Spring 2024 Justice Education Courses
The Institute for Social Concerns offered the following courses during the spring 2024 semester. Click here to see the current semester’s courses.
Abled in a Disabled World: Creating Inclusive Communities
In this course, students gain a deeper understanding of their unconscious bias towards differently-abled people, and study theories of mindfulness, giving voice, empowerment, and existing public policies.
Students will work with a South Bend neighborhood to explore a structural challenge and, with the guidance of a local artist, respond to this challenge alongside community members in creating an artistic piece that serves the good of the neighborhood.
Brain Health: Community-Engaged Research
This course is designed for students who have completed BIOS 40202: Developmental Neuroscience and wish to deepen their community engaged research experience and expand their capstone work.
Dancing in the Street: Music and Social Change in the USA
Students explore American popular music in its many forms to understand its power and limits as both a force for social change and a window into major themes of the American experience.
The Discernment Seminar provides undergraduate students an opportunity to reflect on their undergraduate education and to explore their respective vocations as it relates to the common good.
The course introduces students to the cultural and utilitarian contexts of justice, and urges students to rethink issues of education, health, wage, economy, immigration, peace, environment, and spirituality, including the issue of justice itself.
This interdisciplinary research lab enlists students in the efforts of the Just Wage Initiative (JWI), a collaborative research and advocacy project of the Higgins Labor Program at the Institute for Social Concerns.
Mass Incarceration Research Lab
This research lab will employ an interdisciplinary approach to research on a range of issues related to mass incarceration.
Mind and Society: Cognitive Science and Justice
This course explores the interaction of thinking and action for justice, of cognitive science and social change. How might we examine the ideas with which we think as we envision social transformation and work toward solidarity and the common good?
NDBridge is a one-credit course and an eight-week immersive summer experience where students think hard about injustice, work with communities that face it, and consider their responsibility to the common good at Notre Dame and beyond.
This course will take place in a local neighborhood, where students will learn fundamental concepts and skills of community organizing alongside residents of South Bend. The culmination of the course will include participation in a public action with local officials addressing a pressing issue in our community.
As part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, this course involves inside students (people incarcerated at the Westville Correctional Facility) and outside students (people enrolled at Notre Dame, St. Mary’s, or Holy Cross) learning with and from one another and breaking new ground together.
This course invites students to consider how the stories of the struggle for racial justice in the U.S. shapes our imaginations for the work of racial justice today. The course centerpiece is a spring break trip to civil rights locations in the South.
Social Design: Initiatives, Challenges, and Innovation
This advanced course in visual communication design is for students to understand social advocacy within the local (South Bend) context. New risk areas and deep rooted inequities are explored each semester.
This one-credit course explores the principle and practice of solidarity in the context of U.S. cities. During spring break, students travel to a city to learn/work alongside partners engaging issues of particular importance in context.