Work at Southern Spaces continues to bear witness to the tangled histories of the South as well as provide insights to current and future topics surrounding race, equity, and social justice. 2023 articles that address these themes include:
As part of the COVID in Viral Times series launched in 2022, which addresses the public health and political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, Southern Spaces published 2023 articles “Encountering COVID,” “‘Miking’ Against Covid in Bangladesh,” “CDC in the Pandemic’s Wake,” and “End of the Pandemic? A Grassroots Perspective.” The COVID in Viral Times series is edited by Professor Mary Frederickson.
ECDS continues to support the Arts & Social Justice Partnership. The program is a partnership between the Emory College of Arts & Sciences, Arts at Emory, and the Emory University Center for Ethics. The Arts & Social Justice Fellows (ASJ) program arose in the fall of 2020, amid a “groundswell of national attention to racial and social injustice” that led Emory professors and students to join with Atlanta artists to “explore how creative thinking and artistic expression can inspire change.” As a partnership between the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts (CCA) and the Ethics and the Arts program of the Emory University Center for Ethics, the Arts and Social Justice Fellowship was envisioned as an opportunity for faculty members to work alongside partnered ASJ Fellows to embed creative projects that reflect on social inequities into existing courses. More information on the program can be found in this Emory news feature.
ECDS specialist Bailey Betik worked with history scholars Jessie Ramey of Chatham University and Amelia Golcheski of Emory University to create an interactive digital repository about the work of Kipp Dawson, a nationally significant yet little-recognized trailblazer who built coalitions for over 60 years on the frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam anti-war movement, women’s movement, gay liberation movement, labor movement, and education justice movement.
As an ECDS partner, Betik supported the design, build, and content migration of Ramey and Golcheski’s research into a sleek, accessible, responsive WordPress site. The site uses images and materials from Kipp Dawson’s personal archive as well as external scholarship about Dawson and video interviews with Dawson herself. The site also embeds six interactive StoryMaps that illustrate Dawson’s impact throughout social movements in the United States and abroad.
The Journal of Humanities in Rehabilitation (JHR) is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open-access journal published by ECDS that aims to raise the consciousness and deepen the intellect of the humanistic relationship in the rehabilitation sciences. In 2023, the journal published multiple articles related to race, equity, and social justice including: A Seat at the Table: A Reflection on Engaging Disabled People and Their Families in Research and Service Design, The Case for Disability Justice in Physical Therapy Education and Practice, Steps Toward Inclusion for Those Without Words, and How Structural Oppression Has Shaped the Physical Therapy Profession and Access to Rehabilitative Services.