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In this paper, we name and uplift the ways in which Miya community workers are building communities of resistance as ways to address the manifold colonial, structural (including state-sponsored), and epistemic violence in their lives. These active spaces of refusal and resistance constitute the grounds of our theorizing. Centering this theory in the flesh, we offer critical implications for decolonial liberatory praxis, specifically community-engaged praxis in solidarity with people's struggles. In doing so, we speak to questions such as: What are the range of ways in which Global South communities are coming together to tackle various forms of political, social, epistemic, and racial injustice? What are ways of doing, being, and knowing that are produced at the borders and liminal zones? What are the varied ways in which people understand and name solidarities, alliances, and relationalities in pursuit of justice? We engage with these questions from our radically rooted places in Miya people's struggles via storytelling that not only confronts the historical and ongoing oppression, but also upholds desire—Interweaving and honoring rage, grief, pain, creativity, love, and communality.

African Americans comprise approximately 13% of the U.S. population, 6% of missing persons, and 51% of homicide victims (Kochanek et al. 2019; National Crime Information Center [NCIC] 2018; U.S. Census Bureau 2010). However, African American remains are underrepresented in the documented skeletal samples resulting from body donations to U.S. taphonomic research facilities. If forensic anthropologists are to rise to the challenge of identifying remains from this segment of the U.S. population, and if heritable differences among human populations are to be distinguished from the embodied differences acquired by marginalized individuals, a deeper understanding of African American skeletal biology is essential. This understanding is contingent on Black donors participating in whole-body donation to anthropological research facilities—participation that may be undermined by a legacy of mistrust between Black communities and the traditionally White-dominated scientific and medical establishments. This review paper synthesizes data from medical research on cadaver and organ donation, as well as anthropological literature on structural violence, embodiment, and the collection and curation of human remains, to present multiple perspectives on increasing African American body donation to anthropological research. We focus on historical, structural, and cultural factors potentially contributing to Black donor reluctance, providing a perspective often lacking in discussions of skeletal curation. We aim to generate debate and discussion within the field of forensic anthropologyand among community stakeholders about how skeletal research can better serve Black communities.

This article draws on the work of Raymond Williams to argue that under covid-19 the dominant ‘ways of seeing’ the countryside and the city in Britain are working to obscure the structural violence of capitalism. Cultural narratives of ‘exodus’ from the city abound in British media, fuelling a material ‘race for space’ as the middle class rush to buy up rural properties. The ‘cottagecore’ social media aesthetic has proliferated, offering privatized solutions to the crisis through nostalgic imagery of pastoral escape. At the same time, nineteenth-century discourses of dark, diseased cities have been rearticulated, providing ideological support for racist migration policies. Exploited migrant workers in Leicester are framed as ‘modern slaves’ in the city’s ‘dark factories’;their bodies are transcoded as ‘dirt’ which must be ‘rooted out’ of the nation. We argue that these binary narratives and aesthetics of a bountiful, white countryside and an infested, racialized city lead to an ‘unseeing’ of the deep structural causes of inequality. We develop Williams’s analysis to show how these cultural imaginaries also sustain the gendered and racialized division of labour under capitalism, arguing that the country-city distinction, and the material injustices it obscures, ought to become a central focus for cultural studies. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Braiding our words, "dissi-dance," and desires, this article engages how various social actors, and communities-which we are a part of and belong to-challenge structural violence, oppression, inequity, and social, racial, and epistemic injustice. We thread these reflections through our written words, in subversive letters which we offer in the form of a written relational conversation among us: a plurilogue that emerges in response to our specific locations, commitments, and refusals, as well as dissents. Our stories and process of dissent within the various locations, relationships, and contexts that we occupy served as the yarn and needle to thread our stories, posed questions and reflections. Braiding, threading and weaving together, we animate deep decolonial inquiries within ourselves, and our different cultural contexts and countries. Refusing individualism-the illusions of objectivity as distance, the academic as expert, and the exile of affect and emotion on academic pages-we choose to occupy academic writing and ask: What if academic writing were stitched with blood and laughter, relationships and insights, rage and incites? What if, at the nexus of critical psychology and decolonizing feminism, we grew an "embodied praxis?" Unlike academic writing, traditionally designed to camouflage affect, connection, relationality and subjectivity, these letters are unapologetically saturated in care and wisdom toward a narrative-based embodied practice: decolonial plurilogues of relational solidarities for epistemic justice. Our plurilogue of dissent offers a view to advance community research and action with goals of liberation, decoloniality, and community wellness.

As advocates for social justice, our sights have been stoically fixed on fighting against and challenging what is, be it systemic inequality, structural violence and injustice. Dismantling these systems of oppression are critical, but we have lost sight of the importance of imagining what could be. That is, what a future free from that oppression might look like, might feel like, might be like. Without this ability to imagine, we are unable to create new ways of being that do not perpetuate the injustice we are trying to fight against. The bringing together of Creativity and Activism has proved vital in allowing us to begin to imagine and enact what a more equal and just world might look like. This article explores how the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) in South Africa has been utilising creative methodology in their advocacy to advance the rights of sex workers. SWEAT has been committed to exploring and experimenting with creative methodologies which have been incorporated into strategising, organising, mobilising and advocating for the decriminalisation of sex work. These creative methodologies have resulted in some of the biggest successes in the struggle for the human rights of sex workers in South Africa.

In the Covid-19 period, almost all educational institutions in India are helping students by online classes to cover their syllabus according to the academic calendar. For this situation, researchers have done this research to examine the structural conditions and social structures that mediate poverty among Dalit and Muslim students and access to quality education. This is a comparative study with the use of mixed methods research technique. The snowballs sampling technique was used for data collection as well as some stock narratives were collected from students of various schools in Haldwani. Galtung’s structural violence theoretical perspective was used to know the structural condition of Dalit and Muslim students. This study shows that online education needs instantaneous and easily accessible technology, as online education is widening the gaps between rich and poor and accelerating the concept of equality. This can be improved through better education policies through the government and the structural violence happening with students can be eliminated.

This paper examines the role of material culture in replicating everyday racism in Katherine, Northern Territory, Australia. We argue that inclusivity is determined by inclusive design supported by inclusive behaviours and that archaeologists can inform the creation of a more equitable world by identifying how material culture acts to exclude certain groups and replicate inequalities that might otherwise go unnoticed. This paper is part of the social justice movement in archaeology that analyses material remains in both the past and the present to reveal relationships between racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequality.

Emerging evidence suggests that the historical trauma associated with settler colonialism affects the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) of American Indian (AI) communities today. This article examines how one AI community narratively frames the influence of historical trauma within the context of community-based participatory research (CBPR) and the implications of this framing for health behaviours, internalized oppression, SRH outcomes, and future CBPR interventions. We found that AIs framed the SRH consequences of historical trauma with renderings that favoured personal choice over structural explanations. Our findings suggest future interventions could: (1) include educational components on historical trauma and the continued role settler colonialism plays in structural violence against AI bodies and communities; and (2) recognize the role that the individualized logic of westernized/white culture may play in the erasure of traditional collectivist AI culture, internalized oppression, and SRH.

Studies of amaXhosa (‘Xhosa’) men focus predominantly on Xhosa men attaining manhood through ritualised initiation (ulwaluko) and heterosexual homemaking through the building of a homestead (ukwakh...

Este estudo apresenta reflexões sobre a impunidade estrutural que atravessa as representações de feminicídio nas narrativas de Marina Colasanti, Arminé Arjona e Selva Amada, que contextualizam esse crime em sistemas patriarcais do Brasil, México e Argentina, respectivamente. Este recorte analisará como os códigos machistas relativizam a impunidade de criminosos ao mesmo tempo em que promovem a culpabilização e a desqualificação da vítima. Neste estudo, exploramos as representações literárias como arquivos sociais, levando em conta os conceitos de violência estrutural e as abordagens feministas de Rita Laura Segato (2013), Julia Fragoso (2010) e Lia Zanotta Machado (2010). Metodologicamente, a violência está sendo vista como um código machista de punição e controle do corpo da mulher. Palavras-chave: Violência contra a mulher. Literatura comparada. Códigos misóginos.

Structural social work (SSW) is a critical theory that frames poverty, violence, and disease as the product of oppressive social structures. SSW concepts were applied to a rural dentistry project in Nepal. Delivery of oral health care in Nepal is influenced by capitalist, colonialist, and scientific-modernist ideologies that disadvantage the rural poor. Jevaia Oral Health Care operationalizes SSW principles of tension relief, consciousness-raising, collectivization, and power-brokering, but is limited in tackling structural problems around etiological aspects of oral disease. SSW offers useful and important practice strategies for improving oral health care in Nepal.

We synthesize how the tools of molecular anthropology, integrated with analyses of skeletal material, can provide direct insights into the context-specific experiences of racial structural violence in the past. Our work—which is emblematic of how biological anthropologists are increasingly interested in exploring the embodied effects of structural and race-based violence—reveals how anthropology can illuminate past lived experiences that are otherwise invisible or inscrutable. This kind of integrative research is exposing the legacies of structural violence in producing anatomical collections and the embodied effects of structural violence evident within individuals in those collections.

El artículo argumenta, con base en las experiencias de personas y colectives trans, que si bien el interés por asuntos de paz y transición política por parte de grupos subordinados responde a una larga historia de activismo, corre el riesgo de reproducir y renovar injusticias si no se revisan las epistemologías que permiten tal inclusión y consideración. Se presentan cuatro casos que ilustran diferentes formas de injusticia epistemológica en relación con la compresión de violencias estructurales, los efectos del conflicto armado en Colombia y la construcción de paz desde las perspectivas de personas trans y sus organizaciones. A partir de ello se proponen tres estrategias mediante las cuales la justicia epistemológica puede contribuir a la reparación colectiva de estos y otros sujetos sociales subordinados.

This study in urban Kampala contributes to a growing evidence base about the complex contexts within which women make decisions about reporting domestic violence. Based on an intersecting theoretical lens of structural violence, power, and the body, findings suggested that women reported to formal structures primarily for severe physical or economic abuse. Women did not report less severe abuse, and often abandoned reporting even severe abuse, because of the overarching structural patriarchy and violence that exists, as well as women’s habitus that includes the embodiment of social norms that sanction reporting. Yet, while overwhelmingly women are discouraged from reporting domestic abuse, there were important signs of change.

This qualitative study examines two contexts shaping circumpolar Indigenous young people's contemporary lives. In Arctic North America, the recent, rapid experiences of colonization are linked to d...

This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic in light of two key concepts in medical anthropology: syndemics and structural violence. Following a discussion of the nature of these two concepts, the paper addresses the direct and associated literatures on the syndemic and structural violence features of the COVID pandemic, with a specific focus on: 1) the importance of local socioenvironmental conditions/demographics and disease configurations in creating varying local syndemic expressions; 2) the ways that the pandemic has exposed the grave weaknesses in global health care investment; and 3) how the syndemic nature of the pandemic reveals the rising rate of noncommunicable diseases and their potential for interaction with current and future infectious disease. The paper concludes with a discussion on the role of anthropology in responding to COVID-19 from a syndemics perspective.

Augmenting Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony with Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence and using multiple data sources this study examines the structural phenomenon food waste and the agentic phenomenon dumpster diving. I derive my interpretations from an analysis of reports on food waste by international organizations, US media coverage of food waste, and interviews with dumpster divers. At the structural level, the analysis shows how international organizations and media frame food waste as an economic and environmental—rather than a social justice issue and how they reproduce hegemonic neoliberal conceptualizations and discourses of food and food waste. At the agentic level, the analysis shows how these hegemonic conceptualizations and discourses affect dumpster divers and how an environmental ideological motivation contains an anticapitalistic ideological motivation. Building on my neo-Gramscian analysis, I highlight the potential threat that environmental discourses might stabilize neoliberal hegemony by offering appealing consent-structures and contain more fundamental, social justice-based, critique of the neoliberal social order. To preserve its inherently critical and counter-hegemonic potential, I develop a conceptual model of food waste and discuss its relevance for critical management and organization studies.

[Extract]It is difficult to embark on defending a position whenthe responses to one’s arguments are based on misun-derstandings. Perhaps it might have been in my best in-terest when discussing structural violence and the workof Nancy Scheper-Hughes to adopt the stance of devil’sadvocate as utilized by Nicolas Langlitz. Both Fiona Rossand John Borneman seemed to miss the point I was try-ing to make, and I suspect by publication, Langlitz willmost certainly do the same.

The mental health ramifications of structural violence are borne disproportionately by marginalized patient populations in North America, which includes Black, Indigenous, and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities and people who use drugs. Structural violence can comprise, for example, police or state violence, colonialism, and medical violence. We chronicle the history of psychiatric discourse around structural violence over the past 50 years and highlight the critical need for new formalized competencies to become incorporated into the training of medical students across Canada, specifically addressing the impacts of structural violence for the aforementioned populations. Finally, we offer a framework of learning objectives for designing educational sessions discussing structural violence and mental health for integration into pre-clerkship psychiatry curricula at medical schools across Canada.

Of the many plagues that affect communities today, a particularly insidious one is indifference and depersonalization. This plague has been articulated by Albert Camus and then taken up in an educational context by Maxine Greene. In this article we, the authors, respond to Greene’s call to co-compose curricula with our students to fight this plague. Recognizing the role of difficult knowledge as well as conscious and unconscious defenses, we develop an approach to “diversity” harmonious with radical love during these troubled times of conflict and increased visibility of hatred. Through a weaving of our experiential, embodied knowledge with theory, we consider how we might invite students to consider contemporary, historical, and ongoing inequity and structural violence. Like Sirens luring sailors to precarious shores, we seek to entice teachers and students to the difficult knowledge they might otherwise avoid as all of us together consider our ethical responsibilities to each other.

The essay briefly looks into the bioethical guide of extreme triage and resource allocation based on known co-morbidities (i e , obesity, hypertension, and diabetes) I invite to reflect upon how a focus on individual responsibility under COVID-19 occludes major structural problems while silencing the social factors behind the heath disaster that we are witnessing today The essay argues that chronic diseases are not merely the result of genetic makeup or individual choices but are instead profoundly linked to poverty, systemic racism, structural violence, and lack of care Debates on extreme triage guidelines and resource allocation illuminate a series of ethical shortcomings that preexisted COVID-19 Even if guidelines clearly state that criteria such as race, gender, or class will not be taken into account when deciding how to allocate limited medical resources, these categories are deeply linked to health disparities, and therefore, on people’s possibilities of surviving the pandemic © Centro de Biotecnologia y Biomedicina, Clinical Biotec Universidad CatA³lica del Oriente (UCO), Univesidad Yachay Tech

The sourcing of cadavers for North American skeletal reference collections occurred immediately after death and targeted the poor and marginalised. In Europe, collections sourced bodies that were buried and unclaimed after some time in cemeteries with no perpetual care mandate, and may have also targeted the underprivileged. The relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and abandonment was examined in a sample of unclaimed remains (603 adults and 98 children) collected from cemeteries in the city of Lisbon, Portugal, that were incorporated in a collection. Results demonstrate that low SES individuals are not more likely to be abandoned nor to be incorporated in the collection than higher SES individuals. Furthermore, historical data indicate that the poorest were not incorporated into the collection, because of burial practices. Although the accumulation of collections in North America was facilitated by structural violence that targeted the poor and marginalised, this phenomenon seems largely absent in the Lisbon collection.

The dominance of traditional, institutionalized archives and memory platforms has been more and more challenged by the emergence of digital networks and “peer-to-peer” memory practices. This article argues that memory practices on social media platforms provide minority groups with affordances that established archives do not. Therefore, I will analyze tweets, Tumblr posts and a YouTube video in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA. Social media platforms can act as alternative archives to institutionalized archives and related systems of knowledge and power. While traditional archives focus on the representation of events, memory practices on social media platforms can also stress structural and slow forms of violence and their embeddedness in the everyday, point to historical continuities and make memories travel, thus establishing transnational and transcultural networks of mnemonic entanglements.

Gay men and lesbians in contemporary China face multiple forms of marginalisation and discrimination. However, little is known about how heteronormativity works to regulate the everyday lives of se...

This article explores the intersection of two growing health concerns: the rising incidence of loneliness and the negative health impacts of migration and displacement. To better evaluate loneliness across diverse populations, we emphasize the cultural shaping of expectations for social lives and the ways in which structural vulnerability and violence can undermine these expectations. We draw on ethnographic research with two groups of migrants: Mexican immigrants living in southern Arizona and Turkana pastoralists of Kenya who experience displacement and unpredictable mobility as a result of low intensity violence. For Mexican immigrants, feelings of loneliness intertwine with the emotions of fear, trauma, and sadness, all closely associated with social isolation. The Turkana describe loneliness associated with the loss of their animals, or the shifting social landscapes they must traverse to keep their families safe. The culturally salient experiences described by these two communities highlight the complexity of defining loneliness. Given the pace of global migration and the number of refugees and displaced persons, closer scrutiny of how cultural expectations and structural violence interact to produce feelings of loneliness seems overdue.

PurposeThe authors engage a set of critical discussions on key concepts in disaster studies with attention to recent critiques of the concept “community,” which decry the term's imprecision and problematic insinuation of consensus. The authors’ objective is to explore for enduring and redeeming merit in the use of the term in disaster prevention, response and recovery and in collaborative social science research more broadly.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on case studies drawn from the authors' ongoing, longitudinal studies of community-based work with Spanish-speaking community leaders in San José, California and rural Indigenous communities in Alaska.FindingsThe authors synthesize unromantic critiques of the community concept that surface important matters of inequality that complicate efforts for decolonizing disaster work with a view of community as an often utopian project servicing redistributions and relocations of the loci of power. It is a term not only invoked in scholarship and the work of governmental and nongovernmental agencies but also one with deeply symbolic and contextualized meaning.Originality/valueThe authors’ interpretation is that we must at once be critical and unromantic in studying and working with “community” while also recognizing its utopian fecundity. Abandoning the concept altogether would not only create a massive lacuna in everyday speech but also we fear too strong a language in opposition to the community concept metaphor telegraphs a hostility toward those who use it to mobilize scarce social, political and material resources to confront power and contest structural violence.

The present article examines the concept of the home and its loss from various viewpoints, especially in the context of conflict zones and war. It is based on a research study that examined the exp...

Examining the concept of epistemic violence and its two antecedents, three strategies—developing Indigenous constructs and theories, going beyond the search for universals, and eliminating structural causes of violence—are proposed to generate dialogue between researchers for epistemic harmony.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the impacts of structural violence and its effects on Indigenous Peoples using Aboriginal People – The Indigenous Peoples of Canada, and the Canadian education system as the context for discussion. Due to the root causes of conflict and the nature of violence in Aboriginal contexts being structural, working towards positive peace based on a concept of human security is the best approach to managing Aboriginal youth violence. This approach is conducive to building a culture of peace which is consistent with Indigenous traditions. Alternative methods of formal education should be considered in Aboriginal / Indigenous contexts. These methods should be grounded in the traditions of local Indigenous groups providing a safe space for rediscovery and identity negotiation between tradition and contemporary society. The ability for Indigenous peoples to further their formal education has a profound impact on long term peace building activities. The link between education, poverty, and violence must be of primary consideration when designing peace building activities where Indigenous Peoples are involved. Keywords: Aboriginal youth, structural violence, poverty, human security, alternative education, transformation, peace building activities.

This focus piece examines the findings of a qualitative study on the utilisation of health services among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students in Durban. In-depth interviews with ...

Urban infrastructures can enable and embody multiple forms of violence against women; from the spectacular and immediate, to the slow, everyday and intimate. Disconnections and absences of infrastructure – such as water and sanitation, to public transport and toilets – fracture peripheries and low-income neighbourhoods from resources, rights and mobility within the city, and in everyday life, enacting some of the largest tolls on women. This 'infrastructural violence' (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012) is experienced in intimate ways by women in low-income neighbourhoods. While they lack access to adequate resources in urban settlements they simultaneously face all forms of physical violence during access to and use of water, toilets, public transport, energy use and walkways. Drawing from empirical fieldwork in the city of Thiruvanathapuram, Kerala, in southern India, we adopt an expanded notion of infrastructure that is mutually constitututive of gender-based relations of power and violence from the home to the city. Developing the rubrics of gendered safety and urban violence, we argue first, that lack of access to infrastructure is a form of intimate violence and second, that this violence is experienced and constituted through multiple scales, forms, sites and temporalities of infrastructural absence. In doing so, we further contribute to the extension of debates in feminist critical geography to critique binary constructions of gender based violence, by collapsing hierarchies of intimate and structural violence as the violence of infrastructure.

This paper argues for a decolonial praxis in critical peace education. Drawing on an integrative review method, the paper synthesises approaches, practices, and theories from peace and peace education literature with special attention paid to the concepts of critical peace education, cosmopolitanism, postcolonial thought, and decolonial action. The paper particularly explores the philosophical contributions of postcolonial and decolonial thought and how each could help toward decolonising approaches for critical peace education. The concept of ‘structural violence’ is critiqued as obfuscating individual responsibility. Insights are drawn here from the closely related field of global citizenship education that argues for a focus less on empathy and more on causal responsibility. Before concluding, the paper discusses a ‘pedagogy for the privileged’ and ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ that both might better support a decolonial praxis for critical peace education in theory and practice.

Heritage is considered to be anything that someone wishes to conserve or to collect, and to pass on to future generations. Heritage tourism can contribute to reducing stereotypical attitudes in society and it may lead to a behavioural change and then reduce social contradictions. At present, the use of heritage in tourism is a sensitive and dynamic area of development, particularly where communities which were involved in violent conflicts have moved from war to non-war. Sri Lanka in its post-war peace building process is yet to harness heritage tourism as an avenue for peace and to discover its developmental potential and novel perspectives for peace building process. Godawaya in Hambanthota district in the Southern province of Sri Lanka retain archaeological evidence of a prehistoric civilization. The objectives of this research are to explore the archaeological significance of this site, its cultural value, the interconnections between community and to find possibilities of promoting peace through tourism in Sri Lanka. The methodological approach taken to answer the research question was based on grounded theory. This theory had been constructed based on the meaningfulness or understanding of conversations, observations and interpretations made at the research field. Systematic coding, data analysis and theoretical sampling procedures were carried out during the research process that enables the researcher to deduce from diverse patterns of data description into a higher level of abstraction. The main qualitative methods incorporated to the grounded theory were participant observation, unstructured interviewing, observation and documentary materials. The study finds the failure to construct a cohesive identity suffers a major drawback in Sri Lanka’s nation-state building process. This research has explored the potential of this site which can channel the conscientization process to rediscover a common inheritance and identity between the two ethnic groups of Sinhalese and Tamils which can foster peace. This article also discusses how different ideological representations would like to perceive the history, the land and the heritage of Sri Lanka as well as how primordial sentiments are developed leading to the ethnic segregation. This study has identified the potential that heritage tourism has to reduce structural violence by empowering local communities to reduce inter-ethnic, religious and other prejudices.

The contentious debate on evidence-based Global Mental Health care is challenged by the primary mental health program of Jamaica. Political independence in 1962 ushered in the postcolonial Jamaican Government and the deinstitutionalization of the country’s only mental hospital along with a plethora of mental health public policy innovations. The training locally of mental health professionals catalyzed institutional change. The mental health challenge for descendants of African people enslaved in Jamaica is to reverse the psychological impact of 500 years of European racism and colonial oppression and create a blueprint for the decolonization of GMH. The core innovations were the gradual downsizing and dismantling of the colonial mental hospital and the establishment of a novel community mental health initiative. The successful management of acute psychosis in open medical wards of general hospitals and a Diversion at the Point of Arrest Programme (DAPA) resulted in the reduction of stigma and the assimilation of mental health care into medicine in Jamaica. Successful decentralization has led to unmasking underlying social psychopathology and the subsequent development of primary prevention therapeutic programs based on psychohistoriographic cultural therapy and the Dream-A-World Cultural Therapy interventions. The Jamaican experience suggests that diversity in GMH must be approached not simply as a demographic fact but with postcolonial strategies that counter the historical legacy of structural violence.

Introduction:The purpose of this article is to describe the process of developing and implementing a transdisciplinary community-based research center, the Center for Health Equity Research (CHER) Chicago, to offer a model for designing and implementing research centers that aim to address structural causes of health inequality.Methods:Scholars from diverse backgrounds and disciplines formed a multidisciplinary team for the Center and adopted the structural violence framework as the organizing conceptual model. All Center activities were based on community partnership. The Center activities were organized within three cores: administrative, investigator development, and community engagement and dissemination cores. The key activities during the first year were to develop a pilot grant program for early-stage investigators (ESIs) and to establish community partnership mechanisms.Results:CHER provided more than 60 consultations for ESIs, which resulted in 31 pilot applications over the three application cycles. Over 200 academic and community partners attended the community symposium and discussed community priority. Some challenges encountered were to improve communication among investigators, to clarify roles and responsibilities of the three cores, and to build consensus on the definition and operationalization of the concept of structural violence.Conclusion:There is an increasing need for local hubs to facilitate transdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement to effectively address health inequity. Building consensus around a shared vision among partners is a difficult and yet important step toward achieving equity.

This article considers strategies for illuminating health systems’ structural violence toward people experiencing homelessness and for resisting incursion of moral injury to health professional learners. This article also canvasses the nature and scope of educators’ obligations to teach in patient-focused ways that motivate equity and students’ capacity to serve some of the country’s most vulnerable residents in clinical settings or on the streets.

This thesis addresses the impact of the contemporary social security system on women living in England and Wales who are victims/survivors of rape and sexual abuse. It uses a triangular conceptualisation of violence, comprising direct, cultural, and structural violence, to explore the experiences of these women and to examine whether the social security system is involved in designing and implementing actions, decisions, practices and processes which are culturally and structurally violent and which prevent the women from meeting their basic needs, or living a “minimally decent life” (Miller, 2007). There were four main findings from this research. First, that the social security system as an institution plays an active role in exacerbating women victims/survivors mental and physical health conditions and is moving women further from recovery. Second, that the social security system is implementing policies which are both based on and involved in producing and reproducing cultural patterns which systematically denigrated the women by misrepresenting and stigmatising their identities, decisions, and actions, that is, the system plays an active role in misrecognising the participants. Third, in their interactions with the social security system, the women continually had their experiences minimised and disbelieved: the social security system as an institution is actively involved in invalidating the women’s accounts of themselves and their lives, often in order to deny them entitlement to support. Fourth, the women’s relationship with the social security system is one frequently characterised by abuse: not only were their prior experiences of abuse mirrored in their interactions with the system, but the interactions were sometimes experienced as abusive in and of themselves. By centreing the experiences of these victims/survivors of sexual violence and their interactions with the social security system, this thesis contributes to critical social policy literature and advances understanding of conditionality within the welfare system, and its impact on a marginalised group of women. It also furthers the scholarship of cultural and structural violence, firstly, by providing empirical evidence about how these phenomena occur in people’s everyday lives and interactions, and secondly, by theorising these experiences as forms of misrecognition and invalidation. Finally, it has provided critical social policy with new conceptual tools to understand the experiences and impacts of the social security system. The findings of this thesis are based on in-depth qualitative interviews, and a small number of written submissions, with 16 women who self-identified as victims/survivors of rape and/or sexual abuse and who had also reported experiencing problems with their benefit claims at some point since 2012. Participants were recruited through a number of different avenues from locations throughout England and Wales. The research was conducted from a critical realist standpoint and drew on feminist principles to inform the ethical approach underpinning the research.

This article argues that it is not Buddhism, per se, but rather Buddhist extremism, that is responsible for violence against relevant out-groups. Moreover, it suggests that the causes of Buddhist extremism, rather than being determined solely by textual and scriptural justifications for out-group violence, are rooted instead in the intersection between social psychology and theology, rather than organically arising from the latter, per se. This article unpacks this argument by a deeper exploration of Theravada Buddhist extremism in Sri Lanka. It argues that religious extremism, including its Buddhist variant, is best understood as a fundamentalist belief system that justifies structural violence against relevant out-groups. A total of seven of the core characteristics of the religious extremist are identified and employed to better grasp how Buddhist extremism in Sri Lanka manifests itself on the ground. These are: the fixation with maintaining identity supremacy, in-group bias, out-group prejudice, emphasis on preserving in-group purity via avoidance of commingling with the out-group, low integrative complexity expressed in binary thinking, dangerous speech in both soft- and hard-modes, and finally, the quest for political power, by force if needed. Future research could, inter alia, explore how these seven characteristics also adequately describe other types of religious extremism.