Women's Human Rights

At a United Nations conference in 1995, 189 governments adopted the Beijing Platform for Action, an international agenda for women's equality and a statement of women's rights as human rights. Since that time, violations of women's human rights have become a widely-documented problem across many academic disciplines, international organizations, and activist social movements. Nevertheless, violations against women occur unabated despite widespread commitments internationally to draw increased attention to women's experiences. Given that a focus on women's rights was first put forth two decades ago, the question remains: why do egregious violations of women's rights continue? Edited by Shelly Grabe, Women's Human Rights: A Social Psychological Perspective on Resistance, Liberation, and Justice contributes to the discussion of why women's human rights warrants increased focus in the context of globalization and how psychology can provide the currently missing, but necessary, links between transnational feminism and the discourse on women's human rights and neoliberalism. This volume takes a radically different approach to women's human rights by turning its attention to a variety of disciplines and, as a result, develops new ideas regarding how psychology can be relevant in the study or actualization of women's human rights. By doing so, it makes it very clear for readers as to how activist scholarship can make a unique contribution to the defense of women's rights. Rather than using examples that have been sensationalized throughout academia and advocacy (i.e. genital mutilation), each of this book's contributing authors has used examples (rape, sexual orientation, homelessness, civic participation, violence) of specific human rights violations that occur the world over in their attempt to make the relevance of psychology to this topic more visible to the reader.

Shelly Grabe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works in partnership with grassroots women's organizations in Nicaragua and Tanzania to privilege the activism and voices of marginalized women in the pursuit of women's human rights. She uses a multi-method approach from within psychology to provide the currently missing, but necessary links between transnational feminism, the discourse on women's human rights and globalization, and the international attention given to women's "empowerment" to help support strategies and interventions aimed at social change by local women. In her academic work, Shelly employs frameworks informed by feminist liberation psychology, human rights discourse, decolonial feminism, and social justice to organize her research, teaching, and outreach. She is the author of Narrating a Psychology of Resistance: Voices of the Compañeras in Nicaragua (Oxford University Press, 2016).

- Preface
- Shelly Grabe
- Introduction: The Potential for a Feminist Liberation Psychology in the Advancement of Women's Human Rights
- Shelly Grabe
- SECTION ONE - RESISTANCE: Understanding Change When Knowledge is Constructed from 'Below'
- Shelly Grabe
- Chapter 1: "I survived the war, but how can I survive peace" Feminist-based Research on War Rape and Liberation Psychology
- Simone Lindorfer and Kirsten Wienberg
- Chapter 2: How/Can Psychology Support Low Income LGBTGNC Liberation
- Michelle Billies
- CRITICAL REFLECTION OF SECTION ONE - Silence Kills in "Revolting" Times: Braiding Feminist Activist Scholarship with the Threads of Resistance, Human Rights and Social Justice
- Michelle Fine
- SECTION TWO - LIBERATION: The Transformation of Social Structures
- Shelly Grabe
- Chapter 3: From "Welfare MothersQueens" to "Welfare Warriors": Economic Justice as a Human Right
- Heather E. Bullock
- Chapter 4: Integrating Grassroots Perspectives and Women's Human Rights: Feminist Liberation Psychology in Action
- Geraldine Moane
- CRITICAL REFLECTION OF SECTION TWO - What is Psychology's Role in the Project of Liberation and Structural Change?
- Abigail J. Stewart
- SECTION THREE - JUSTICE: Praxis Whereby Researchers Work Alongside the Dominated and Oppressed Rather than Alongside the Dominator or Oppressor
- Shelly Grabe
- Chapter 5: Civic Participation, Prefigurative Politics, and Feminist Organizing in Rural Nicaragua
- Anjali Dutt
- Chapter 6: The Everyday and the Exceptional: Rethinking Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Garo Hills, India
- Urimitapa Dutta
- CRITICAL REFLECTION OF SECTION THREE - Feminist Intersectional Human Rights: Embodying Justice in and through Transnational Activist Scholarship
- M. Brinton Lykes
- Conclusion: Being Bold: Building a Justice-oriented Psychology of Women's Human Rights
- Anjali Dutt