From the Editors

We are pleased to introduce you to aspects of our quarterly journal online. Available are all of our editorials and tables of contents dating back to 1974. There is also supplemental material, such as recent recognition of our colleague, Paul Takagi, including an archive of his work. See Tony Platt's commentary on the Pelican Bay hunger strike and his testimony before the California Senate Judiciary Committee relative to historical lessons to be drawn from the eugenics movement in the United States and Europe. For teachers, we have compiled the classroom materials that have appeared in our pages and added some new ones.

We hope you will subscribe to the print version, and we offer first-time online visitors a discount. Many of our articles dating to 1986 are available in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format upon request for $4.00 each as e-mail attachments. This way, you can put together collections of articles specific to your research, using our subject index; this is the only way to obtain articles from out-of-print issues. (Publishers and copy services wishing to reprint or reproduce this material in any form must contact Social Justice for permissions instructions.)

A strength of our journal is that most issues are thematic, developed by guest editors who are intimately involved with the topic. Over the years, we have published volumes on "globalization," on threats to global security, on violence in its many forms, on gender and ethnicity, on immigration, on civil and human rights, on social welfare and educational policy, on crime, policing, and the related punishing institutions, and on harms related to the environment.

Global themes: Our Resisting Militarism and Globalized Punishment (Vol. 31, Nos. 1-2) is the most recent to examine the global structures that reproduce war, conflict, and controlling institutions such as prisons. It develops themes found in in Neoliberalism, Militarism, and Armed Conflict (Vol. 27, No. 4, Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey, eds.), Criminal Justice and Globalization at the New Millennium (Vol. 27, No. 2, Robert Weiss, ed.), as well as two issues edited by Robert Gould and Pat Sutton, Global Threats to Security (Vol. 29, No. 3) and Public Health in the 1990s: In the Shadow of Global Transformation and Militarism (Vol. 22, No. 4). Our Intersection of Ideologies of Violence (Vol. 30, No. 3) explains violence at the local and global levels, and Race, Security, and Social Movements (Vol. 30, No. 1) offers an analysis of the consequences of September 11. Lipschutz and Jonas' Beyond the Neoliberal Peace: From Conflict Resolution to Social Reconciliation (Vol. 25, No. 4) reinforces the utility of multilateralism and diplomacy in peacemaking. Perspectives on sustaining a livable planet are offered by Globalization and Environmental Harm (Vol. 29, Nos. 1-2), Children and the Environment (Vol. 24, No. 3), and Environmental Victims (Vol. 23, No. 4).

Domestic policy is the focus of two issues edited by Gwendolyn Mink, Disdained Mothers and Despised Others: The Politics and Impact of Welfare Reform (Vol. 25, No. 1) and Women and Welfare Reform (Vol. 21, No. 1). Follow-up issues on the impact of welfare reform include Welfare and Punishment in the Bush Era (Vol. 28, No. 1) and In the Aftermath of Welfare "Reform" (Vol. 28, No. 4). Jose Palafox's volume, Gatekeeper's State: Immigration and Boundary Policing in an Era of Globalization (Vol. 28, No.2), and our out-of-print Immigration: A Civil Rights Issue for the Americas in the 21st Century (Vol. 23, No. 3) show the impact of domestic policy on our hemisphere. Our commitment to hemispheric themes is shown in Shadows of State Terrorism: Impunity in Latin America (Vol. 26, No. 4).

Current & Recent Issues

Citizenship Surveillance of La Gente: Citizenship Theory, Practice, and Cultural Citizen Voices (Vol. 35, No. 1), covers the power imbued in citizenship ideologies and practices in schools, communities, and national forums. Read the "Introduction" or article abstracts, or order the issue online now.

Securing the Imperium: Criminal Justice Privatization and Neoliberal Globalization (Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4), edited by Bob Weiss, discusses the current resurgence, global expansion, and market concentration of the private security industry. Privatization of police, prisons, and the military is addressed in terms of the U.S., China, Latin America, the U.K., Australia, and South Africa. Read the "Introduction" or article abstracts, or order the issue online now. Another recent issue, Beyond Transnational Crime (Vol. 34, No. 2), offers a global framework for integrating crime control, national security, politics, and international relations. The issue emphasizes border militarization, environmental crime, and the corruption of counterterrorism efforts in Iraq and Australia. Read the "Introduction" or article abstracts, or order the issue online now.

Art, Identity, and Social Justice (Vol. 34, No. 1), edited by Edward J. McCaughan and Emmanuel David, discusses the role of the visual arts, theater, and performance in the social justice struggles of communities as diverse as American Indians, Bahamians, North American and Mexican feminists, working-class women in England, and LGBTQ communities of color in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Authors address identity and difference within contested relationships of power and structural inequality, including race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Read the "Introduction" or article abstracts, or order the issue online now. Also available is the companion volume, Art, Power, and Social Change (Vol. 33, No. 2). These essays explore dimensions of the role of art in processes of social change. Some address the power of art as a voice of dissent, as a tool for advancing social justice and democracy, as the core of a revolutionary strategy, and as a source of memory and future ways of knowing. Other essays warn about the art of power, such as government and art world censorship, the co-optive ability of capitalism, and the blinding force of Western rationalization. Read its "Introduction" or article abstracts. Or order the issue online now.

Waging War over Public Education and Youth Services: Challenging Corporate Control of Our Schools and Communities (Vol. 32, No. 3) helps us comprehend the war being waged over public education and services. It offers a critical theoretical framework on how social justice work can dismantle the considerable barriers erected by the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy. The volume looks at the way in which challenges to education, welfare, and notions of security affect particular groups and entire communities, as well as how they respond, resist, and create alternatives. It advances our understanding of the ways in which communities and institutions can support the development of agency among underserved youth, particularly given the Right's dominance over the nature and content of education, and thus address the roles of public institutions in a democracy. Read the "Introduction" or article abstracts. Or order it online now.

See also Pedagogies for Social Change (Vol. 29, No. 4), which covers the "new market economy" paradigm that now dominates the U.S. in the field of education. We face increased state and nationwide efforts to control learning and teaching under the guise of "standards" and "accountability." A growing number of educators and community activists are resisting this trend through innovative, progressive practices in classrooms at all levels and through organizing students, parents, and teachers to defend their educational rights. This issue of Social Justice captures examples of this resistance in California universities and elsewhere and offers critiques of the "standards" movement. Edited by Susan Roberta Katz & Cecilia O'Leary. Read the "Introduction."

Resisting Militarism and Globalized Punishment (Vol. 31, Nos. 1-2) examines the widening net of incarceration, immigration policing, and drug and crime enforcement, as well as the role of an increasingly authoritarian national security state in a globalized 21st-century economy. This transnational phenomenon is the fruition of a conservative program, initiated in the Reagan and Thatcher years, and continuing under George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s New Labour, that lowers the cost of labor, makes regressive tax cuts, reduces environmental regulations (especially in the U.S.), guts affirmative action and welfare benefits, and greatly expands the military and the criminal justice system. It pushes the world to accept unilateralist, preemptive militarism, most notably with the Bush-Blair intervention in Iraq. The U.S. and Britain have been engaged in a prison-building binge, such that the U.S. now has the highest rate of incarceration of any modern democracy and England has become the prison capital of Western Europe. Articles in this issue speak to an integrated system of global workforce management and governance that is increasingly based on restricting civil, political, and human rights. Read the "Introduction."

Applied Research and Social Justice (Vol. 30, No. 4) examines how social science research can contribute to the pursuit of social justice through its direct application to resolving concrete social problems, aiding organizing efforts, informing public policy, influencing legislation, or changing institutions. It delineates the boundaries between basic, applied, and clinical sociological research. Authors address the national debate on “welfare reform,” service learning, electoral redistricting, and the death penalty. Edited by Laurie Joiner & Ed McCaughan. Introduction.

The Intersection of Ideologies of Violence (Vol. 30, No. 3) explains violence at the local and global levels, as well as its manifestations in society’s structural, material, cultural, and political spheres. Central ideologies of violence discussed are patriarchal domination, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, and savage competition and individualism, nurtured by an extreme concentration of wealth and widespread poverty. Beyond addressing the enactment of violence through these ideologies, the articles propose transformative strategies. New discourses include the role of the state and social movements, identity politics as a transformative agent, the combined power of ethnicity, class, and gender politics as an organizing force, the promises and restrictions of human rights litigation, rescuing the vocational value embedded in the act of work, and the use of film as an instrument that offers critical pedagogies to counter the politics of fear prevalent in societies such as the United States. Introduction.

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