Women's Human Rights ─ A Social Psychological Perspective on Resistance, Liberation, and Justice

At a United Nations conference in 1995, 189 governments adopted the Beijing Platform for Action, an international agenda for women's equality and a statement of women's rights as human rights. Since that time, violations of women's human rights have become a widely-documented problem across many academic disciplines, international organizations, and activist social movements. Nevertheless, violations against women occur unabated despite widespread commitments internationally to draw increased attention to women's experiences. Given that a focus on women's rights was first put forth two decades ago, the question remains: why do egregious violations of women's rights continue?

Edited by Shelly Grabe, Women's Human Rights: A Social Psychological Perspective on Resistance, Liberation, and Justice contributes to the discussion of why women's human rights warrants increased focus in the context of globalization and how psychology can provide the currently missing, but necessary, links between transnational feminism and the discourse on women's human rights and neoliberalism. This volume takes a radically different approach to women's human rights by turning its attention to a variety of disciplines and, as a result, develops new ideas regarding how psychology can be relevant in the study or actualization of women's human rights. By doing so, it makes it very clear for readers as to how activist scholarship can make a unique contribution to the defense of women's rights.

Rather than using examples that have been sensationalized throughout academia and advocacy (i.e. genital mutilation), each of this book's contributing authors has used examples (rape, sexual orientation, homelessness, civic participation, violence) of specific human rights violations that occur the world over in their attempt to make the relevance of psychology to this topic more visible to the reader.

Shelly Grabe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works in partnership with grassroots women's organizations in Nicaragua and Tanzania to privilege the activism and voices of marginalized women in the pursuit of women's human rights. She uses a multi-method approach from within psychology to provide the currently missing, but necessary links between transnational feminism, the discourse on women's human rights and globalization, and the international attention given to women's "empowerment" to help support strategies and interventions aimed at social change by local women. In her academic work, Shelly employs frameworks informed by feminist liberation psychology, human rights discourse, decolonial feminism, and social justice to organize her research, teaching, and outreach. She is the author of Narrating a Psychology of Resistance: Voices of the Companeras in Nicaragua (Oxford University Press, 2016).