Topic: Racial Justice

Catalog description

Recent years have witnessed the global proliferation of new grassroots movements for racial justice including the global rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Idle No More in Canada, Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa, and the CARICOM campaign seeking reparations for slavery in the Caribbean. This course will explore the internal dynamics of various movements for racial justice—as well as the external conditions to which they are responding—by charting the complex interconnections between the concepts of “race,” “peace,” and “justice.” While focusing primarily on the fraught racial dynamics of the United States, the course will situate domestic struggles for racial justice within the Peace and Justice Studies discipline, with attention to a broader international context and consider how efforts to build peace and justice in other locations around the world grapple with important similarities and key differences as a result of their own context-specific legacies of racism and colonialism. The class will begin (and end) by engaging with trauma-informed approaches to transforming racial violence that link personal and societal transformation and healing.