UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

Amidst calls for racial and social justice heard from disenfranchised communities across the Global South and Global North, this course focuses on global justice from diverse cultural perspectives and brings together critiques and innovative solutions that do not derive from the Global North and/or Euro-American history. The course employs an expansive epistemological approach to focus on the theme of justice in its many facets, including racial, gender, social, economic, climate/environmental, global, spatial, criminal/retributive, restorative/reparative, distributive, poetic, natural, and divine. The course integrates a global transdisciplinary framework with the explicit and pronounced de-centering of Euro-American knowledge in favour of amplifying voices and experiences from Majority World contexts. It therefore centers specifically (if not exclusively) on Global South and Black, Indigenous and People of Color's critiques of the global political economy from the standpoints of those at the "margins". With that, it engages students in a detailed confrontation of the sometimes searing Global South critiques of 'development' as an imperialist and racist idea alongside highlighting critical, postcolonial, and/or radical theoretical concepts such as racial capitalism, alternate conceptions of gender, pluriversality (as contrasted with the binary of universality versus cultural relativism), third world approaches to international law, calls for decoloniality and antiracism, and more. Through the course, students will focus on innovative ways of thinking about and doing justice, inclusion, and development work as an intersectional 'insider' to the economically, socially, or politically excluded community of affinity or choice. The course therefore draws stark contrast with most scholarship on 'culture' and social justice 'innovation' that concerns itself with preparing outsiders to go into marginal 'other' communities to do socially transformative work.