Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Studies in Social Justice

Publication Date

2-11-2024

Abstract

We live in a world in which we are socially, politically, economically, and environmentally connected with other people. Online communication has facilitated people coming together from different parts of the world. In terms of social justice movements, people have come together to share ideas about how they perceive social inequality and how to address it, which is what academics call critical consciousness. While scholars have explored critical consciousness in the American context, whether it operates on a global scale is under-explored. To address this question, we administered the Critical Consciousness Scale (a validated survey) with students from the United States, Iran, and Ukraine. Our findings demonstrate that critical consciousness maintains its factor structure across the entire sample, meaning that students from these three countries share some notions of critical consciousness. However, when comparing national groups, we find that critical consciousness is defined differently by students in different countries. In a practical sense, these findings mean that some aspects of critical consciousness are shared, but there are important differences in how it is perceived and how its components relate to one another. By attempting to understand critical consciousness internationally, this study serves as a cautionary narrative for international solidarity movements organized around the goal of social justice.

ISSN

1911-4788

Publisher

Brock University Library

Volume

18

Issue

1

First Page

143

Last Page

164

Disciplines

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

Critical consciousness, Global scale, Social justice, International solidarity movements, Social inequality

Indexed in Scopus

no

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series

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