practices, and dispositions) desired by all SUP members, and designing the experiences and activities that will support new teachers achieving that profile. We share strategies that help our SUP to create a healthy ecology for teacher preparation that is focused on social justice and equity for both candidates in our program and the students in partner schools.

In this chapter the sociolinguist Ian Cushing critiques what he sees as the prevailing narrative on oracy and social justice. He challenges two key points: Firstly, he disputes the 1960s theory of oracy, which viewed certain communities as linguistically deficient, attributing educational struggles to individual shortcomings rather than systemic injustices. Secondly, he opposes the contemporary oracy agenda’s focus on individual language modification to address broader societal inequities, arguing for transformative methodologies tackling root causes. Cushing criticizes organizations like Voice 21 for perpetuating deficit perspectives and language policing in the name of social justice. Instead, he advocates for a holistic approach acknowledging language struggles’ intersection with socioeconomic and racial inequalities. Only systemic transformation, he concludes, will offer genuine social justice.

The last chapter offers a comparison of protest movements in the territories: some appeared to be less politically motivated and more concerned with land rights and economic grievances; other movements, such as the march in 1949 in the BVI, openly called for greater political rights and autonomy. Yet, none of the campaigns by local pro-autonomy activists managed to achieve widespread public support or electoral success. This final chapter assesses local independence groups and their political discourse. It explores their interactions with the local population, existing political structures, and regional anticolonial movements. It is inaccurate to suggest that the non-sovereign status of these territories was a result of a lack of popular protest or a total absence of nationalism. Rather, through the relationship between popular protest movements, local politics, clandestine independence activists and the response of the colonial state, no widespread call for independence emerged.