Equity, Diversity and Social Justice.

Catalog description

Semester course; 3 lecture hours (delivered online, face-to-face or hybrid). 3 credits. This course is designed to increase students’ awareness, knowledge and critical skills related to diversity, equity and social justice (health, economic, housing, education, etc.) in research and practice. The interdisciplinary approach to diversity and equity will cover the intersections of disability, race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, age, poverty and other social statuses and will draw on interdisciplinary research across multiple fields. The topics of this course include developing a framework for engaging diversity, equity and social justice in research and advancing human rights and social justice. Students will explore the knowledge base that underlies skills needed to work toward justice, including types and sources of power, multiple social locations, social constructions, social processes, social identities, conflicts, and how all these interact. Students will explore the nature of diversity and power relations and how social norms shape individual identity. A major emphasis is on developing skills in critical contextual thinking, research and analyses, and in praxis, learning to use knowledge and theory to recognize and critique underlying assumptions and paradigms, and inform working for change. Multiple kinds of boundaries are especially important — across groups, between organizations and system levels, and within and between people, related to intersecting social locations.