QUT Centre for Justice welcomes you back for another year of impactful news, research and events on topics and issues related to justice.
Over the holiday break the Centre released three new Briefing Papers on three diverse aspects of justice:
Queer Justice:
Lisa van Leent (2024), Pride celebrations in schools: Queering celebrations for social justice education.
All schools in Australia should be places in which queer children and youth thrive. What teachers and leaders in schools do matters in the lives of queer children and queer families. Despite a history of negative experiences and outcomes related to schooling, young queer people continue to survive and thrive. As a social justice imperative, every child in Australia has a right to access education on parity with their peers, regardless of their sex characteristics, gender and or sexuality (Gillett-Swan & van Leent, 2019). The purpose of this paper is to encourage schools to create safe, engaging and meaningful queer lives through celebrating queerness with pride.
Sanitation Justice:
Katherine Webber and Deanna Grant Smith (2024), Addressing sanitation justice through local government public toilet strategies.
Sanitation injustice exists when people do not have equitable access to sanitation infrastructure. Public toilet strategies can address sanitary injustices in public spaces across cities, towns and regions, but very few local governments in Australia have formalised policies. Two exceptions are Cardinia Shire Council located on the urban fringe of Melbourne and Inner West Council in Sydney. Using these case sites, this briefing paper makes recommendations for local governments seeking to deliver sanitation justice through the development and implementation of effective public toilet strategies.
Professor Deanna Grant-Smith has authored a previous Briefing Paper on Sanitation Justice.
Disaster Justice:
Jenny Hou (2024) Storytelling for disaster resilience and community engagement: A practical guide
Disaster resilience building requires inclusive and engaging communication to share knowledge, develop trust, and foster collaboration. Current disaster risk communication, dominated by a ‘deficit model’ of one-way information broadcasting, lacks sensitivity to the diverse needs and disaster inequalities faced by marginalised or vulnerable communities. The briefing paper advocates for a shift from authority/expert-driven narratives to disaster storytelling as a tool of social inclusion and community engagement. It provides a practical guide to strategic disaster storytelling planning governed by ‘5C’ principles (contextual, comprehensible, compelling, conducive to action, cohere), and supported by multiple factors, to achieve measurable communicative impact on disaster resilience.
This paper forms part of the Disaster Justice Briefing Paper Series released during 2024. A third edition of this series is coming in 2025.
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