ACADEMIC RESOURCES

The intent of the seminar is to aid scholars in developing skills, knowledge, and concepts relevant to becoming social justice leaders in their field. To this end, the seminar will:

• Connect Scholars to relevant faculty, alumni and community and institutional leaders
• Promote intellectual engagement among all scholars and faculty from across the school, as well as community-based representatives
• Promote the development of critical consciousness and awareness of the issues of social justice in the scholar’s chosen fields
• Develop possible action strategies using a critical framework

The United States incarcerates people at a higher rate than any other country. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, people with disabilities, and queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people are disproportionately exposed to the carceral continuum of policing, surveillance, arrest, and incarceration. U.S. history includes numerous examples of abolitionist resistance to the carceral state, from the slave uprisings to the Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971, to the Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality movements. This course draws from multiple disciplines including history, sociology, and law to explore and understand the phenomenon of mass incarceration, the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), and abolitionist thought and movements in the United States. In this course we will critically reflect on the political, economic, and social antecedents of mass incarceration, as well as the pervasiveness of the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States. We will also assess alternatives to punishment and incarceration as means of pursuing justice.

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a pervasive global problem, with recent studies suggesting that rates of GBV are increasing. GBV represents a broad constellation of interpersonal harms that are typically understood as rooted in patriarchal forces, although they can happen to individuals of all genders. This class will focus on five types of GBV: sexual violence, intimate partner violence, violence against children, economic violence, and state violence. We will read academic, personal, organizational, and governmental articles, as well as engage with mixed media like videos. After orienteering ourselves with theory, each student will pick a population on which to focus during the semester about which they will develop a portfolio of knowledge. Population choices may be based on age, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, geography, or any other identity. Students are encouraged to think domestically or globally depending on their own interests. This course will take an active-learning approach, every other class will be individual and small group work where students delve deeper into how violence manifests in their population and work with a group to design cross-cutting solutions. The course is open to NPL, MSSP, and MSW students; students across disciplines will work together to find clinical, organizational, and political solutions to GBV.

Climate change has emerged as a defining societal challenge. Economics and data can be powerful tools for analyzing climate change: for understanding how it is caused, who is hurt by it, and how policy solutions may be designed to mitigate it. Exploring the market and non-market forces that drive economic opportunity and inequality, and how these forces could interact with climate change may be important for policymakers and practitioners given the breadth of climate impacts and the wide-ranging implications of energy policy. This course provides an introduction to applied economic scholarship on climate change, with an emphasis on studies and perspectives that use “big” data and empirical analyses that permit valid causal inference, which is the science of disentangling cause and effect using real-world data. We will explore the market failures that give rise to climate change; emerging evidence on its effects on human health, economic productivity, crime, and wellbeing broadly construed; and the forces that may influence whether and how societies will adapt to a changing climate.

So You Want to Change the World? Taught by Ben Jealous—civil rights leader, tech investor, and 2018 candidate for Governor of Maryland—and Dr. Ariel Schwartz, Managing Director of Penn’s Center for Social Impact Strategy, this class invites students to pick their One Big Thing and explore multiple paths for making real social change. The semester will be split into four sections. In the introductory section, students will find ways to translate personal passion for social change into a clearly articulated goal and explore what it means to lead with heart. The next three sections will dive into different ways to solve big problems in our communities, our country, and the world: social impact tech start-ups, running for office, and leading an issue campaign. Occasional guest lectures by master practitioners will help us concretize what we are learning. Students will cultivate their own vision and approach to leading social change. Student involvement will include co-leading at least one discussion section and writing four short essays—one articulating your “One Big Thing” (impact goal) and three reflections on the approaches we explore. The final assignment will be an oral presentation for solving the challenge you have identified. The course will feature lively discussion and interactive ways of grappling with solving tough social problems. This class will be challenging, fun, and likely very different from your other courses.

This course will explore the context of contemporary schooling in the U.S. with special attention to how African American youth, teachers, and leaders experience educational inequality. Through this course, students will have the opportunity to examine education policies that (re)produce, sustain and exacerbate a particular form of harm for Black people. Further students will critically interrogate the relationship between education policies, housing policies, and criminal justice and how they shape the enduring conditions of Black life. This course foregrounds settler colonialism and antiblackness as logics that structure the social world generally, and the educational enterprise, specifically. As an interdisciplinary theory course, our readings will draw from neighboring fields such as Black studies, political science, and Black geographies, students will explore concepts like “social death,” “afterlife of slavery,” and “Black place making” to understand how anti-black racism reinforces subjugation and dehumanization across the educational enterprise. Students will also consider how Black people cultivate joy against a backdrop of suffering and whether policy interventions and institutional change might be a site of possibility to reduce harm. To that end, we explore ideas of abolition and its potential to re-imagine a new world. Students enrolled in this seminar will have the opportunity to engage with scholarly texts, podcasts, and films.