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Edited by Christian Matheis
Transformation: Toward a People’s Democracy is a movement book for anyone working for an expansive vision of social justice. Here Suzanne Pharr offers a clear and compelling vision for action amid social and political turmoil. Drawing on decades of work on the frontlines of social movements, Pharr’s writings create a real-time chronicle of on-the-ground organizing and the historical significance of struggles for freedom and democracy. Pharr, a Southern queer feminist and anti-racist organizer, explores the pitfalls and the strengths within social justice movements. Her writings reflect the interchange of ideas and the collective work of thinkers and organizers who led activists to lift up the liberation of gender and sexuality, to fight both domestic and state violence, to advance anti-racist strategies and the leadership of people of color, to work against the advancement of rapacious capitalism, and to confront the rise of the Right in all of its forms.
Transformation examines not just what happened but how it happened in the battles against numerous forms of oppression including economic injustice, racism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, and nationalism. Taken together, Pharr’s writings give activists and scholars a way to understand decades of attacks on civil rights while offering a roadmap that shows the way toward a people’s democracy where everyone has full participation, voice, a fair share of the benefits, justice, and dignity.
Suzanne Pharr is an organizer and political strategist who has spent her adult life working to build a broad-based, multi-racial, multi-issued movement for social and economic justice in the United States. She founded the Women’s Project in Arkansas in 1981, was a co-founder of Southerners on New Ground in 1984, and was director of the Highlander Center from 1999 to 2004. After six decades of working across movements, Pharr now thinks of herself as a political handywoman, engaging with activists of diverse races, genders, sexual identities, classes, ages, abilities, and cultures to develop strategies for justice and equality.
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“In this era of Covid-19, enlightened policing is of special urgency. The authors of Community Policing in Nigeria provide us invaluable guidelines to attain this.”
— Gloria Emeagwali, Central Connecticut State University
“Community Policing in Nigeria is well timed, especially when Nigeria is descending into a state of security failure. Not only do the authors trace the history of policing in Nigeria, they offer comprehensive strategies for community policing that would help Nigeria maintain peace and order, as well as prevent and apprehend the various kinds of criminal elements that menace the streets of the country. Most important, the book demonstrates that acceptable policing practices were bracketed and ubiquitously practiced in regions of Nigeria before the European invasion and the subsequent introduction of a state militarized police system. This book is a must-read for policy-makers and Nigeria’s educational sectors.”
— Ihekwoaba Declan Onwudiwe, Texas Southern University
Emmanuel C. Onyeozili is professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore. Biko Agozino is professor of sociology and Africana studies at Virginia Tech. Augustine Agu is a retired senior policy officer at UNICEF. Patrick Ibe is professor and chair of the Criminal Justice Department at Albany State University.
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Complexo da Maré is a group of 16 contiguous favelas and housing projects in the northern zone of Rio de Janeiro. Home to an estimated 140,000 individuals, Maré is Brazil's largest agglomeration of favelas. Often depicted in a negative light, these favelas are in fact vibrant and diverse communities, as revealed in this remarkable book.
Maré from the Inside: Art, Culture and Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is a companion to the exhibition of the same name (Portuguese: Maré de Dentro), which was developed by an international team of Brazilian and US academics, activists and artists. The exhibition documents the lives of residents of Complexo da Maré through family portraits, street photographs, documentary films and written works.
Featured in this book is a selection of the exhibition's photographs by Italian photojournalist Antonello Veneri, who worked closely with Maré resident and activist Henrique Gomes over the period from 2013 to 2019, during which Rio was home to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. These photographs, simultaneously personal and deeply humane, counter long-standing and powerful stigmatizing narratives, demonstrating instead the diversity and resilience of these communities and exposing the barriers residents confront in their everyday lives.
Providing context to the photographs are essays by the exhibition's creators, curators and collaborators, including Maré resident and scholar Andreza Jorge, who asks what it is about the Maré de Dentro exhibition that has made it so compelling for so many people from very different parts of the world. The answer lies in the power of art to make us rethink prevailing social frames and, in turn, embrace fresh political and cultural strategies for integrating previously marginalized communities more fully into political and social life.
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The saying goes that well-behaved women rarely make history. For centuries, American women have been carving out spaces of their own in a male-dominated world. From politics, to entertainment, to their personal lives, women have been making their mark on the American landscape since the nation’s inception, often ignored or overlooked by those creating the record. This collection takes the long view of the American woman and examines her transgressive behavior through the decades. Including stories of women enslaved, early celebrities, engineers, and more, these essays demonstrate how there is no such thing as an “average” woman, as even those ordinary women are found doing extraordinary things. This collection comes at a particularly poignant time, as August 2020 markedthe 100th anniversary of the ratification and adoption of the19th amendment, which – in a landmark for women’s right – granted American women the right to vote.
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The Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance launched an experiment in 2011 called the Community Voices initiative. Community Voices was a student-led group devoted to bringing graduate students and faculty from diverse backgrounds into thoughtful dialogue with leaders who have devoted their professional lives to spurring or assisting with community change. This book is the product of those conversations.
Conversations in Community Change features 12 interviews conducted by members of Community Voices, since renamed the Community Change Collaborative (CCC). The interviewees are leaders who have worked in many different contexts across the public, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors to instigate meaningful change (democratic social, political and economic) in their communities. The animating idea behind these interviews is that those in search of peaceful democratic social change, especially amidst ongoing economic and social dislocation, have much to learn from one another within the United States and internationally, and at all levels of governance.
Among the topics and initiatives discussed in the book:
- Efforts to secure civil and human rights for groups that have historically experienced discrimination,
- How food system pioneers are seeking to make alternatives to the present corporate-dominated food production framework real for growers and consumers alike,
- How the arts can open up new public and private spaces to permit reconsideration of otherwise dominant assumptions and thinking,
- The social exigencies created by capitalism’s constant economic dislocation and roiling,
Ultimately, readers will come away from the book with a fuller appreciation for the complexities of democratic change—and the need for modesty, patience, and perseverance among those who would seek to lead or encourage such efforts.
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In January 2019 the Calhoun Center for Higher Education Innovation at Virginia Tech launched a multiyear project designed to explore the connections between adaptation and inclusiveness in learning. Our thesis was that a full-fledged commitment to adaptive learning has the potential to diversify the emerging knowledge economy while also making it more inclusive. Moreover, increased diversification and inclusiveness can enhance socioeconomic sustainability and enable our society to engage all pertinent voices when approaching complex problems.
To test this thesis, we first explored an adaptive and inclusive approach to defining what we mean by learning and knowing. A dynamic definition allowed us to then openly explore adaptation to specific aspects of learning including: i) How is learning realized? ii) When is learning delivered? iii) Who is included in learning?
Our first step was to bring together 60 individuals, each with significant direct experience with adaptive learning. These individuals came from 30 different organizations representing a range of sectors: higher education, K–12 education, industry, and non-profit.
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The design professions—architecture, city planning, landscape architecture, and urban design—share a great deal in terms of intellectual antecedents, professional ideals, and praxis. In particular, they share a commitment to creating better cities—whether at the scale of buildings, neighborhoods, or city-regions. But who decides what constitutes a “good” city, and how should such an ideal be implemented?
In Better by Design? Paul Knox explores the intellectual roots of the design professions, showing how architects, planners, and other designers have traditionally interpreted their roles and implemented their ideas in cities across North America and the UK. Drawing on his long record of research and award-winning publications on the social production of the built environment, Knox offers a critical appraisal of their ultimate effectiveness in achieving the goal of creating and sustaining good cities.
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Driving is risky business. Only cancer, heart attacks, and strokes cause more unintentional deaths among the general population. In this book, Tom Dingus, one of the foremost authorities on driving safety, tells you how to reduce your risk of accident while on the road. Dingus directs the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), which is home to the largest group of driving safety researchers in the world. In Survive the Drive he brings together decades of transportation safety research with personal anecdotes from his own time behind the wheel to create an entertaining guide that gives you all of the information you need to keep yourself and those around you safe on the road.
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The US blueprint for operations in Syria included a “by, with, and through” approach to working with local proxies to fight ISIS insurgents. The approach also formed the framework for the United States–Syrian Democratic Forces partnership. However, the US–SDF relationship was never stable and ultimately broke down. In this paper Dylan Maguire examines the inherent challenges in the US–SDF relationship, as well as potential improvements that could be made to the US proxy selection framework to ensure more effective and sustainable proxy relationships in the future.
"A Perfect Proxy?" is the latest contribution to the Proxy War Project, which aims to develop new insights for resolving the wars that best the Arab world. PWP is jointly directed by Ariel Ahram (Virginia Tech) and Ranj Alaaldin (Brookings Doha Center) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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Exploring the Architecture of Place in America's Farmers Markets draws attention to the simple but elusive architectural space of public and farmers markets. It discusses three seminal types of markets—heritage building, open-air pavilion, and pop-up canopy—demonstrating the characteristics of each type using a mixture of narrative and illustration. The narrative combines historically informed architectural observation with interview material drawn from conversations the author has had over the years with market managers, vendors, and shoppers. The illustrations include an appealing variety of photos, diagrams, and drawings that enabled the author to view each market through an architectural lens based on eight scales of measure—the hand, the container, the person, the stall, a grouping of stalls, the street, the block, and the market's situation within the neighborhood. Some of the architectural elements discussed include walls that layer, openings that frame, roofs that encompass, and niches that embrace. While each of the case studies illustrates shared characteristics of one of the architectural typologies, each farmers market is distinct in the specific ways it reflects the local culture and environment. Ultimately, in viewing markets through these three types and eight scales of measure we are able to better appreciate how farmers markets foster social interaction and community engagement.
The book concludes with a broad look at the way of life and living that public and farmers markets have spawned, while looking ahead to what the author sees as an emerging new typology – the mobile market – which takes the bounty of local farmers to neighborhoods underserved with fresh healthy food, and otherwise known as food deserts. Market vendors speak enthusiastically about the qualitative benefits that farming life allows, and the greater good their individual choice provides for the general public and region. Likewise, a spectrum of governmental, commerce and community leaders champion the economic development farmers markets catalyze through allied business development and civic commitment.
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