[2] Dignity restoration is a remedy that seeks to provide dispossessed individuals and communities with material compensation through processes that affirm their humanity and reinforce their agency.
[1] Since then, many scholars across disciplines have applied these socio-legal concepts to an array of case studies in various time periods and geographic locations, providing a transnational, historicized approach to understanding involuntary property loss and its material and non-material consequences.
[4] Though Loyalists were deprived of their property alongside acts of dehumanization and infantilization, Hulsebosch found that it was not a dignity taking because their stigmatized identity was a choice, rather than an immutable characteristic.
[1] Political scientist Craig Albert analyzed whether the treatment of Iraqi Kurds under both the Islamic State (ISIS) and Saddam Hussein's Baath regime constituted a dignity taking.
[8] Polish legal scholars Ewa Kozerska and Piotr Stec argue that Communist Poland's mining and construction battalions are another example of dignity takings because wage theft accompanied dehumanizing treatment.
[9] Deemed unworthy of standard military training or uniforms, the battalions' soldiers were considered “class enemies,” e.g. landowners, economic elites, dissenters and their family members, and clerics.
[9] Legal scholars Kozerska and Stec also describe the nationalization of land, agricultural production, and other property in post war Communist Poland as a dignity taking.
[9] Legal scholar Eva Pils also writes about a communist nation—China—and how forced evictions intended to create space for China's rapidly expanding cities involved a dignity taking.
[10] Hence, the updated definition of a dignity taking is when a state directly or indirectly destroys or confiscates property rights from owners or occupiers, and the intentional or unintentional outcome is dehumanization or infantilization.
[13] Legal scholar Matthew Shaw studied the controversial 2013 closure of 49 public schools—which occurred primarily in Chicago's communities of color— and concluded it was a dignity taking.
[14] Legal scholar Thomas Joo has argued that the demolition of Sacramento's Japantown as part of the city's urban renewal program constituted a dignity taking.
[15] Urban renewal was a public program created in the 1940s and 50s that used eminent domain to transfer ownership of homes and businesses in blighted areas to private developers for redevelopment.
[16] Political Scientist Stephen Engel and English professor Thomas Lyle argue that the shuttering of gay bathhouses in New York at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a dignity taking.