SEJ 202 Social and Environmental Justice: Theory and Practice
Social justice is a type of justice rooted in the idea that everyone should have equal rights, opportunity, and treatment. This course allows students to critically analyze social care and justice and explore its applications to various service and user groups to enhance their capacity to act as a force for progressive social change. Through a series of lectures, problem-based learning activities, engaging discussions, and creative research, students acquire knowledge and skills that help them to facilitate representation at the personal, organizational, and political levels of society. The knowledge and skills they gain also help them promote the concept of relationality in all aspects of social care to advance social inclusion, social justice, and equality. Students explore a range of topics that include the values of recognition, respect in all social care domains and in society generally, redistributive and social justice, redressing unequal relations, care for oneself and others, inequality, domination, collective empowerment, and resistance, among others. Students develop an understanding of the theoretical, social, and historical underpinnings of various equity and social justice issues and analyze strategies for bringing about positive social change in their societies.
Learning Outcomes
Review, analyze, present, interpret, evaluate, and critique various arguments, fallacies, biases, assumptions, and concepts related to social justice or the study of issues related to social justice.
Express information, arguments, theses, and analyses accurately and clearly in both written and oral forms regarding issues related to social justice to both specialist and non-specialist audiences.
Identify problems associated with contentious social phenomena in relation to politics and economics (e.g., the “interlocking” nature of poverty, violence, racism, sexism, colonization, disability, religious persecution, environmental degradation and other forms of oppression), and present theoretical and practical solutions for the identified problems in innovative, integrative, analytical and ethical ways.
Evaluate the nature and consequences of past, present, and potential social injustices and develop strategies to overcome and prevent them.
Demonstrate skills in qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and building a bibliography, standard scholarly practices, and standard conventions of style for academic writing.
Design research and collaborate in a fruitful and congenial manner with their peers, reflecting on their biases and the limits of their knowledge.
Compare and contrast various Western and Islamic social justice theories, methodological approaches to social justice, and their resulting forms of knowledge.
Identify, distinguish, and explain methods, ways, and channels in which knowledge about social justice issues is disseminated and circulated within mainstream public discourse.
Assess the mediating impact of ideology, culture, and power on institutions, and evaluate and interpret data concerning relationships between social institutions and social inequality, the role of consciousness as a transformative tool, and related issues.
Examine personal motivations and how they affect one’s active citizenship.