Social Justice and Community Studies (SJCS)

Students are introduced to social justice perspectives on social inequality, power relations, and resistance. Students examine theoretical concepts of power relations and topics that challenge dominant notions about society. The biases and assumptions that inform the study of power relations across gender, race, class, sexuality, Indigeneity, ability and citizenship are also considered.

Students examine social justice perspectives on Canadian society and state policies past and present. Possible questions include: What does it mean to be Canadian? What are the encounters involved in how the Canadian nation and identity come to be?

Students examine the significance, dynamics, and strategies of critical participation and awareness in community organizing efforts. Students are introduced to analytical perspectives, practical principles, and examples in social justice organizing at the local, national, and global levels.

Students critically examine the history, social production, and ongoing impacts of race, racism and colonialism.

Students use interdisciplinary, intersectional, and critical approaches to explore the socio-historical construction, practices, policing, and power of white racial privilege, and white supremacy. Students also consider potential solutions to these problems.

Students critically examine living histories of, and resistance and alternatives to, capitalism as a political and economic system centred in private ownership and profit accumulation, the exploitation of labour and other “resources,” and intersections with empire, colonialism, and slavery.

Students examine key theoretical texts and empirical studies on the construction, policing, and regulation of the Other institutionally, individually, and systemically. Topics include eugenics and temperance movements, prison regulation, racial profiling, policing of Indigenous and Black communities, and the casting out of Muslims from Western law and politics.

Students are introduced to the interdisciplinary study of the city, and urban social relations and communities, with particular attention paid to how these are shaped through unequal power relations, and in historically specific ways.

Students study the basic science of climate change, learn the history of climate activism, connect environmental harm and capitalism, and reflect on what this means for our near future. The focus of the course is on Black and Indigenous disproportionate community impacts, land care, and resistance to the “resourcification” of the earth.

Students examine corporate and state crime and social harm, the principal factors in the definition and commission of such crimes, and the ways in which governments and legal systems respond to the problems.

Students explore different forms of servitude at the intersections of imperialism, racialization, globalization, labour, and citizenship. Students analyze a combination of texts that largely focus on Canadian contexts, but also include texts set in other countries. Possible topics could include chattel slavery, indentured labour, and migrant labour.

Students critically examine the historical and social frameworks for Canadian approaches to multiculturalism, and then put into practice what they learned by working with a community organization.

Students examine and analyze how the social construction of femininity, masculinity and non-binary gender intersect with other dimensions of identity and power to shape law.

identification of a faculty thesis advisor

Students examine the history and contemporary forms of settler colonialism, with a particular focus on contemporary Indigenous-Settler relations.

Student critically examine practical applications of concepts, theories, methods, and strategies of social justice organizing at the transnational level. This advanced course brings forth social justice organizing at the macro and micro levels while exploring the tensions and negotiations of organizing efforts, including through student work with a community organization.

Students develop the concept of intersectionality in relation to how structures of power and domination − patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism − are interconnected and interacting. Students are instructed how to engage responsibly with intersectionality as a paradigm, an analytic tool, and a theoretical framework.