SHL's blog

Since I wrote the first essay for this webzine (see “Spatiality and Working Class Solidarity”), I have been preoccupied with how workers can

Thousands of Koreans have been protesting the importation U.S. beef by gathering in vigils almost every night for the last two months.

While there are people who pursue powerful positions in society or in a group in order to dominate others, there are also those who identify themselves with dominant groups or the ideology of the group and submit themselves to the opinions of strong authority figures. One of the characteristics of them is to show a “blind faith” toward their “ingroup” to which they belong and hostility toward “outgroups.” Besides, they seldom show sympathy (or often show hostility) toward minorities who occupy weaker positions in social structure, whether in terms of ethnicity or in such criteria as gender, sexuality, occupation, nationality, opinions, and wealth.

Book Review: Laura Pulido’s Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest.

“Subaltern” groups, according to Pulido, are those which are subordinated socially, politically, culturally, and institutionally as well as economically. For example, Mexican agricultural workers occupy the lowest position within the division of the labor, lack political rights and legal protections, and face language barriers.

Book Review: David Naguib Pellow’s Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago.

Pellow’s Garbage Wars examines the history of the environmental struggles over the means and locations of the disposal of solid waste in Chicago and discusses the problems of “environmental racism.”

Patriarchy has existed for thousands of years, but the process of separation between public and private spheres in capitalism imposed new kinds of gender roles between husbands and wives in Western Europe by the middle of the 19th century: While a husband became the sole breadwinner in the public sphere, his wife took the task of the reproduction process in the private sphere. These separate roles became more rigidly reinforced by the ideology of the “cult of domesticity,” which was advocated by eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and subsequently by nineteenth-century literary writers like Sarah Ellis.