MAS150B2

This course focuses on issues of social difference, identity, and social status as these are reflected in scholarship about social justice, and applied to social justice issues in the local, national, and international stages. The course has two distinct foci: 1) Learning about the historical and structural foundations that have led to social injustice in the United States over time, and 2) Learn about how communities and movements have organized against these injustices to help move society forward.

Students will develop their analytic writing by crafting a five-page analysis paper and through weekly discussion board posts reflecting on course material. In doing so, students will develop informed opinions about social and economic inequalities and movement for social justice that exist locally and across the world.

Students will explore scholarship that addresses youth, race and ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, policing and mass incarceration, immigration and social justice. We will begin the course by defining what we mean by social justice and related concepts such as racism, anti-racism, morality, activism, dignity, and solidarity. The class will then focus on current interdisciplinary approaches that emphasize the use of ethnography, oral history, and other social science methodologies to understand how local experiences relate to larger social phenomena. Cases will focus primarily on issues in the United States, and immigration to the United States, but we will also engage scholarship pertaining to related issues in other countries in order to benefit from a global perspective. Through case studies we will consider: 1) How youth and other marginalized people experience and impact structural and cultural conditions relating to globalization and neoliberalism, 2) Diverse techniques employed by activists for achieving social justice, including 3) Techniques employed by immigrants to achieve social justice regardless of immigration status. We will also juxtapose these case studies with popular representations of youth, immigrants and other marginalized communities in order to understand the role that gender, race, age, religion, class and other factors play into multiple layers of \"Othering\" in how youth and immigrants are (mis)represented in the mass media, by politicians and in academic scholarship.