Virtual Library

In 1938, a black newspaper in Houston paid front-page tribute to Thyra J. Edwards as the embodiment of "The Spirit of Aframerican Womanhood." Edwards was a world lecturer, journalist, social worker, labor organizer, women's rights advocate, and civil rights activist--an undeniably important figure in the social struggles of the first half of the twentieth century. She experienced international prominence throughout much of her life, from the early 1930s to her death in 1953, but has received little attention from historians in years since. Gregg Andrews's Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle is the first book-length biographical study of this remarkable, historically significant woman. <br> Edwards, granddaughter of runaway slaves, grew up in Jim Crow-era Houston and started her career there as a teacher. She moved to Gary, Indiana, and Chicago as a social worker, then to New York as a journalist, and later became involved with the Communist Party, attracted by its stance on race and labor. She was mentored by famed civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, who became her special friend and led her to pursue her education. She obtained scholarships to college, and after several years of study in the U.S. and then in Denmark, she became a women's labor organizer and a union publicist. <br> In the 1930s and 1940s, she wrote about international events for black newspapers, traveling to Europe, Mexico, and the Soviet Union and presenting an anti-imperialist critique of world affairs to her readers. Edwards's involvement with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, her work in a Jewish refugee settlement in Italy, and her activities with U.S. communists drew the attention of the FBI. She was harassed by government intelligence organizations until she died at the age of just fifty-five. Edwards contributed as much to the radical foundations of the modern civil rights movements as any other woman of her time. <br> This fascinating new biography details Thyra Edwards's lifelong journey and myriad achievements, describing both her personal and professional sides and the many ways they intertwined. Gregg Andrews used Edwards's official FBI file--along with her personal papers, published articles, and civil rights manuscript collections--to present a complete portrait of this noteworthy activist. An engaging volume for the historian as well as the general reader, Thyra J. Edwards explores the complete domestic and international impact of her life and actions.

Although a thriving social science literature in citizenship has emerged in the past two decades, to date there exists neither a sociology of rights nor a sociology of human rights. Theoretical obstacles include the association of rights with the philosophical discourse of normativity, the abstraction of universalism, and the individualism attributed to rights-bearers. Parallel historical obstacles dating from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 include American exceptionalism and racism, cultural relativism, the institutional primacy of sovereignty, and the privileging of civil rights over socioeconomic rights. Except in the United States, today human rights discourse is the lingua franca of global struggles*; building a sociology of rights as a collective project is now imperative. This article unearths and reconstructs 60 years of political clashes, intellectual debates, and struggles for inclusion and recognition surrounding human rights and citizenship—much of which has been hidden from history (especially African American human rights movements). We introduce a nascent but uncoordinated social science attention to rights and develop criteria for a new sociology of rights. At the nexus of human rights and citizenship rights we identify the public good of a “right to have rights,” which expresses the institutional, social, and moral preconditions for human recognition and inclusion. The concept offers a promising avenue of social science inquiry.

This article introduces a political geography of abortion, arguing that abortion access is an essential but overlooked site where gendered mechanisms of state control are enforced and contested. Today, abortion access is currently in the midst of a significant spatial transformation: advances in technology, medicine, and activist tactics are currently changing the geographies of abortion and working to weaken the link between access to abortion and national legal frameworks. In response to these challenges to state control over reproduction, states are responding with new tactics to re-assert authority over pregnancy and abortion. However, these changes remain under-researched in the geographical literature, which tends to sustain a focus on state-law and inter-state travel. The forces currently transforming abortion access exceed these analytical frameworks: we require a multi-scalar and scale-jumping account of the relationship between pro-choice activists and anti-choice states. This article makes the case for a political geography of abortion that moves beyond a state-based framework to account for changing patterns of resistance and restriction on abortion. The arguments are developed through two cases: mobile abortion clinics at sea and telemedicine abortion technology, both of which demonstrate the contestation over abortion rights at the sub- and supra-state levels.

The Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, provided unprecedented insights into the operations of state-corporate surveillance, highlighting the extent to which everyday communication is integrated into an extensive regime of control that relies on the ‘datafication’ of social life. Whilst such data-driven forms of governance have significant implications for citizenship and society, resistance to surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks has predominantly centred on techno-legal responses relating to the development and use of encryption and policy advocacy around privacy and data protection. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of social justice activists, we argue that there is a significant level of ambiguity around this kind of anti-surveillance resistance in relation to broader activist practices, and critical responses to the Snowden leaks have been confined within particular expert communities. Introducing the notion of ‘data justice’, we therefore go on to make the case that resistance to surveillance needs to be (re)conceptualized on terms that can address the implications of this data-driven form of governance in relation to broader social justice agendas. Such an approach is needed, we suggest, in light of a shift to surveillance capitalism in which the collection, use and analysis of our data increasingly comes to shape the opportunities and possibilities available to us and the kind of society we live in.

The demise of custom as a source of international law has been widely forecasted. This is because both the nature and the relative importance of custom’s constituent elements are contentious. At the same time, custom has become an increasingly significant source of law in important areas such as human rights obligations. Codification conventions, academic commentary, and the case law of the International Court of Justice (the Court) have also contributed to a contemporary resurrection of custom. These developments have resulted in two apparently opposing approaches, which Roberts terms “traditional custom” and “modern custom.” The renaissance of custom requires the articulation of a coherent theory that can accommodate its classic foundations and contemporary developments. This article seeks to provide an enriched theoretical account of custom that incorporates both the traditional and the modern approaches rather than advocating one approach over the other.

This article offers an interpretation of transitional justice policies – the efforts of post‐conflict and post‐dictatorship societies to address the legacy of past abuses – as a form of social control. While transitional justice is commonly conceptualized as responding to a core problem of impunity, this article argues that such formulation is too narrow and leads to lack of coherence in the analysis of the diverse array of transitional mechanisms, which include among others trials, truth commissions, reparations for victims and apologies. Building on the work of Stanley Cohen, the article contends that the core transitional problem is the denial of human rights violations, and consequently that the common purpose of all transitional justice mechanisms is to reclassify the past: redefining as deviant some acts and individuals which prior to the transition were considered ‘normal’. The article identifies and analyses three themes in the application of a social control framework to transitional justice: (1) truth, memory and retroactive social control, pertains to the way truth‐seeking transitional justice mechanisms reclassify past events by engaging in social control of and through memory; (2) censure, celebration and transitional social control refers to the reclassification of categories of individuals through expressions of both social disapproval and praise; and (3) civil society and social control from below concerns the role of social movements, organizations and groups as informal agents of social control during transitions. The concluding section recaps and briefly explores the concept of ‘good moral panic’ in the context of political transitions. While the concept of social control tends to have negative connotations for critical sociologists, this work suggests that efforts to categorize, punish and disapprove certain behaviours as deviant may not only be viewed as supporting a conservative status‐quo, but also as promoting fledging human rights norms.

In recent decades, scholars of world cultural diffusion have begun to examine the structure of the world society itself, finding evidence of regionalization within the network of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). There is little research, however, on how the structure of world society shapes processes of transnational diffusion. In this paper, I propose that the regionalization of world society, measured through INGO membership composition, structures the transnational diffusion of cultural norms like LGBT associations. Analyzing an original, comprehensive dataset of 3,141 domestic, voluntary LGBT associations founded between 1979 and 2009, I find that countries embedded in anti-LGBT regions are more resistant to the diffusion of domestic LGBT associations. I further find that the negative effect of embeddedness in anti-LGBT regions on domestic LGBT association founding is weakened by dependence on Western foreign aid. The findings highlight the importance of examining the composition of INGOs as well as attending to the role of regional culture in studies of transnational diffusion.

While usually seen in positive terms, transnational mobilization can sometimes hurt movements as well as help them. An examination of the transnational network of organizations supporting civil rights demands in Northern Ireland between 1967 and 1972 suggests that international involvement, not only can exacerbate problems encountered by domestic coalitions, but can also introduce additional obstacles to the effective pursuit of social change. Using a wide range of sources, four types of impediments to positive issue network dynamics are conceptualized and illustrated—structural, organizational, cultural, and ideological. Structurally, the civil rights network brought together groups outside of Northern Ireland that, otherwise, would not have attempted to cooperate because of diametrically opposed positions on domestic issues. In terms of organization, spatial variations in Irish Diaspora and New Left protest limited sustained network activity to a few societies. Weak ties between organizations located in different societies reduced the likelihood of cooperation. Competition for resources led to the formation of rival transnational blocs within the issue network. Cross-societal differences in cultural norms and group identities led to clashes. Interactions across borders exported and amplified ideological tensions already existing on the domestic-level. The findings suggest that political process assumptions regarding the effects of the presence of external allies require qualification.

Trauma Cinema focuses on a new breed of documentary films and videos that adopt catastrophe as their subject matter and trauma as their aesthetic. Incorporating oral testimony, home-movie footage, and documentary reenactment, these documentaries express the havoc trauma wreaks on history and memory. Janet Walker uses incest and the Holocaust as a double thematic focus and fiction films as a point of comparison.

Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) that usually affects the lungs leading to severe coughing, fever, and chest pains. Although current research in the past four years has provided valuable insight into TB transmission, diagnosis, and treatment, much remains to be discovered to effectively decrease the incidence of and eventually eradicate TB. The disease still puts a strain on public health, being only second to HIV/AIDS in causing high mortality rates. This review will highlight the history of TB as well as provide an overview of the current literature on epidemiology, pathogenesis and the immune response, treatment, and control of TB. In this race to combat a disease that knows no boundaries, it is necessary to have a conceptual and clear understanding of TB overall with the hope of providing better treatment through novel and collaborative research and public health efforts.