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During the last five years a group of consultants, who have been working with organisations on programmes to increase equality of opportunity, have been developing a number of new perspectives on the issues that underlie inequality. This has led them to develop new approaches to training, new training designs and new training skills. The most important of these perspectives are laid out, and the implications for training that follow from them are explored. Issues of sex are mainly dealt with, but the principles outlined are as true for work on race or disability.

Oppressive society and sexism in organisations constantly draws our attention to the differences between men and women, but, in practice, the differences are far wider within each gender than between them. The nature of this oppression is reviewed, and solutions are identified in terms of positive thinking, challenging assumptions and paying, specific attention to achievements rather than mistakes.

In the spirit of the growing Time is Up movement in North America, this paper aims to focus on the human dimension of academic learning environments and delves into the reasons for the continuous oppression, discrimination and bullying (ODB) of faculty members with disabilities in academia, showing the particularly detrimental effect of ODB in the small professionally oriented field of information science.

The conceptualizing of continuous ODB of people with disabilities in academia is done by carefully scrutinizing the state of affairs; presenting a nuanced survey of utilized terminology; providing a new and inclusive definition of everyday oppression; introducing a new model of an oppressive workplace environment experienced by people with disabilities; showing the centrality of information behaviours and phenomena in ODB; highlighting the high relevance of this discussion to learning science; and outlining potential detrimental effects of ODB on the psychological climate in and the process of professional higher education.

The model of an oppressive workplace environment experienced by people with disabilities is presented.

Unlike previous models of ODB at the workplace, the current model puts information phenomena as decisive factors in continuous ODB against people with disabilities; particular attention is paid to information avoidance behaviours; distorted or delayed information messages transmitted by managers to employees; gossip as an informal information-based tactic of ODB; the insufficient protection of privacy and confidentiality of information about disabilities and personal health; and vague information messages that diminish the usefulness of university policies on disabilities.

The text explores the feminist concept of intersectionality and its adoption within disability studies. The aim is to analyze how feminist and disability movements and theories have managed the issue of struggling against oppression and for equality while acknowledging internal diversity.

Literature review based on the concepts of intersectionality, disabled women, and disability and diversity seeking for explicit and implicit confluences and emerging implications at different levels: social movements, theoretical developments, and policymaking.

Intersectionality is a minor field within disability studies. However, diversity and multiple oppression issues have been addressed by the disability rights movement, after disabled women introduced feminist principles. This intersection of disability and feminist studies has transformed both fields, and at the same time fostered a new paradigm. It situates the claims on the similarities between disabled and nondisabled people, instead of focusing on identity politics.

The chapter acknowledges social movements as key actors in generating and developing significant debates, both in feminist and disability studies. Moreover, it seeks for conceptual tools that promote alliance-building strategies between oppressed groups in the struggle for social justice.

The chapter presents overall perspective of what intersectionality is and how the disability rights movement has addressed it, while seeking broader implications of the analysis of multiple inequalities.

Low-income mothers who use welfare benefits are frequently portrayed as “faces of dependency” in the prevailing public discourse on America’s poor. This discourse, often anchored in race, class, and gender stereotypes, perpetuates the assumption that mothers on welfare lack skills to employ constructive agency in securing family resources. Scholars, however, have suggested that their welfare program use is embedded in complex survival strategies to make ends meet. While such studies emphasize maternal inventiveness in garnering necessary resources and support, this literature devotes little attention to the costs of these strategies on maternal power as well as how mothers negotiate gender and the oppression that usually accompanies such support. Feminist scholars in particular point to the importance of exploring these issues in the contexts of mothers’ romantic unions and client–caseworker relationships. Guided by an interpersonal, institutional, and intersectional framework, the authors explored this issue using longitudinal ethnographic data on 19 Mexican-immigrant, low-income mothers from the Three-City Study. Results showed mothers negotiated gender and power by simultaneously “doing,” “undoing,” and/or “redoing” gender using three strategies that emerged from the data: symbolic reliance, selective reliance, and creative nondisclosure. Implications of these findings for the future research are discussed.

It is widely accepted among critical human–animal scholars that an absolute ontological distinction between humans and animals, the human–animal dualism, is an ideological construction. However, even some of the most radical animalists make use of a softer version of it when they explain animal exploitation and domination in capitalism. By criticizing the reintroduction of the human–animal dualism through the back door, I reopen the terrain for a historical–materialist explanation of bourgeois animal exploitation and domination that does not conceptualize them as a matter of species in the first place. Rather, with reference and in analogy to ecosocialist arguments on the greenhouse effect, it is demonstrated that a specific faction of capital – animal capital – which uses animals and animal products as means of production, is the root cause, key agent, and main profiteer of animal exploitation and domination in the current mode of production. Thus, the reworked concept of animal capital presented here differs from the original, postoperaist notion introduced by Nicole Shukin since it is based on a classic sociorelational and value theoretical understanding of capitalism. According to this approach, animals are integrated socioeconomically into the capitalist class society via a relation of superexploitation to capital, which can be called the capital–animal relation.

The disability movement is a new social movement (Fagan & Lee, 1997; Shakespeare, 1993) based on identity politics (Anspach, 1979). Activists seek material benefits, challenge cultural constructions of disability, and create new collective identities on the part of recruits. Mobilization in this status-based movement, as in other new social movements, has focused in part on cultural and symbolic issues of identity (Bernstein, 2005; Johnston, Larana, & Gusfield, 1994; Shakespeare & Watson, 2001). Status-based movements challenge stigmatized identities that are externally imposed. Identities can be deployed strategically by movement activists and recruiters for multiple goals, including changing cultural representations of the group, gaining access to institutions, and/or transforming participants (Bernstein, 2005).

Food movements and organizations are increasingly complementing their longstanding emphasis on environment with a focus on social justice. This conceptual chapter discusses dimensions in which engagements in this arena diverge and converge along a continuum from neoliberalization to opposition/structural change. Categories and visions of social justice vary widely, highlighting certain social categories and locations while eliding others. Gender, in particular, is a social category that is a key factor in the allocation of power and privilege, but that has not been significantly addressed in efforts toward social justice in most food movements.

The topics and categories movements consider most important determine their assignments of energies. These assignments in turn create common understandings of priorities and mechanisms for changing the food system, although they may omit consideration of key axes of oppression. For example, strategic preferences for family farms and food-system localization may not consider legacies and contemporary practices of enslavement, exploitation, and patriarchy.

As movements increase their focus on social justice, they can engage in critical reflection and dialogue to interrogate the nature of conditions of injustice and the causes behind these conditions. This would include examining how practices and discourses of racism, classism, and sexism – along with the ways they intersect – have shaped, reflect, and reproduce the food system. This process must privilege the participation, perspectives, and priorities of those who suffer from injustice. It can then best illuminate strategic definitions and pathways that can move toward transformation of a food system grounded in conditions of social justice.

The inherent violence of the patriarchal spectacle is at times decried through mass social movements such as the #MeToo or black lives matter movements in response to overt political displays of power or policies reinforcing inequalities of gender, race and ethnicity. While critical criminologists and feminists have spent decades on topics such as these, what is, more often than not, ignored is the banal patriarchal oppression women across the globe endure during their everyday lives. Moreover, women, most notably in the Global North and the United States in particular, assent to their oppression through the willingness of allowing the innate violence of an unequal patriarchal system of harm and violence. Our specific focus is on the routinisation of everyday life women participate in reinforcing the status quo of the patriarchal carceral state. We also suggest that social change must be more than reactions and demands for processes of change within the social structure that maintain the overall patriarchal state and structure of society: rather resistance must equal revulsion and rejection for a revolutionary social change to the innate violent system.