Elevate Difference

Reviews by Andrea Gittleman

Andrea Gittleman

Andrea is a human rights lawyer, avid reader, diehard feminist, and budding writer. She has dedicated her professional career to international justice and the varied ways to bring communities from conflict to peace. Andrea has worked in Mauritania (West Africa), on the Thai/Burma border, and in the United States with organizations including the Peace Corps, the Burma Lawyers’ Council, Human Rights Watch, and the New York Civil Liberties Union. She has a law degree from New York University and an undergraduate degree in Political Science and International Studies from the University of Chicago. Some of her other writing can be viewed under Perspectives in Practice on Human Rights Brief Blog.

Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America

Sara Dubow navigates the complexities of an impassioned and divisive issue in Ourselves Unborn. She takes a calculated historical look at how Americans have interpreted the fetus and pregnancy throughout ever-shifting political realities. Her thesis: Americans have cast their social and cultural anxieties onto the fetus, which often results in abortion-related policies that serve ulterior motives.

Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China

Heroin. AIDS. Migration. Development programs. Gender roles. In Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China, Shao-hua Liu examines each of these issues and how they relate to Nuoso youth. An anthropological researcher, the author delves into how China’s evolution from the traditional to the modern intersects with drug use, disease, and development.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

I knew when I bought my ticket that Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps would not be a feminist film. I had an idea of the storyline: Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) returns for Oliver Stone’s modern depiction of the beginnings of the current economic crisis, told through the eyes of Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), a young ambitious businessman, and his girlfriend Winnie (Carey Mulligan), Gekko’s daughter.

Surviving the Witch-Hunt: Battle Notes from Portland’s 82nd Avenue, 2007-2010

Surviving the Witch-Hunt is collection of artifacts and commentary from 2007 to the present and catalogues the community forces that emerged after the City of Portland removed its controversial Prostitution Free Zones (PFZ). These zones had allowed the police to issue exclusion orders for those who had been arrested for sex work, even if they had never been charged.

The Second Trial

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a scourge that affects families in every country and at every social class. Between twenty-five and fifty percent of women worldwide will be a victim of IPV at some point in thier lives, and forty to seventy percent of female murder victims are killed by an intimate partner. These statistics are shocking, but what is too often left out of the discussion about IPV is the way violence can affect so many lives.