His research and writing interests focus on race relations and restorative justice. He is a regular contributor to edited volumes on popular culture, including Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, published by BenBella and recently co-authored a book on the Russian-Jewish diaspora: Building a diaspora: Russian Jews in Israel, Germany, and the United States. An autobiographical essay of his interests in race relations and basketball is available here. His Psychology Today blog about race is called Between the Lines.
All material on this site published under his byline remains the property of Mikhail Lyubansky, copyright 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. Permission is granted to repost and distribute, with proper attribution.
Saturday, January 22, 2011 Myth of the Hero Gunslinger (10 comments)
To many gun owners, the question of whether to arm even more people in a country that already has upwards of 300 million guns is as calcified as a Sonoran Desert petroglyph. It’s written in stone, among the fiercest of firearms advocates, that more guns equals fewer deaths.
Friday, December 10, 2010 Restorative Justice: The Evidence
A summary of research findings comparing restorative justice to other approaches.
Friday, December 10, 2010 Community Police Turn To Restorative Justice
By the time Jay was about halfway through Grade 11, he had only 3½ credits and no hope or thoughts of a meaningful life beyond high school.
Then the Hamilton teen got into a fight with another student that landed him in police custody and saw him expelled from school. Enter restorative justice.
Friday, December 10, 2010 The Complexity Of Conflict
Restorative Circles reject the labels of "victim" and "offender". RC innovator Dominic Barter explains why they fail to capture the complexity of conflict.
Friday, December 10, 2010 Understanding Justice as a System
Sometimes, systems are so large and so hegemonic, we barely know they're there. Restorative Circle innovator Dominic Barter describes the impact of system blindness.
Friday, December 10, 2010 Opening the Door To Forgiveness (1 comments)
A UW law program brings the victims of violent crimes face-to-face with the people who hurt them, proving that human compassion resides in the most unlikely places.
Friday, December 10, 2010 Personalizing Crime: Mediation Produces Restorative Justice for Victims and Offenders
Our traditional criminal justice system is a system of retributive justice--a system of institutionalized vengeance, explains attorney Marty Price. The system is based on the belief that justice is accomplished by assigning blame and administering pain. If you do the crime, you do the time. If you do the time, then you've paid your debt to society and justice has been done. But justice for whom?
Friday, December 10, 2010 Family Group Conferencing: Implications for Crime Victims
Rarely has a new criminal justice idea received such extensive exposure to and interest from audiences as widespread as activists, professionals, and the general public in such a short period of time. No other restorative justice approach has so quickly brought such large numbers of law enforcement officials to the table as active stakeholders in the restorative justice movement.
Friday, December 10, 2010 Relations of Domination and Subordination: Challenges for Restorative Justice in Responding to Domestic Violence
Non-domination is said to be a core value of RJ, but what are the implications for restorative encounters when one party is dominant? In this paper I examine these issues through the lens of gendered violence with particular reference to domestic violence and sexual assault as a means of displacing the approach common in much Restorative Justice literature of working with an undifferentiated concept of victim (and offender).
Friday, December 10, 2010 Long Path To Redemption
"Restorative justice really helped me to see that what I was doing was affecting someone else besides myself," he says. "Terence was a son to somebody."
That's at the heart of the restorative justice idea: Let victims and offenders hash it out in a controlled setting, ask questions, express emotions, and together decide on a way to improve the situation.
Monday, July 26, 2010 Making the Link: The Inside Story of How Health Professionals Designed the U.S. Regime of Torture (1 comments)
Nathaniel Raymond has led Physicians for Human Rights (PHR's) investigation of the role of health professionals--particularly psychologists--in the design, supervision, and implementation of the Bush Administration’s regime of physical and psychological torture of detainees in U.S. custody. His 40-min talk offers a rare and startling look into a world few of us have access to: the U.S. military leadership.
Friday, April 2, 2010 The Audacity of Humanity
The Audacity of Humanity features over 35 authors, ages 10 to 71, representing 5 continents, multiple ethnicities, diverse sexualities and belief systems, and different abilities and limitations.
We are ONE people, the human race, courageously up-ending who and what others think we are. Each contributor offers their story as a radical transformation of what leadership can be.
Saturday, January 2, 2010 Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here's What Happened
"Author Evan Ratliff Is on the Lam. Locate Him and Win $5,000."
-- wired.com/vanish, August 14, 2009 5:38 pm
The premise is simple: I will try to vanish for a month and start over under a new identity. Wired readers, or whoever else happens upon the chase, will try to find me.
Sunday, November 29, 2009 Searching for Whitopia: The Unfortunate Misdirection of a Journey Into Whiteness
Rich Benjamin, an African American journalist spent over two years criss-crossing the country to document the latest manifestation of "white flight" -- the migration of white residents from cities to racially homogeneous enclaves that Benjamin calls "Whitopias." Along the way, he bumps into a white separatist group that, by his account, treats him well. What are we to make of his account vis a vis contemporary race relations?
Wednesday, October 7, 2009 Happiness Is In the Eye of the Beholder (1 comments)
An analysis of over half a million Americans has found that happiness varies between age groups and that women enjoy a slightly higher level of happiness than men do at specific life stages. This article examines the possible reasons, with "expert" opinion from an OEN editor.
Saturday, September 12, 2009 E-Democracy Win: Britain Apologizes to Alan Turing | techPresident
First paragraph:
This morning, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official statement of apology to Alan Turing, a mathematician who led the WWII code-breaking effort that broke Germany's Enigma codes and did pioneering work in the development of computers. Turing, who was gay, was convicted of "gross indecency" in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration. He committed suicide two years later.
Sunday, August 16, 2009 Margaret Bush Wilson dies at 90; first black woman to head national NAACP board -- latimes.com (1 comments)
Margaret Bush Wilson, the first African American woman to head the national NAACP board of directors, and who was ousted in 1983 after a public feud with its executive director, died Tuesday at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis of multiple organ failure. She was 90.
Friday, August 14, 2009 Tasered Mom: "I Posed No Threat'
Do Tasers save lives (as police and the Taser Corp. claim) or do they promote police brutality? Incidents like this problematize the issue.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009 A Latina Judge's Voice
Transcript of Sonia Sotomayor's 2002 speech describing the role that her ethnicity plays in her work.
Monday, April 13, 2009 Race and the Obama Admininstration
Danny Glover writes about how the United Nations is convening the Durban Review Conference in Geneva April 20 to 24 to review and assess the progress since 2001. Will the Obama administration send a delegation?
Monday, April 6, 2009 Are Republicans Blackmailing Obama? - The Daily Beast (1 comments)
If the president releases the Bush torture memos, Republicans are promising to "go nuclear" and filibuster his legal appointments. Scott Horton reports on a serious threat to Obama's transparency.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009 How Words Could End a War
Even in the middle of another cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, the most depressing feature of the conflict is the sense that future fighting is inevitable. Social Scientists suggest there may be a way out.
Friday, December 12, 2008 Gadgets that make you look like a jerk
Do you like gadgets? Apparently most people do, including the author, who nevertheless marvels how almost 90 percent of American nuclear households have multiple cell phones, despite the fact that studies keep demonstrating cell phone use by men is associated with less "motile" sperm. Yes, it's MSNBC, but it made me smile.
