15 Social Justice Course Programs

This 4-week programme is designed to inspire participants to become global citizens. It presents insights into South African history, politics, culture, social justice, and social entrepreneurship. The program connects the past to the present, discussing opportunities and challenges of transformation facing the country, the African continent, and the world today.

Masterclass in Social Protection: We are observing a renewed appreciation of social protection: the recent pandemic once again reminded us that rights-based social protection systems, are powerful socio-economic stabilizers and engines of development. The essential remerging questions in the current debate around the future of social protection systems go back to reflections on different forms of protection, adaptive strategies coordinating social protection with other public policies, diversity of schemes and their design, and sustainable solutions to finance these systems.

The Peace, Conflict, and Social Justice Studies concentration reflects Bryn Mawr’s and Haverford’s interest in the study of conflicts, peacemaking, and social justice as well as related issues of human rights. Through this program students can explore these phenomena through courses in the social sciences, such as anthropology, economics, education, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology, that are built around such foci, as well as through courses in the humanities and natural sciences through which issues of peace, conflict, social justice, and/or human rights can be highlighted and traced.

Critical Theory and Social Justice (CTSJ) is the only undergraduate academic department of its kind in the U.S. Since 2006, the CTSJ major has graduated students with rigorous training in critical theory and transformative political practice. At the heart of the program is an interrogation of intersecting structures of power. Our three pillars of inquiry are interdisciplinary thought, intersectional analysis, and critical interventions. The department emphasizes the necessary relationship between critical thought and political action. Majors will learn ethical tools to effectively work within formal structures of politics and grassroots activism, and employ creative and inventive approaches to seemingly intractable problems. Majors will learn the functions and processes of formal political institutions, as well as radically transformative modes of resistance, which precede and exceed oppression. As students advance through the major, they will study in academic disciplines as diverse as psychology, political science, decolonial theory, critical race theory, Black studies, Indigenous studies, feminist theory, queer theory, biopolitics, post-modern political theory, and gender and sexuality studies.

The religion and justice minor examines religion as a human category that cuts across global space and historical time. Whether examining, for example, the radical call for justice in the Jewish prophetic tradition, the spiritual quietism of the Sufi mystical tradition, the call for holy war in later Christianity, the traditions of non-violence in Buddhism, or even American secular religion, this minor allows students to explore how religion continues to influence and be influenced by political, social, economic, legal, artistic, and cultural frameworks. Focused especially on the ways in which religion can support as well as stand in tension with the aims of social justice, especially in a global context, the minor allows students to add an additional lens to any major.

Black women activists and organizers first coined the term "reproductive justice" in the summer of 1994 while organizing to expand the scope of the Clinton administration's Health Security Act. As a critical theoretical framework, reproductive justice moves beyond the abortion "choice" debates, encompassing a wide range of issues impacting the reproductive lives of marginalized people, including but not limited to the right to have children, not have children, parent the children one has, access safe contraception.

Community and justice services professionals often work with clients who find themselves at a crossroads. They work within the justice system – focusing on keeping people out of it through prevention, intervention and rehabilitation. Help build stronger, safer communities by helping people at risk gain the skills and support they need to make positive life choices.

The Program in Poverty, Justice and Human Capabilities (PJHC) provides students with a multifaceted understanding of human well-being. and enriches their understandings of poverty and inequality in the US and internationally. The minor encourages its students to build lifelong commitments to supporting the well-being of all people and to become leaders in solving local and global problems.

The Civil War Era Studies program provides a comprehensive exploration of the period encompassing the American Civil War (1861-1865) and its aftermath, delving into its military, social, intellectual, and political dimensions. Through interdisciplinary study, students gain a deep understanding of the complexities and legacies of this pivotal moment in American history.

Young activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez has written that "the youth of the world are continuing to rise to power and shape our culture." In this course, we will examine texts written by youth, and youth action and activism primarily in the contemporary US, as forms of enacting such power and shaping.

In the wake of Obama's historic presidency, the American media triumphantly declared that we are living in post-racial times. But is race dead? Are we color-blind? If so, how do we explain the resurgence of white supremacy during and after the Trump presidency? Utilizing an interdisciplinary amalgam of Ethnic Studies, Critical Race Theory, Media Studies, US Third World Feminism, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Philosophy, and Post-Colonial Theory, this course will investigate how "race" continues to shape American society in the post-civil rights era.

Daily Life in Palestine: a HALF COURSE engaging essays, history, ethnography and film: This experimental half-course will focus on accounts of community life in Gaza and the West Bank, engaging work about specific communities and individuals at specific moments in time with an alertness to materiality, memory, affect, and the politics of representation. We will also reflect together on the effects of different kinds of narratives.

In Cruising Utopia, Jose Munoz describes the possibility for queerness through the opening oneself up to the "perception of queerness as manifestation in and of ecstatic time." Ecstasy allows for us to see the paradoxes in pleasure, giving space to the contradictions, nuances, and differences, and in that, opening up what is meant in thinking with the future and potentiality.

Almost all political theory, despite extreme variations across cultures and time, seeks to justify submission to authority. By contrast, anarchism explicitly rejects forms of domination claimed to be central to so-called civilization, especially the State, capitalism, and religion, expanding in recent decades to include patriarchy, racism, coloniality, sexual and gender hierarchies, eurocentricism, technology, aesthetic norms, and western epistemological methods.

According to a famous and revealing anecdote, antisemitism means "hating the Jews more than necessary." Why hate them at all? Among the most perplexing things about antisemitism is its persistence. It has flourished for over two millennia in a wide variety of settings. Three-quarters of a century after the end of World War II, despite the rise of modern multiculturalism, it seems to be on the rise again. One-third of Jewish college students report having experienced antisemitism in the past year.