Website: http://womens-studies.rutgers.edu

Chair: Mary Hawkesworth

Director of Undergraduate Studies: Carlos U. Decena

The social justice minor is designed to introduce students to the complexity of social justice issues, cultivate their capacity to identify key determinants of structural inequities, familiarize them with various social justice practices and strategies, and prepare them for advocacy and activism to address these pressing issues.

The social justice minor draws upon resources in multiple academic units, disciplines, and interdisciplinary programs to involve students in ongoing struggles to define and achieve social justice locally and globally. Through individual courses that incorporate service learning, as well as internships, study-abroad, and alternative spring break experiences, students are encouraged to recognize injustice and work to eradicate it. Among the manifold dimensions of injustice, the social justice minor pays particular attention to modes of exploitation, marginalization, structural and physical violence, and cultural imperialism that produce systems of advantage and disadvantage.

Students who complete the 18-credit program will learn to think analytically, integrate social justice theory and practice, identify structural constraints and trace their operation across social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental terrains, understand the effects of various social and economic policies on the scope and intensification of inequality, and grasp the complex interrelation of local and global justice issues.