InclusiveVT Publications
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Browsing InclusiveVT Publications by Content Type "Article"
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- A Black Woman’s Search for the Transdisciplinary Applied Social Justice Model: Encounters with Critical Race Feminism, Black Feminism, and Africana StudiesPratt-Clarke, Menah (Itibari M. Zulu, 2012-03)This work examines my journey, as a descendant of the Creoles of Freetown, Sierra Leone, on my father’s side, and former enslaved Africans of rural Texas on my mother’s side, to construct and develop the Transdisciplinary Applied Social Justice (TASJ©) model. The TASJ model is an Afrocentric, praxis-oriented, theoretical, and methodological approach for addressing the marginalization, exclusion, and disenfranchisement of people of color, and women of color, in particular. This article documents the development of the TASJ model using personal narrative and demonstrates its connections to Black Feminism and Critical Race Feminism. In addition, the model’s contribution to Africana Studies is examined. Key contributions include its transdisciplinary focus; its recognition of the importance of intertwined identities, including race and gender; and its commitment to social justice activism and social movements.
- How KANERE Free Press Resists BiopowerDeramo, Michele C. (York University, 2016)How does a free press resist state biopower? This article studies the development and dissemination of KANERE Free Press, a refugee-run news source operating in the Kakuma Refugee Camp, that was founded to create “a more open society in refugee camps and to develop a platform for fair public debate on refugee affairs” (KANERE Vision Statement). The analysis of KANERE and its impact on the political subjectivity of refugees living in Kakuma is framed by Foucault’s theory of biopower, the state-sanctioned right to “make live or let die” in its management of human populations. The author demonstrates the force relations between KANERE, its host country of Kenya, and the UNHCR through two ongoing stories covered by KANERE: the broad rejection of the MixMe nutritional supplement and the expressed disdain for the camp’s World Refugees Day celebration. Using ethnographic and decolonizing methodologies, the author privileges the voices and perspectives of the KANERE editors and the Kakuma residents they interviewed in order to provide a ground-level view of refugee’s lived experiences in Kakuma. As KANERE records refugees’ experiences of life in the camp, they construct a narrative community that is simultaneously produced by and resistant to the regulations and control of camp administration and state sovereignty. In doing so, KANERE creates a transgressive space that reaches beyond the confines of the camp.
- The Spectacle of Volunteerism: Aid, Africa, and the Western HelperJames-Deramo, Michele (Virginia Tech, 2011-07-22)This study emerges from the discourse on international aid effectiveness in Africa. There is a compilation of evidence that international aid has not produced significant gains in the quality of life in African nations and, in fact, has coincided with an overall decline in well-being. Following in this discourse, I propose that volunteerism represents another form of international aid whereby human ingenuity, capital, and physical labor are delivered to African nations in the form of helpful visitors from the United States and Europe. The purpose ofthis study is to explore in greater depth the impact of the Western helper. Do volunteers from the West deliver measurable benefits to the villages they visit? Or is volunteerism a spectacle that furthers a Western agenda through positive public relations?