Quest for Justice
Oxford Brookes University (Gipsy Lane Campus)
Augmenting Water, Energy and Food Security in the Sahel Region with an Integrated Ecosystem Services Nexus Approach View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daphne Gondhalekar
Groundwater is a critical underlying resource for human survival and economic development in extensive drought-prone areas of Sub-Saharan Africa such as the Sahel region. Here, recurrent droughts are dominant climate risks that compromise livelihoods, water, and food security, and exert a major negative effect on GDP growth in one-third of the continent’s countries. Some of these countries belong to the poorest in the world, with a large part of the population depending on subsistence farming and face huge impacts. With projected climate change impacts and huge population growth, environmental and water stresses will be further amplified. Land degradation due to overgrazing is causing herders to move farther south to find suitable grazing areas, which is also fuelling social unrest. With climate change and population growth, water development in Africa needs to go forward in ways that consider all water sources in conjunction. Further, despite huge solar and other power potentials in the region, two-thirds of the Sahel population do not have access to electricity, hampering social and economic development, as well as access to groundwater. As the sectors of water, energy and food are closely interlinked, a cross-sectoral Nexus approach can help to develop sustainable solutions, address this complex geo-political challenge and accelerate the achievement of the UN SDGs.
Trans/Queer Against Housing Marketization
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jemma De Cristo, Mariam Lam, Eric Stanley
Mass houselessness is not the collateral of development, but indeed is its precondition. Starting here, this roundtable will bring together organizers to not only diagnose the current, and historic elements of trans/queer displacement, but also attempt to chart ways out of it. While much ink, and even more blood has been spilled on the global “housing crisis,” the remedy on offer is capital’s acceleration by demanding even more empty luxury condos. The trick of trickle-down housing. And yet the only structures that are outpacing the condo towers, are the tents housing those forced out. This, while what little remained of trans/queer public space becomes further privatized under the uniformed guard of “community ambassadors” employed by nonprofits to ensure sidewalks remain benchless, Ubers are at the ready, and the white noise of white return is the only sound you hear. Together we ask, if “solidarity means attack” then what forms of war must be waged against the marketization of shelter?
“I Have a Peaceful Place”: Redefining Disability, Trauma, and Access in Law and Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Allison Heinemann
This paper focuses on the implications of Peter P., et al. v. Compton Unified School District, et al., a lawsuit filed on behalf of Compton Unified School District (CUSD, Compton, California) students and teachers who have experienced complex trauma, meaning repeated exposure to not only interpersonal harms and deprivation, but also to institutional and structural inequities and injustices. These exposures are then compounded by schools’ reliance on punitive measures, in conjunction with the school-to-prison pipeline. The lawsuit argues that CUSD’s lack of appropriate response to the disabling effects of such trauma constitutes a violation of U.S. federal disability law in denying access to a meaningful education. This paper thus illuminates the groundbreaking, but complicated, potential of using disability law to compel schools to implement trauma-sensitive practices that reject educational policies of marginalization and criminalization, particularly of students of color. In so doing, this paper also addresses, and responds to, recent calls from within the discipline of critical disability studies to engage with discourses and experiences of trauma.
