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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.

The possibility of causal feedback between human behavior and human environments resulting from behavioral and developmental plasticity combined with niche construction suggests that some small environmental changes could have cascading effects that would trigger substantial social change. An example of what this might look like is provided by Patricia Gowaty's "alternative sexual strategies" hypothesis, according to which both male and female reproductive strategies are flexible, adjusting according to the degree of female sexual autonomy with far-reaching behavioral and social effects.

The introduction sets up the historical and theoretical context necessary to the analysis of the female ghost. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, Mary Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattock Tarule, the introduction provides an overview on these texts about women’s psychology. Then the introduction reviews current scholarship on ghosts, and provides a precis of each chapter.

This chapter makes a case for reconceptualizing human rights “from below” by grounding human rights discourses in women’s particularities and their voices rather than prescriptive policy standards. It does so by bringing together feminist perspectives grounded in decoloniality and liberation psychology. It presents findings from activist scholarship in Northeast India to offer a critical feminist analysis of civil society’s (non)response to gender-based violence and counternarratives of Garo women protagonists who explain these (non)responses. Following Garo women protagonists in their understanding of violence illuminates the fundamental heterogeneity of violence against women as well as underlying cultural institutional and structural processes. By moving between situated narrative and wider analysis, this chapter explicates the connections between “exceptional” violence and pervasive violations of women’s human rights. The research, action, and policy implications for feminist psychologists engaged in human rights scholarship are discussed.

Feminist theologians generally express a desire to be more interdisciplinary. According to Corinne Squire, feminist psychology and science fiction are intertwined, and the latter is either ignored or assimilated into the literary canon. Squire further asserts that the struggle of a new or less powerful field to enter into ‘interdisciplinarity’ with an established field always problematises the latter, potentially giving rise to ‘a frail but autonomous new discipline’. This chapter examines James Tiptree Jr's text about alien encounter, ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’ in the intersecting contexts of theology, literature, culture and philosophy. It discusses the feminist transformation of science fiction and looks at the views of Robin Roberts on feminism and science (fiction).

Liberation is often understood as a project of self-liberation or at least individual liberation, especially by the nearly-always-individualistic field of psychology. This is not the liberatory goal at stake in Bullock’s or Moane’s work in Section Two. They are aiming at the liberation of groups—poor people, women without access to abortion, those with socially marginalized sexual identities, and others—through a process of liberation that both is individual and includes engagement with the social processes of subordination and oppression. The authors have found and outlined resources in psychology that help with both levels of that project—the personal and the structural. In doing so, both Bullock and Moane show that the language and theory of human rights can be useful. The psychology both of these chapters outlines is one that brings psychologists and communities into meaningful partnerships to create social justice by drawing on a human rights framework.

Conversing with Dutt’s and Dutta’s chapters suggests that activist scholars in psychology seeking to accompany women as they construct more just and inclusive communities might benefit from engaging dialogically with critical transitional justice, toward articulating and performing a more holistic “bottom-up” vernacularization of intersectional human rights. Within distinctive geographic and historical sites with contrasting possibilities vis-à-vis women’s protagonism and leadership, Dutt and Dutta share a commitment to engage with local women to document and understand multiple experiences of violence and violation in their everyday lives. Both authors collaborate with women in rural and/or remote areas of Nicaragua (Dutt) and India (Dutta) where women’s lived experiences are constrained by racialized and gendered economic and political structures that frequently exclude them from accessing their basic needs. Both authors help us to discern distinctive possibilities of women’s political engagement through the lens of civic participation (Dutt) and protagonism in the everyday (Dutta).