THE INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL CONCERNS

The Institute for Social Concerns is the University of Notre Dame’s scholarly home for interdisciplinary responses to questions of justice. Committed to the normative proposition that a just world is a beautiful world, we engage the most urgent signs of the times through justice education, research for the common good, and collaborations with community.

JUSTICE
EDUCATION

Our approach to justice education develops students’ moral imagination, practical wisdom, and courage to act through academically rigorous coursework, immersive experiences, and critical reflection grounded in Catholic social tradition.

RESEARCH FOR
THE COMMON GOOD

Our approach to research focuses on the world’s most pressing social concerns and develops innovative, interdisciplinary, scholarly approaches to understand and address them.

COLLABORATIONS
WITH COMMUNITY

Our approach to community incubates democratic collaborations between community members and Notre Dame faculty, staff, and students that catalyze evidence-based sustainable interventions to local challenges.

INSTITUTE STORIES

Maya Tello speaking at Research for the Common Good symposium

Celebrating undergraduate summer research

Through the NDBridge program, Maya Tello spent eight weeks at Dismas Farm in Oakham, Massachusetts, researching how programs for returning citizens such as theirs could be replicated across the United States. Maya was one of six research award recipients from among the 283 students who participated in the institute’s programs last summer.

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Postbaccalaureate fellows research reentry

Wonu Fasasi and Hayden Kirwan teach three-hour workshops in the St. Joseph County Jail called Jails to Jobs, conduct mock interviews at the South Bend Community Re-entry Center to assist returning citizens, and research to develop a digital literacy curriculum for a course they will teach at the reentry center.

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Suzanne Mulligan reflects on ‘Dilexi Te’

According to Suzanne Mulligan, co-director of the Catholic Social Tradition minor, it is critical that in Dilexi te Pope Leo dismisses arguments that the poor “are such because they do not ‘deserve’ otherwise, as maintained by that specious view of meritocracy that sees only the successful as ‘deserving.’”

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