Inequality in the Use of Languages in Legal Systems: the Case of Algeria

Nourridene Bessadi Civic Education and Leadership, Syracuse University, [email protected]

Inequality in the Use of Languages in Legal Systems: The Case of Algeria.

In my paper, I’d like to talk about inequality in the legal system when there is no equal use of different languages. I’ll especially talk about Algeria. In this (my) country, which is characterized by multilingualism, since its independence in 1962, the single official language is Arabic. This language is used almost exclusively in all fields. The Algerian legal system uses Arabic and tolerates French but millions of Algerians speak Berber languages (their mother tongue) but cannot use them when they are taken to court. I consider there is obviously an inequality when one cannot speak his own language and use it in the legal system of his country. Also, I consider there is no real citizenship without access to the legal system in one’s own language, which is unfortunately the case for Berber languages speakers in Algeria.

Maria Espinoza Sociology, Syracuse University, [email protected]

Activism and Resistance from the Hamlets: The Emergence of “We-ness” Within a Town Ban Movement Against Gas Drilling

The so called “we-ness,” the “us” or sometimes the “we-them” (Saunders 2008), has been recognized as a requisite for the formation of collective identity, as a key element of meaning- making, and a powerful source that shapes the movement participants’ actions. Collective identity has been considered the basis of a social movement. In this paper, I’ll be looking at Maren Klawitter’s “cultures of action” concept (2008) as an analytical tool for grasping the emergence and construction of “we-ness” or “we-them” in a social movement, in this case within the Town Ban Movement against gas drilling in New York State. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data gathered from a grassroots environmental organization against hydraulic fracturing of natural gas in Upstate New York, I explore the different meanings that being an activist have for the Town Ban Movement members. I find that the constitution of the we-ness is both a process and a product that shapes individuals’ participation within the movement. The collective identity construction programs “what we are/what we are not” and “what we say no to/ what we say yes to” coexist with multiple identity programs that do not follow dichotomies (loose sub-identities). The activists’ personal and collective identities are embedded within this tension, which ultimately influences their positions and visions of the movement.

1 Jessica Hausauer

Sociology, Syracuse University, [email protected]

Disciplining the Poor during the Great Recession: An Individual and Contextual Analysis of Welfare Sanctions

To investigate the impact of neoliberal paternalism on the lives of the poor, I examine the role Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) played during the Great Recession. In particular, I examine how sanction policies, the primary tools of poverty governance under TANF, were implemented during a time of national economic crisis. This study broadly considers how racial, political, and economic factors have shaped US welfare policies and to what extent the dominant ideology of work-first in welfare reform is destabilized by a major economic event such as the Great Recession. Using federal administrative data, preliminary findings suggest that TANF responded unevenly to the Great Recession and that black women were at greater risk of being sanctioned than white women.

Brian Hennigan Geography, Syracuse University, [email protected]

House Broken: Housing First and the Right to the City

Heavily stigmatized and antithetical to liberal notions of citizenship, cities across the United States attempt to move homeless populations toward degraded urban spaces, to render them contained and invisible, to deny them any right to the city. A new social policy addressing homelessness called “Housing First” (HF), however, is posed a means to rehabilitate the most vulnerable homeless populations by providing housing, thus granting them a right to the city. Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between “habitat,” the individual right to housing, and “inhabit,” the collective right to decommodified and democratic existence, will be put to work in order to explore what sort of a right to the city HF participants indeed achieve. Drawing upon ethnographic research as a HF case manager, as well as site visits and interviews with administrators, case managers, and tenants in two HF operations in metropolitan Phoenix, this paper argues that HF, due to the re-inscription of deviancy among its participants, offers a seriously truncated right to the city. Rather than a right to city that fulfills Lefebvre’s concept of inhabitation, HF combines habitation with normalizing and marketized rehabilitation. For this reason, HF is as much about providing housing to broken individuals as it is about creating house broken individuals. This paper concludes that the right to the city, as conceived by Lefebvre, is not only impossible within Housing First; it is impossible within a society where Housing First is a possibility.

2 Natasha S. Koshy Social Science, Syracuse University, [email protected]

Gender In(Justice) Across Spheres In this paper, I will attempt to examine the manner in which injustice within families, conceptualised in terms of the unequal outcomes of what Nancy Fraser terms “participatory parity” seeps into other institutions to replicate injustice there. The focus of this paper is this disprivilege, and the manner in which it is wrought in the context of the Indian rural labour market, based on data from a recent time use survey in the distressed region of Vidarbha, located in the state of Maharashtra in India. This survey was the first phase of a two-season survey conducted in 2012, with data pertaining to daily time use collected from over 800 individuals. As I will attempt to demonstrate, this disprivilege cuts across spheres, both public (in this instance, the labour market) and private (the family) to result in conditions that are unacceptable to women across social and economic classes.

I argue that the “functional hierarchy” of gender roles functioning within households can in part be addressed by addressing labour market structures, and consequently women’s economic power. It is argued that a reduction of the functional hierarchy will change the distribution of power potentially allowing for greater equality. Remedial institutions, instituted by state policy, can address some of the issues and questions raised. Doing so effectively, however, would require cognisance of, and accounting for, the various ways in which an individual’s status within different spaces and spheres is constituted.

Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio Environmental Studies, SUNY ESF, [email protected]

Contract Farming and Micro-level Land Grabs: ‘Smallholder’ Oil Palm Development and the Marginalization of Indigenous Peoples

Current trends in large-scale acquisition of lands in the global South by transnational corporations for production of food, fiber and fuel have spurred an emerging literature on global land grabbing. This literature has focused on the purchase or lease of large parcels of land through several schemes ranging from persuasion to violent seizures. This process of acquisition, however, does not apply to transnational production networks that directly involve smallholders in contract farming. Building on the literature on political economy/ecology of contract farming and the analytical framework, Powers of Exclusion by Hirsch, Li and Hall

3 (2011), I argue that production contracts that attempt to integrate smallholder farmers can create conditions for micro-level land grabs and control that can marginalize one type of smallholder. This form of land grab ranges from coercive to non-aggressive processes involving different types of smallholders (e.g. indigenous or migrants). Although transnational companies may not be directly involved in large-scale acquisition of lands, they create conditions in the contract that contribute to micro-level land grabs and conflicts on the ground. Drawing from ethnography in the Philippine province of Palawan, I illustrate how contract farming with ‘smallholder’ cooperatives for the production of oil palm create conditions that contribute to the marginalization of indigenous peoples, which is often instigated by Christian migrants from neighboring cities and provinces. The case of oil palm development in Palawan also illustrates the importance of understanding the links between contract regimes and processes of exclusions in investigating land grabs in the context of smallholder-integrated production networks.

Will Oliver Sociology, Syracuse University, [email protected]

“Greedy Institutions” and Social Control: The Extraction of the Physical and Emotional Labor of Army Officers’ Wives

The goal of this paper is to explore the relationship between the United States Army and Army officers’ wives within the context of the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Army perceives the spouses and partners of Army personnel, as well as Army families, as potentially negatively impacting overall unit readiness. I use the theoretical framework of the "greedy institution" to contend that Army officers’ wives are expected, through informal and formal institutional roles to take on active leadership responsibilities within the community of Army families. As a result, these expectations create a social environment where officers’ wives are expected to provide support to their fellow Army families and the Army’s organizational goals, especially in preparation for and throughout the duration of deployments. Thus, these roles act to alleviate the Army of such responsibilities and place the weight of military family-related issues on the shoulders of Army spouses. Army spouses are therefore perceived as a problem for unit readiness and also as a tool to assuage this problem. Through semi-structured interviews with the wives of Army officers, I demonstrate that such informal and formal social expectations function to extract the physical and emotional labor of Army officers’ wives, while also acting to gain the loyalty and commitment of officers’ wives in order to increase the social control over these wives for the purpose of supporting the Army’s organizational goals.

Yasmin Ortiga

4 Sociology, Syracuse University, [email protected]

Schooling in the Migrant-Sending Country: Learning to Labor for Low Wage Jobs Overseas

In their classic book, Schooling in Capitalist America, economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis discussed how schools prepare students for future work based on the hierarchical structure of the modern corporation, hence reproducing class inequalities in the greater society. This argument led to a renewed understanding of how schools reinforce structural inequality, not only in terms of explicit curriculum but everyday interactions that socialize students towards particular work positions. Locating my study within the Philippines, one of the largest labor-exporting nations in the world, I extend Bowles and Gintis’s seminal work by investigating how schools reproduce class inequalities in a transnational context, where students not only train for jobs within a domestic labor market but those found beyond national borders.

International organizations have commended the Philippines’ education and training system as an effective “supply response” to the global demand for migrant labor (Tan 2009: 9). Unlike other countries like Mexico and Indonesia, scholars and policymakers have noted the large proportion of college-educated Filipino migrants in various skilled and semi-skilled positions, from nurses and accountants to hotel service workers (Alburo and Abella 2002; Asis, Piper, and Raghuram 2009; Guevarra 2010). In this paper, I argue that while aspiring migrants pursue higher education in the hope of obtaining professional jobs overseas, universities and colleges continue to replicate class hierarchies within Philippine society, thereby socializing low income students towards low wage jobs overseas. This then creates a population of migrants who take on jobs for which they are overqualified and overeducated. Focusing on the programs of Nursing and Hotel and Restaurant Management, I show how individual teachers and students negotiate this socialization process, eventually defining their own aspirations according to a perceived notion of their “place” in future destination countries.

Yvonne A. Perez Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University, [email protected]

Who Should Support Children’s Education? The Role of Teachers, Parents and Students as the Pillars of Education

This case study explores the learning conditions of a third grade classroom in a border city in Mexico. The scarce monetary allocation to schools in this Mexican school leaves students without proper learning materials and infrastructure. How can students be expected to succeed academically when basic educational materials are not been provided? What can teachers do to properly educate students under such conditions? Furthermore, what role do parents play in their children’s education? This study addresses these questions and provides examples of the

5 extra work a teacher must do in order to provide the best possible learning environment for his or her students. The study also focuses on the families’ contributions (i.e. learning and cleaning supplies) to the classroom needed to meet the students’ learning needs. This study is an example of how a government’s monetary allocation to school is not sufficient to provide quality education for its students in Mexico, and how as a result the schools depend on families and teachers to supplement the needs.

Blair E. Smith Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University, [email protected]> B-Girls in the Academy: Towards A Radically Queer Transnational Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy

When I entered my doctoral program in Education, I knew that it was time to look deeply and critically at the personal experiences that influence the route I have chosen to take, looking to merge my personal, political and intellectual selves. In Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminist Anthology, Dr. Gwendolyn Pough (2007) explains, “[hip-hop feminists] have a strong relationship to the ‘self’ and they connect their personal narratives with theoretical underpinnings and critique” (p. vii), particularly forms of Black popular culture. Practicing critical personal truth narration and breaking down my potential growth and identity as a radically queer hip-hop feminist social justice educator concerned with transnational perspectives, I am presenting “new strategies and different voices” (p.vii). Hip-hop feminism has provided me with a framework to connect my personal narrative with theoretical underpinnings and critique. More strikingly so, radical queer Black feminisms have pushed me to create what queer black feminist Laura Alexandra Harris (1996) calls a “critical personal narrative” that brings “…the personal and political together without having to circumscribe the other…and to open up the possibility of productive insight into the emerging feminisms of this decade and their inherent power relations” (4). I utilize black, radical, queer, transnational, third-world and hip-hop feminist theories (Anzaldua, 1981; Clarke, 1981; Clay, 2007, 2008; Collins, 2000; Hammonds, 1994; Lorde, 1984; McFadden, 2002; Morgan, 2000; Pough, 2003, 2004; Smith, 2000) to create a critical personal narrative of my matriculation through formal educational spaces that recognizes my experiences as inextricably linked to transnational and historical radical Black feminist intellectual politics, praxis, pedagogies and visions of the future. This critical personal narrative adds to the efforts of hip-hop feminists and educators to explore sexuality as global and transnational experiences that are better understood when integrated with larger social, political, and cultural theoretical consideration.

Susan Vente Environmental Studies, SUNY ESF/ Syracuse University, [email protected]

Media Analysis of the Anti-Conga Conflict in Cajamarca, Peru

6 South America has been experiencing a resurgence of social movements from historically repressed ethnic indigenous communities that tend to experience great social, political and economic inequalities. In the Andean region of Cajamarca in Peru, thousands of protestors, a majority of them indigenous peasants, have organized a series of protests against the building of the Conga mine that has led to confrontations with the police, deaths, and international interest.

The press has played an important role in depicting the protestors, strikes and mobilizations along with the dissemination of a variety of opinions on its pages. My aim in this study was to answer the question: How is the media portraying the anti-Conga Protest? I categorized the prominent themes and voices in these publications by examining 116 newspaper articles from the regional daily Panorama Cajamarquinoand the Lima-based daily El Comercio. Each article’s title, the news sources, as well as newspaper editorials served to classify the recurring themes and to quantify the frequency of specific voices, including that of government officials, Cajamarca citizens and newspaper writers. My findings show the press portraying the central government as a powerful figure capable of looking after the Cajamarca people, the protest leaders as radical individuals searching after their own political gains while denying the citizens an opportunity for economic and social progress, and an absence of the local community’s opinion.

For rural communities that lack the means to bring their grievances to the central government, the media can be a powerful source of dissemination for their message. However, this is only possible if the press allows for the broadcasting of an array of voices, including that of the affected communities, which has not been the case in the anti-Conga protests. As indigenous social movements continue not only in South American but also in North America, it is imperative that the South American press stop perpetuating current inequalities by suppressing indigenous voices.