Reflection Project

The prompt

For this project, please make an argument about how your volunteer work and the work of your community organization contribute (or perhaps doesn’t contribute) to the cause of social justice more broadly. What defines social justice as an idea and as a form of activist practice, and how does your work with your organization fit (or fail to fit) within that bigger picture?

Your audience

To insure that your arguments are clear and fully developed, please imagine that your audience consists of folks who would be skeptical of them. For example, if you’re arguing that your work, though “charitable” in nature, ultimately contributes to radical social change, you might imagine that you’re writing to an audience that believes that charity always serves the status quo.

Etc.

Your paper ought to clock in at about 1,000 words. More is fine; less is likely too little to do justice to the question.

If you were unable this term to gather enough volunteer experience to feel confident writing your essay, then you may write about another volunteer experience.

Please bring three paper copies of a draft to class on Tuesday, March 12. Please also email copies to me and Catherine.

Your final draft is due on Tuesday, March 19.

Community Engagement and Social Justice, Part 2

This week, we are going to think further about how our work with community organizations fits into the bigger social justice picture.  So, please read the article, "Justice and Charity," which is posted on Blackboard, and come prepared with responses to the following questions:

1) What issue/s is the organization you are working with trying to address?  How does the organization define the issue?

2) How is the organization trying to address this issue?

3) How does this organization relate to other organizations trying to address the same issue within the area/country/etc.?

Community Engagement and Social Justice (part 1)

For the next couple of weeks, we are going to focus on your experiences at your community engagement sites and how those experiences connect with what we've been debating in class.  

This week, there will be time for each of you to share and process some of your experiences with the class.  Thus, please come prepared with thoughts on the following questions:

1.  What have you been doing?  What interactions have you had with either the people running the organization and/or the people who the organization serves?  (Think very concretely about this.  Have you been filing papers?  Folding clothes? Sending emails? Etc.)

2.  How have your experiences and interactions made you feel?  

3.  What sort of questions about social justice have come up for you in these experiences?  

Additionally, please read Ann Green's article, "Difficult Stories:  Service-Learning, Race, Class, and Whiteness," which you'll find on blackboard.  

The struggle continues

I thought that, this coming week, we might try a different format. Instead of a head-to-head debate, Groups 2 and 4 will each present a 10-minute response to the question below (based upon the readings), then take questions from the audience, and then the two teams will work together to synthesize both of their arguments as well as the new ideas generated by the questions and discussion.

The readings are Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and Cornel West’s “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” The question is this:

If we imagine the struggle for social justice today to be a continuation of the struggle undertaken during the 50s and 60s by what Dr. Vincent Harding called the Black-Led Southern Movement for the Expansion of Democracy, then how should we — as a social justice community on a college campus — bring that struggle to DU? What should our goals be? And how can we realize them? 

I encourage the teams to think big. As Dr. Harding pointed out, the struggle for social justice isn’t about merely reforming what’s wrong; it’s about creating a new world. Our agenda for DU should be likewise imaginative, ambitious, and transformative. So, as always, don't feel limited by the readings; instead, use them to generate ideas of your own.

Speaking of the readings: they're on Blackboard, in the Content folder.

As social justice activists, should we advocate that the US embrace an open door immigration policy?

Rally, Civic Center Park, Denver, CO.

With the end of the Cold War and the advent of a truly global market economy, the issue of immigration has become one of the most important ones confronting social justice activists. What responsibility do we have to the hungry, homeless stranger who arrives at our door, especially when her poverty is tied in complex ways to our prosperity? What are the ethical obligations of citizens of a wealthy country like to the U.S. to people driven by market forces and scarce resources to leave their country of origin to seek work here, whether they have the required documentation or not? 

One answer proposed by social justice activists is "the open door policy," which would open American citizenship to all who seek it. This idea has been criticized by, among others, social justice activists who contend that the potential negative economic consequences of an open door policy would fall primarily upon the domestic poor, i.e., upon those American citizens whose earning power would be devalued by a sudden influx of cheap labor. In John Rawls's terms, then, we face a conflict over which option is of "the greatest benefit to the least advantaged:" An open door policy would be a great benefit to the globally least advantaged, i.e., the immigrant poor, but, at least in the short term, that benefit would come at the expense of the locally least advantaged, i.e., the domestic poor.

In our third debate, we'll ask: As social justice activists, should we advocate that the US embrace an open door immigration policy?

Group 1 will take the "Yes" position; Group 3 will take the "No" position. To develop your arguments and counterarguments (and to be an engaged audience member), please read Stephen Macedo's "The Moral Dilemma of U.S. Immigration Policy: Open Boders vs. Social Justice" in (Debating Immigration, Carol M. Swain, ed.). Macedo makes a social justice argument against the open borders policy; you may also want to read "Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders," by Joseph H. Carens, which makes a social justice argument on behalf of open borders. In any case, Please note that your group need not limit its arguments to those found in the readings. You should craft your own arguments, drawing on the readings or inventing original arguments as the group sees fit. The important thing is that your arguments be clear, coherent, persuasive, and capable of holding up to criticism.

The Macedo reading is available online via Penrose. Click here, and then click the link that says "Access online. Individual login with EBL required." You'll then need to log in to Penrose (using your DU ID and passcode) and then to log in to EBL. If you already have an EBL account, log in with your EBL username and password. (If you've forgotten it, you can retrieve it.) If you don't have an EBL account, then create one by clicking on "Create new account." Once you get to the e-book, the simplest way to to find Macedo's chapter is by clicking "Read online" and then using the search bar at the top of the screen to go to page 63. 

Please note that rhere may be a limit on how many people can read Debating Immigration at one time, so try to stagger your readings among group members to avoid being unable to "check out" the book.

The Carens article is here.

Mural, El Centro Humanitario, California St. and Park Ave. West, Denver, CO.

Can justice co-exist with gender?

In our second debate, we'll ask: Can justice co-exist with gender?

The question comes by feminist philosopher Susan Moller Okun, who maintains that gender inequality is so deeply embedded in social structures that it infects the very idea of fairness and thus the theory and practice of justice. As Okun puts it:

[I]f principles of justice are to be adopted unanimously by representative human beings ignorant of their particular characteristics and positions in society, they must be persons whose psychological and moral development is in all essentials identical. This means the social factors influencing the differences presently found between the sexes — from female parenting to all the manifestations of female subordination and dependence — would have to be replaced by genderless institutions and customs. Only children who are equally mothered and fathered can develop fully the psychological and moral capacities that currently seem to be unevenly distributed between the sexes. Only when men participate equally in what have been principally women’s realms of meeting the daily material and psychological needs of those close to them, and when women participate equally in what have been principally men’s realms of larger scale production, government, and intellectual and artistic life, will members of both sexes  be able to develop a more complete human personality than has hitherto been possible. Whereas Rawls and most other philosophers have assumed that human psychology, rationality, moral development, and other capacities are completely represented by the males of the species, this assumption itself has now been exposed as part of the male-dominated ideology of our gendered society. (“Justice as Fairness: For Whom?” 107) 

Group 3 will argue that justice can exist in a gendered society. Group 4 will argue that justice can only exist in a genderless society.

I've put the Okun reading on Blackboard. Please note that your group need not limit its arguments to Okun's. You should craft your own arguments, drawing on Okun or inventing original arguments as the group sees fit. The important thing is that your arguments be clear, coherent, persuasive, and capable of holding up to criticism.

The Gender-Swapped Justice League

Our first debate!

Our first debate will take place next class. Groups 1 and 2 will do the debating. Group 3, Group 4, John, and Catherine will serve as audience. Here's the question:

Should the pursuit of social justice form part of the core mission of higher education? Why or why not?

Group 1 will argue YES. Group 2 will argue NO. Both groups will draw upon the assigned readings to help them marshall their arguments. Groups 3 and 4 will read the assigned texts carefully, too, so that they're prepared to ask engaged and thoughtful questions.

Speaking of the readings: they're on Blackboard, in the "Content" folder, inside which is another folder, labeled "Social Justice and Higher Ed."

Also, to see who's on what team, what the debate schedule is, and what format they'll take, click on the "Debate" tab.

Finally, please note that these debates are group projects whose success depends on you and your capacity to work together to take responsibility for class discussion. Debate Groups should get together well in advance to hammer out strategies, assign roles, etc., so that you're ready to hit the ground running once class starts.

Last year's Social Justice LLC debate teams.

Here's the syllabus!

SJUS 2020 Syllabus - Winter 2013