Integrating Grassroots Perspectives and Women’s Human Rights

This chapter considers how social psychological perspectives from feminist and liberation psychologies can enhance understandings of human rights activism, using three examples from the Irish context: abortion, poverty, and sexual orientation. The gap between institutional/state structures and grassroots community groups is apparent from the case of abortion and the use of the human rights framework in an Irish context. Possibilities for bridging this gap and for expanded understandings of human rights are considered. Firstly, Links are made between women’s human rights and structures of oppression through examples from community-based education with women living in impoverished communities. Secondly, A case study of community activism involving women from a deprived community demonstrates how a micro-level or bottom-up understanding of social change can be integrated with human rights. Thirdly, The example of LGBT women points to the need to expand individualistic concepts of personhood that underpin human rights to include relational and collective psychological processes.