Suicide is a global phenomenon, with implications for HICs and LMICs alike, bec,ause of interconnectedness. Social injustice increases societies’ suicide risk and it is easily and frequently exported. Suicide is preventable but not always individually. Suicide prediction is difficult or impossible, so those measures that effect everyone work best. Hence assuring good quality, timely mental health coverage for the whole population is important. Those with the least resources must be targeted, as they are at greatest risk..

This chapter traces debates on progress and social justice as of the late 1980s. The critique of a medical marketplace, the perceived need to challenge an autonomy-based notion of progress, and a certain sociopolitical optimism all contributed to reimagining medical progress by placing left-wing sensibilities front and center. The rise of the health model underpinning this view of progress emphasized nonhealth factors – including income, education, and housing – that influence the health of communities. Effectively, the idea of health progress lost its narrower “medical” focus and became associated with ambitious projects for achieving social equality. But here too, a single-minded commitment to the notion of progress as health justice comes replete with trade-offs and unresolved tensions. I end the chapter with a case study of the COVID-19 pandemic, the way in which it furthered a vision of health as occurring in a much larger ecosystem than previously thought, and corresponding ideas of progress as social justice.

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.

After reviewing restorative justice and peace education in the previous two chapters, I integrate these fields into the mission of a progressive psychology in this last chapter of the book’s first section. This book is part of a series dedicated to more closely aligning psychological science and practice with the pursuit of a more just, harmonious world. What this world entails is not a clear or singular idea, however, and so I first discuss the nuance needed in thinking through what it means for the discipline to be more engaged in the world this way. I then move to arguing that restorative justice and peace education have much to offer a progressive psychology, while these deep engagements with social justice in each area can also benefit psychological science. To demonstrate the roles that these fields play in building more socially just worlds, I also review empirical research on both. This summary highlights potential areas, as well as limits and gaps in understanding.

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.