Social Movements & the Law

November is National Native American Heritage Month – a time to recognize and celebrate the indigenous populations of America. National Native American Heritage Month was first celebrated in …

Democrat Rhode Island lawmakers on Wednesday promoted a suite of bills motivated by the Freedom to Read movement — an assertion of libraries’ right to hold controversial books, amid an ongoing culture clash over the written word.

Both the Indiana and Iowa State Legislatures have introduced legislation regarding criminally charging libraries and librarians over “inappropriate” material. These bills are closely related to widespread book challenges occurring at schools and public libraries across the nation, with people trying to remove books that address certain topics relating to gender, sexuality, and race from library collections. In many cases there is already a clear process for reconsidering materials in a collection, so how do legal defenses play a role in this and what do the bills change?

We’ve documented actions taken on dozens of campuses to alter or eliminate jobs, offices, hiring practices, and programs amid mounting political pressure to end identity-conscious recruitment and retention of minority staff and students.

The word "squaw" was declared derogatory by the Department of Interior in 2021. Since then, hundreds of geographic features have been renamed with input from local tribes and Indigenous communities.

A tested approach to DEI that creates lasting change.

Petitions, Places to Donate, & More

Check out this data/research hub from the Southern Border Communities Coalition that provides a deep look at border militarization, the border agents masquerading as soldiers, the violent & deadly border wall & the policies that allow this to happen.

BackgroundThe Tohono O’odham have resided in what is now southern andcentral Arizona and northern Mexico since time immemorial.The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 divided the Tohono O’odham’straditional lands and separated their communities. Today, theNation’s reservation includes 62 miles of international border.The Nation is a federally recognized tribe of 34,000 members,including more than 2,000 residing in Mexico.Long […]

United We Dream is the largest immigrant youth-led network in the country. We fight for justice and dignity for all immigrants.

ACE advocates on behalf of the Dreamers, urging Congress to pass legislation to grant them permanent legal status and other protections.

Federal policy on deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) led to consideration of legislative change in states related to driver's licenses and in-state tuition.

Arizona voters have approved Proposition 314, a sweeping and divisive law that will incite the discrimination and harassment of immigrants, Latine communities, and people of color. The ACLU of

Proponents of DEI face an enormous struggle over the next four years. The incoming Trump administration has signaled it will escalate the already virulent anti-DEI backlash in the workplace. Leaders who want to build just and inclusive organizations amid these challenging conditions can look to a framework developed eight years ago to help multinational corporations support LGBTQ+ inclusion in countries that are hostile to LGBTQ+ rights. Companies can follow: 1) the “When in Rome” model, in which they adhere to local norms and laws, even if that means diluting some of their DEI commitments; 2) the “Embassy” model, in which they adopt DEI policies internally but do not push for larger societal change; or 3) the “Advocate” model, in which they seek to shift local laws and social norms in a pro-DEI direction.

This paper introduces a subfield of management studies, "critical management studies" (CMS) in order to rethink mainstream management practices in academic libraries, with strategic planning as an illustrative example. Mainstream management models from the corporate sector prioritize efficiency, productivity, and numerical measures for assessing impact. Academic libraries have generally borrowed uncritically from this mainstream management praxis, but how well does this serve our needs, especially when it comes to the most complex issues we face? CMS draws on critical theory to interrogate the methods and goals of mainstream management, with an emphasis on denaturalizing "taken for granted" practices and prioritizing ethics and worker equity. After providing a brief overview of the history and adoption of mainstream management in academic libraries, this paper focuses on strategic planning as an illustrative exploration of CMS principles in an academic library context. Strategic planning is a common managerial practice that has been embraced by academic libraries and generally modeled after mainstream approaches. Yet, CMS scholars contend that traditional strategic planning reproduces workplace inequities and universalizes managerial interests. In this article, I employ ideas from CMS to rethink library strategic planning by opening participation, reframing problems, and embracing our ethical agency.

Arizona voted to grant state and local police the authority to make immigration arrests, going against Supreme Court precedent.

This guide serves as a collection point for information pertaining to Responsibility Centered Management.

Disability exists regardless of whether a doctor has confirmed its existence. Yet in the American workplace, employees are not disabled, or entitled to reasonab

The American Indian College Fund provides scholarships and support for Native American students and tribal colleges and universities, and also supports programs for institutional growth and sustainability and cultural preservation.

The Indian Land Tenure Foundation (ILTF) is a national, community-based organization serving American Indian nations and people in the recovery and control of their rightful homelands. We work to promote education, increase cultural awareness, create economic opportunity, and reform the legal and administrative systems that prevent Indian people from owning and controlling reservation lands.

Editor’s Note: This guest post has been authored by Alejandro Marquez (Science and Engineering Librarian at the University of Denver Libraries) and Brady Niemitalo Woods (Patron Training Specialist at Jefferson County Public Library, Colorado). The fall semester started recently, marking the begi

Arizona voters will decide Nov. 5 whether to make illegal border crossings a state crime in a ballot measure that has drawn little public debate.

"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women. Holding It Together chronicles the causes and dire consequences. America runs on women -- women who are tasked with holding society together at the seams and fixing it when things fall apart. In this tour de force, acclaimed sociologist Jessica Calarco lays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo. Holding It Together draws on five years of research in which Calarco surveyed over 4000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with women who bear the brunt of our broken system. A widowed single mother struggles to patch together meager public benefits while working three jobs; an aunt is pushed into caring for her niece and nephew at age fifteen once their family is shattered by the opioid epidemic; a daughter becomes the backstop caregiver for her mother, her husband, and her child because of the perceived flexibility of her job; a well-to-do couple grapples with the moral dilemma of leaning on overworked, underpaid childcare providers to achieve their egalitarian ideals. Stories of grief and guilt abound. Yet, they are more than individual tragedies. Tracing present-day policies back to their roots, Calarco reveals a systematic agreement to dismantle our country's social safety net and persuade citizens to accept precarity while women bear the brunt. She leads us to see women's labor as the reason we've gone so long without the support systems that our peer nations take for granted, and how women's work maintains the illusion that we don't need a net. Weaving eye-opening original research with revelatory sociological narrative, Holding It Together is a bold call to demand the institutional change that each of us deserves, and a warning about the perils of living without it"--

Creating an inclusive library : approaches for increasing engagement and use with students of color-book

Carry : a memoir of survival on stolen land-book

"A powerful work of reportage and American history in the vein of Caste and How the Word Is Passed that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation's earliest days, and a small-town murder in the '90s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land over a century later"--;"A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation's earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later. Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests--in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples. In the 1830s Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed. Over a century later, a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen on tribal land. His defense attorneys argued the murder occurred on the reservation of his tribe, and therefore Oklahoma didn't have the jurisdiction to execute him. Oklahoma asserted that the reservation no longer existed. In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court settled the dispute. Its ruling that would ultimately underpin multiple reservations covering almost half the land in Oklahoma, including Nagle's own Cherokee Nation. Here Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country." --

"In the U.S., the second-wave feminist fight to achieve legal and societal recognition of men's violence against women leaned heavily on the victim-offender binary, which has since become inscribed in funding schemes, legal remedies, and intervention approaches. In Broken, scholar-practitioner Lisa Young Larance interviews women who participated in antiviolence intervention and draws on her own extensive practice in the field to explain how this binary erases the trauma histories of those who both survive and cause harm. Calling for a more holistic conception of interpersonal violence that makes room for human complexity, Broken illuminates the connections across race, class, and sexual orientation that facilitate women's healing and repair"--

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