This study examines the representation of economic justice in A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019) and A Plague Tale: Requiem (2022) through a narrative and political-economic analysis that considers the games as both cultural texts and interactive economic products. Set in plague-ravaged medieval France, the games stage feudal oppression, resource monopolization, and class violence. Combining narrative theory, political economy of media, and critical game studies, the article examines how ludonarrative design, character arcs, and environmental storytelling render systemic inequality and ethical dilemmas for protagonists Amicia and Hugo. Their journey through war-torn villages, aristocratic estates, and plague-infested cities foregrounds a systemic critique of class-based privilege and dispossession. The siblings’ efforts to protect one another are framed against a world where institutions (religious, political, and economic) have abdicated moral responsibility. Gameplay mechanics and level design juxtapose elite control of resources with peasant precarity, framing economic justice as both redistribution and an ethical response to violence, institutional failure, and social alienation. The analysis also situates the titles within industry conditions by assessing their production by Asobo Studio and distribution by Focus Entertainment, arguing that market positioning within the mid-tier budget segment complicates the games’ critical stance. By tracing how interactive mechanics implicate players in morally ambiguous choices, the study shows that these works dramatize crisis capitalism, austerity, and institutional collapse while offering a space for resistance and moral reflection. The findings contribute to understanding video games as cultural commodities that simultaneously critique and participate in political-economic structures.
Informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and using qualitative content analysis, this paper examines how Canada frames its priorities for Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) in light of the systemic barriers faced by Black students. The paper reviews key policy documents, including Moving Forward Together: Canada’s 2030 Agenda National Strategy, the Canadian Indicator Framework, Voluntary National Reviews, and the SDG Data Hub. Although Canada broadly frames SDG 4 beneficiaries as “Canadians,” this universal language can obscure racial inequities by overlooking the specific barriers faced by Black students. Similarly, references to “inclusion” and “quality” education that do not address historical and structural exclusions risk rendering these commitments symbolic rather than transformative. The study argues that achieving SDG 4 requires explicitly naming racialized groups, integrating their lived experiences into policy, using disaggregated racial data, and designing targeted interventions. A CRT lens reveals that meaningful educational equity demands confronting the racialized foundations of Canada’s education system rather than relying on universalist ideals.
Fighting prison expansion is a social justice issue, as the prison is a key site reproducing and compounding social marginalization. On 27 August 2020, the Government of Ontario announced the Eastern Region Strategy, a series of new prison infrastructure projects, including the Eastern Ontario Correctional Complex, a 235-bed prison to be built in the small town of Kemptville. Drawing on five years of research and of activism by the authors working with Kemptville residents as part of the Coalition Against the Proposed Prison, this study examines the long and short-term contexts from which the prison plan emerged. To this end, the paper brings into focus four social forces that shaped the emergence and contours of the Ontario government’s recent prison building strategy, including settler colonialism, capitalist restructuring, penal reform, and abolitionist organizing. We end with a discussion of the need for anti-prison organizing that features a broad range of groups and individuals with different points of entry into social justice struggles working together to oppose prison expansion.
The concept of sanism offers a promising framework for examining the structural injustices encountered by individuals with mental health diagnoses. However, it remains inconsistently applied across the existing literature. This study aims to clarify and define the concept of sanism. We use Walker and Avant’s (2019) conceptual analysis method to conduct the study. After a review of the literature on sanism, we analyse 54 articles to identify the attributes, antecedents and consequents of the concept. The results show that sanism is a distinct form of oppression (attribute 1) directed specifically at individuals affiliated with the social group of Mad people (attribute 2). Sanism has five antecedents: psychocentrism, stereotypes, prejudices, othering and identity reduction. It also has six consequents: deprivation of human rights, discrimination, epistemic injustice, marginalization, microaggression and violence. While sanism is recognized as a distinct form of oppression, it must be analysed through an intersectional lens that captures its entanglements with other systems of oppression, including racism, sexism, ableism, and classism. By providing greater conceptual clarity around sanism, this conceptual analysis offers a stronger foundation for future research, policy development and advocacy for disability justice.
Academic freedom seems to be under assault from all political angles. Opposed sides invoke academic freedom when it serves their purposes but ignore it when doing so serves the purposes of attacking their political enemies. Most at risk in the midst of these on-going battles is the future of the university as a space for free inquiry, debate, criticism, and the extension of human knowledge in all fields of intellectual inquiry. As a step towards safeguarding the future of the university as a space for open inquiry, the meaning and value of academic freedom needs to be clarified. While it is often (and understandably) identified with the constitutional right to free speech, it is in fact different in significant respects. Academic freedom is both a broad principle of free inquiry and argument upon which the university as an intellectual institution rests and a narrow collective agreement right. In both dimensions it is subject to limitations to which the right to free speech is not subject (curricular decisions, for example, must pass the test of relevance to the subject matter, while there are no constraints on introducing extraneous material into public political debates). Since all academics’ professional lives depend upon the institutional commitment to academic freedom, those who would undermine it in favour of their political priorities contradict themselves and raise questions about their fitness for the vocation of teacher-researcher.
This study explores how low-income lone mothers in Ottawa, Ontario, navigate Canada’s complex, multi-sector networks of social supports in their work to meet their families’ needs. Drawing on reflective thematic analysis of in-depth interviews and text message-based data with 25 mothers, the study illuminates how systems organized to meet basic needs are often experienced as stressful and deflating, stigmatizing, and even risky. Mothers described the labour of accessing supports as extensive, with physical, bureaucratic, relational, and emotional dimensions, and as compounding feelings of shame, undermining trust in the state, and constraining their socio-economic mobility. The findings show how certain aspects of social service design and delivery fail to meet needs and can entrench poverty and erode social bonds. Participants also identified elements that can foster a sense of support and connection, such as services that are reliable, flexible, co-located, coordinated, and relational. These findings underscore the need to reimagine social support delivery to value provisioning labour, reduce systemic harms, and address the structural conditions that sustain poverty.
In the face of academic antagonism, this article argues that feminists must build caring and careful communities of practice to sustain ourselves. In it we explore the importance of creating intentional, feminist-oriented spaces of actionable solidarity to protect activists and academics from institutional antagonisms. Through our encounters as researchers working within feminist archives, and as academics who are part of feminist research collectives, we have developed a process for creating provisional solidarities that protect both our persons and our activisms. This process is based on our lived experiences, archival explorations, and social media research that informs our sometimes messy and often nuanced praxes of community-building as a counterpoint to increasing neo-liberal co-option of discourses of solidarity. In this paper we provide some guideposts for how we do our work as a way of inviting further conversation around how to manage the antagonisms we face as feminist scholars.
Having conducted research and taught courses in political anthropology for several decades, particularly on nationalism, populism, and ethnonational conflict, I have initiated, facilitated and been caught up in many difficult conversations on issues including identity (politics), rights, conflict and justice with my students and colleagues. My research on the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and the Kitchener-Waterloo Mennonite Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program has taught me valuable lessons on how practices of repair have been embedded or emerged in response to tensions, conflict and trauma-induced experiences, histories and lived realities. These lessons have become especially relevant in the context of recent challenges to academic freedom that have emerged in response to the ongoing war in Palestine/Israel. Suspensions, censure and surveillance are some of the troubling consequences, which combined have had an enormous impact on pedagogy and scholarship, affecting faculty and students alike. In this context, I argue that practices reflecting the centrality of (and urgent need for attention to) academic freedom are enhanced through pedagogical instruction and illustrate several strategies I use in classroom settings. I also discuss how despite the fractious environment created, and in some cases inflamed by the ongoing conflict, faculty and student groups are endeavouring to create and test out safe and respectful spaces for critical thinking, vigorous debate, as well as sharing and listening. These and other locally inspired initiatives are important to building networks based on thoughtful discussion and analysis, allyship, activism and more. I conclude by reflecting on anthropological research on the ethics of repair and its potential to inform pedagogical strategies aimed at navigating increasingly fraught and vulnerable academic spaces.
In Canada, research is governed by national ethical guidelines and standards enforced by institutional research ethics boards (REBs) to protect vulnerable populations, such as temporary migrant farmworkers. However, the rigid and inflexible application of these procedures often creates significant barriers for social science researchers striving to promote social justice for this population and may lead to antagonism between researchers and REB chairs. Institutional ethics frameworks frequently fail to account for the embeddedness of research within rural agricultural communities and the critical role these communities play in shaping ethical decision-making. When REBs overlook these relational and contextual dynamics, they impose requirements that can obstruct meaningful, on-the-ground ethical engagement. To illustrate these tensions, we focus on three challenges, namely, participant recruitment strategies, consent procedures, and protection from trauma. To avoid misunderstandings and antagonism, we call for a paradigm shift toward understanding research ethics as relations, that is, inherently embedded within complex networks of relationships, emphasizing iterative models of consent developed through ongoing negotiations between researchers, participants, and other community members. Bridging the gap between ethical research in theory and practice requires a relational paradigm that recognizes the need to mitigate hostilities and antagonism and emphasizes the importance of collaboration and dialogue – not only among academics, migrants, and community stakeholders but also between researchers and REB members.
Despite the increasing diversity of our online and offline communities, hate speech continues to divide us deeply. We urgently need to examine its ghastly omnipresence and our growing numbness to its harms. This article aims to identify mechanisms that exploit the right to free speech as a cover for the proliferation of hate speech in contemporary society. Chief among these is the manipulative tactic of equating resistance to today’s culture of uninhibited expression – which includes hate speech – with censorship. To begin with, I demonstrate that the idealistic “marketplace of ideas” endorsed by free speech absolutists becomes as repressive as the tyrannical censorship it fears when participants are constantly pressured into conformity. Next, I show that in this unregulated market, the idea of open dialogue gains more traction when participants are divided by hate. Finally, I examine how digital technology fosters seemingly benign habits that enable the online and offline amplification of harmful speech.
Despite growing calls to advance social justice and address deep-seated inequities and gaps, injustice and oppression continue to be perpetrated in contemporary society. This article attempts to review and understand social justice issues and contribute to discussions to addressing the violence of ongoing colonialism. Given the many meanings and conceptualisations of social justice, this review seeks to find out how concepts of decoloniality can be taken up to rethink and redefine social justice. The review process comprises a systematic search of four academic databases for relevant peer-reviewed literature on the topic. A total of 265 records were identified, of which 38 studies met our eligibility criteria for inclusion. Thematic analysis revealed diverse interpretations and applications of social justice. Findings highlight the need to draw on decolonial perspective for a more nuanced conceptualisation of social justice to tackle racial, social, economic, political, and cognitive injustices. The review calls for further research to deepen the understanding of social justice and to develop strategies that effectively address the complexities of oppression and marginalisation in contemporary multicultural settler-colonial societies.
