Effectively addressing both cognitive and affective dimensions of learning is one of the greatest obstacles to teaching race and racial justice in higher education. In this article, we first explore the need to integrate attention to cognitive and affective development, along with evidence-based strategies for doing so. We then provide a case study of an undergraduate sociology course on environmental justice in which the instructor intentionally adopted holistic pedagogical principles of teaching race. Analyzing student responses from a pre- and post- course survey, course assignments, and instructor observations of student participation, we find that both white students and students of color experienced significant growth in their cognitive and affective understanding of the complexities of race and work toward racial justice. However, results also show how challenging it can be to create the conditions for productive multiracial dialogues that produce extensive affective development, particularly interpersonal skills of racial reconciliation. Reflecting on the limitations of the case, we conclude that more holistic teaching approaches are necessary to develop both students’ cognitive and affective abilities to navigate race and work against racism, and we make suggestions for faculty development and administrative support.
In the last twenty years, and especially since NAFTA, the U.S.-Mexico border has been a site of intensive neoliberal development, particularly in the growth of 2,340 export-processing plants (maquiladoras), ninety percent U.S.-owned. The economic growth this has helped to promote has been both rapid and uneven, and the burdens it has placed on local communities through impoverished conditions of work and life have been immense -no where more so than in Tijuana. Although much of this growth and the associated social and environmental problems have been the subjects of many policy, academic, and journalistic discussions, Tijuana's local community organizations, which have attempted to meet local needs and formulate alternative development paradigms, have not. Based on interviews with community organization representatives in the San Diego/Tijuana region, this text argues that a more complete understanding of these movement eVorts to resist neoliberalism, especially the alternative visions for development they construct, are crucial to any understanding of neoliberalism generally, transnational social movements, and more democratic labor and environmental policy. These alternative paradigms diVer radically from those promoted by capital and states on both sides of la frontera, and potentially oVer a more participatory, democratic, and sustainable form of transnational development, for Mexico and all of North America.
This article compares women workers' movements in Nicaragua and Northern Mexico that have mobilized in opposition to the abuses occurring within export-processing zones (EPZs). We examine the opportunities and obstacles that such movements have faced as they seek social change via national and transnational coalitions. Our focus on gender tensions within transnational labor movements illustrates how power relations fracture the space of transnational civil society and constrain opposition to neoliberalism. Women's labor movements in both contexts confront highly gendered national and transnational political spaces, stemming in part from the hegemonic association of women with private space and men with public space. Significant differences in the opportunities for resistance emerging from local and national dynamics in Nicaragua and Mexico demonstrate that the realm of the so-called global cannot be understood as abstracted from historically situated localities.
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