“Locally Manifested Global Injustices” – Hymke Theunissen

Many highly influential global movements that strive to end injustice have traveled via social media across the ocean from the United States to Europe. #MeToo, the global movement against sexual harassment, and Black Lives Matter, the global movement against racism, originated in the United States but have ever since spread across the world. These movements show that social injustices, such as sexism, racism, and ableism, are global issues. While we might not have the exact same experience with injustice in the Netherlands compared to the United States, the translation is easily made. People all over the world are discriminated against; these social injustices might manifest themselves differently depending on the national context, but the same mechanisms are at work.

This is why social media are such powerful tools for these movements. Any individual can start a fight against injustice, all they need is access to the internet and they can reach a global audience. They are not dependent on power or money. With the global character of injustice, social media seem like the perfect place to start a campaign, and to point a global audience to manifestations of injustice in specific contexts, translating the local to the global.

However, sometimes the translation is just not that easily made.

This became clear to me as Lara Harvey and Veronica Cinibulk presented their work on the topic of Rapid Response Design Justice. Harvey and Cinibulk showed their campaigns to save the American death-row inmate Lisa Montgomery. Harvey has created an Instagram-campaign that aims to tell the entire life story of Montgomery, and Cinibulk has composed a YouTube song about the hardships Montgomery went through.

Harvey and Cinibulk focused their campaign on matters of gender and extreme sentencing. This, for me, pointed to the grand differences in what fighting for justice in the United States in comparison to Europe looks like.

As a European, I am completely unfamiliar with the specific injustice Harvey and Cinibulk have fought against. This does not mean that I am unfamiliar with the concept, but that I am inexperienced in living under a legal system that endorses capital punishment. For me, it’s not a disputable matter whether Montgomery should be saved from execution, the entire execution shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Not a single country in the European Union endorses capital punishment, in accordance with the European Convention of Human Rights (European Parliament 2020). This means that the connection between gender and violence, as manifested in the death row in the States, was a completely new issue for me. On my screen were two American female students fighting to save someone from execution in their own country, and while I could connect to them on several other levels, I could not imagine setting up a campaign to save someone from death penalty in my own country.

This, for me, disrupted the seemingly seamless translation from local to global injustices. To be able to adequately address a global audience about these issues, a sensitive attitude should be adopted towards the context of the manifestation. Before I can see extreme sentencing as a gendered issue, I need to become aware of the context of the American legal system; then I can shift my focus from bafflement at the idea of execution to a global fight against sexism.

References

• European Parliament. 2020. “Death penalty: key facts about the situation in Europe and the rest of the world.” News. Last modified July 28, 2020. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/world/20190212STO25910/death-penalty-in-europe-and-the-rest-of-the-world-key-facts