SOCO students get proximate
January 13, 2025
Raising the justice quotient requires getting proximate to people and places.
So says Bryan Stevenson, acclaimed public interest attorney, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and recent guest of the Institute for Social Concerns. Proximity, Stevenson believes, creates awareness of structures of injustice and empowers people to work for the common good. This spring, undergraduate students will have the opportunity to experience that two-fold gift through the newly developed one-credit S/U seminars called Proximities.
Guided by instructors from the Institute, Proximities will ask students to briefly but intensely engage with a question of justice in a specific time and place. This year, these questions involve healthcare in Minneapolis, Minnesota; restorative justice in Los Angeles, California; environmental health in New Orleans, Louisiana; and justice at the border in Tucson, Arizona. The opportunities are free of cost, interdisciplinary in nature, and include students from all class years. They also count toward a number of University minors.
In Minneapolis, students will have the opportunity to get proximate to determinants of public health, such as housing, poverty, and substance abuse. They will also hear from organizations working in Indigenous health, and learn why the Twin Cities are home to one of the largest urban Native American populations in the United States.
The Los Angeles participants will engage with community organizations and local artists, including a visit to the re-opening of the Corita Art Center, where they can learn about justice activist Sr. Mary Corita and the artwork of peace. “The arts are an incredibly powerful tool for justice, because they provide an entry point into difficult conversations,” said Postdoctoral Research Scholar Geneva Hutchison, who will travel with the Los Angeles students. “The arts also give us insight into worldviews that we may not be able to see or understand otherwise.”
In New Orleans, students will examine the structure of environmental racism, listen to stories from environmental activists, hear from faith leaders about their justice work, visit communities in Cancer Alley, and observe the impact of policy on addressing environmental injustice.
The Tucson participants will observe legal proceedings, attend a humanitarian aid training, tour a border patrol facility, listen to stories from migrant families, visit the border wall and a border community, hear from Catholic and other faith leaders about their justice work, and participate in a humanitarian desert trip. “As a daughter of Mexican immigrants, I have a personal connection to this area of study,” said Jaimie Lopez-Alvarez, a senior minoring in Latino Studies and a student in the Tucson Proximities course. “Taking a course that would grant me the opportunity to personally hear from migrant families would be invaluable to further deepening my understanding of the resilience and sacrifices made by these individuals.”
All Proximities participants will gather as a whole before and after the immersive experiences, offering students the chance to build connections beforehand and to hear afterward how their peers are integrating what they saw, heard, and felt. Participants will also engage with the same three core readings. These readings act as a spine, holding and connecting the disparate questions and locations. This year’s readings include Hannah Arendt’s conception of natality, Simone Weil’s Catholic reading of rootedness, and Stevenson’s exhortation of proximity as both a ticket and method for practicing these concepts.
Students were quick to register for Proximities, and each section’s waitlist swiftly filled as well. What attracted students to the opportunities was the chance to hear firsthand from individuals.
“I’m looking forward to connecting what I have learned to the lived realities of the families I hope to serve in the future as a medical professional,” said Lopez-Alvarez. “This will be a great way to end my last semester at Notre Dame.”
