JUSTICE
EDUCATION

The Appalachia Seminar utilizes a Catholic Social Tradition (CST) framework to build skills around social analysis, critical thinking, and theological reflection. Students examine the relationship between solidarity and service and consider how the Common Good is expressed in local communities across the region. This course has a fee. Learn more about this course.

Content will include Catholic Social Teaching, cultural critique, narrative theology, spiritual practices, and the arts. Must be a sophomore, junior or senior to take this course.

The center is a small working farm and outdoor education center with three miles of nature trails, a restored native prairie, animal barns, rain gardens, an orchard and vegetable gardens. Students will stay in simple rooms in the retreat center building and have access to the kitchen, chapel, library, nature trails, outdoor stations of the cross and outdoor rosary walk. Prayer/liturgical opportunities will be available.

During the week students will work outside on environmental projects such as building a rain garden and assisting with native prairie restoration, as well as with the farm and animals. Students will also be guided in learning how to cook meals with homegrown foods. Daily seminar-style meetings complement the outdoor work and focus on readings from Laudato Si’, as well as Catholic and non-Catholic writers who reflect on the nature of creation and the unique role of humans in caring for it in today’s world. The course could be a valuable experience for those majoring in both technical and non-technical disciplines, as well as those interested in social concerns.

Students from all fields and disciplines are welcome to participate in the project teams that will address different dimensions of this problem. Questions animating the lab may include: If AI is helping exacerbate child sex trafficking are the ways to use it to stem child sex trafficking? How can Catholic Social Teaching give us new insight into how to address this exploitation? What role might policing and legal interventions play? How can we best address needs of survivors? Permission is required. 

Reflecting on the theory and practice of dialogue, this course develops interpersonal and small-group communication skills for engaging conflict, building community, representing vulnerable people in conversation, and facilitating discernment.

Whether performed by rank-and-file reformers or famous recording artists — from Frank Sinatra to Nina Simone to Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, and beyond — popular music has accompanied and sometimes fueled transformations in American politics, culture, and social life. In this course students will explore American popular music in its many forms — blues, country, jazz, folk, rock, punk, disco, hip hop, tejano, and more — to understand its power and limits as both a force for social change and a window into major themes of the American experience.

In this course, we will generate responses to these questions by examining the extent to which fossil fuels have shaped Catholic concepts of moral virtue, human dignity, and the common good in the modern world, as well as how Catholic moral and social teachings can inform a just transformation of energy systems. In recent years, scholars from multiple disciplines have argued that there is a two-way influence between the material properties of things, like coal and oil, and human values and cultural ways of life. These dynamics are the object of our study in this course. In addition to engaging with developments in history, we will also explore emerging models of non-carbon intensive human flourishing and the common good as well as the virtues and practices needed to sustain them. Throughout the course, each student will conduct a case study of one moral virtue or Catholic social principle both to examine how it has been “carbonized” and to develop an argument about whether or how it should be “decarbonized.” This course in energy and environmental studies engages with perspectives drawn from history, environmental/climate studies, ethics, theological studies, philosophy, and cultural anthropology. There are no required prerequisites.

In conversation with primary texts of the Catholic social tradition, the course material will consider a variety of thematic issues through an ethical lens, including education, health care, restorative justice, racial justice, power relations, environmental justice, and structural violence. This course satisfies the core course requirement for the Catholic Social Tradition Minor.

The goals of this course include:

– that students will emerge from the course with a deepened historical and thematic understanding of the Catholic social tradition, as well as insight into its significance for their own vocational journeys;

– that students develop the skill of correlating theological insight with other disciplinary perspectives in particular contexts of application;

– that students will thoroughly process and integrate their site experiences with the course readings and class sessions, particularly through the practice of keeping an Integration Notebook.

Students will also engage with experiential learning that is focused on problem-based goals and relevant applications in the area of poverty. This course will create an opportunity for students to learn practical approaches to data identification, collection, analysis and dissemination. It will include a lecture and seminar-based format where students are introduced to key concepts in research methods as well as hands-on opportunities to practice what they’ve learned in collaboration with community partnerships. At the end of this course, students will have the strategies, tools and confidence to handle complex data, to develop practical solutions to current challenges, and develop a clearer understanding of the varying ways knowledge can be created and accessed. The course will culminate in a group research project proposal.

In short, the meanings, values, strategies, and concepts that make up the environmental justice (EJ) framework have been driven by grassroots leaders and organizations with a transformative vision. This course in environmental humanities and social sciences examines this transformative approach to EJ as it has emerged in places as diverse as rural North Carolina, urban New York, Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” tropical forests around the world, and most recently transnational networks of grassroots leaders responding to climate change. Through interdisciplinary engagement with scholarship in environmental studies, religion, ethics, history, sociology, anthropology, and politics, as well as analysis of primary source documents, this course equips students to analyze the dynamic relationship between human cultures and environmental realities at local and global scales. In particular, it equips students to answer questions such as: To what extent has the EJ movement been shaped by religion and culture? How do transformative approaches to EJ differ from other approaches? How do diverse concepts of the sacred, nature, and justice factor into contemporary debates about environmental and climate action? What moral and political resources do EJ communities draw on to sustain their commitments? What commitments inform students’ personal approach to EJ issues?

Through academic and experiential learning, we gain a deeper understanding of the public and private programs and institutions that address poverty on the local, national, and global level. We also gain a deeper understanding of what has worked and what hasn’t in domestic and international efforts to reduce poverty. Finally, students consider how they are called to address poverty in their personal and professional lives, exploring individual actions and careers that align with their skills and interests related to poverty.

The course will also introduce students to research and evidence linking robust moral purpose to positive health outcomes and higher levels of happiness. But more significantly, it will provide a space for students to begin discerning their own moral purpose beyond the predictable false binaries of money or happiness or success or community. It will also challenge students to consider how they might support the common good across their lifetimes in whatever profession or community they find themselves a part of. Through lectures, discussions, exercises, experiments and short essays this course is where students will come to understand that living a just life is an all-day, every day pursuit.  It is a way of life, it is not what you do but who you are or can be. Being good means doing good. Students must be part of the Institute for Social Concerns McNeill Justice Fellows program to take this course.

Students will also undertake research projects connecting their own intellectual interests and disciplinary expertise to the JWI’s foundational question: What makes any given wage just or unjust? In addition, students will collaborate with the instructor and local, national, and international practitioners to envision and execute collaborative research and advocacy campaigns to promote a just wage economy. Extended weekly class sessions will feature visits by scholars and activists, as well as facilitate interactive group discussions and collaborative experiments.

Students will be able to design projects (exploring moral, normative, and/or empirical etc. dimensions of incarceration) which connect their own academic and intellectual interests to emerging research questions at the Institute for Social Concerns. This research lab is open to students in all disciplines.

We will examine how assumptions about knowledge and our theories of mind impact our communication and work, and explore means to overcome conflict through engagement, reciprocity, and reparation. We will explore, in seminar format, means to promote intellectual humility, ethical imagination, practical wisdom, and commitment to action. Students will be encouraged to learn through experience and community engagement, and apply the lessons of the course in their own journeys. This fall, the course will have a particular focus on restorative justice: students will be given the opportunity to participate in and co-lead restorative circles that honor each participant’s voice and story. After the first week, we will travel to Indiana University’s Civil Rights Heritage Center in South Bend for class each week.

Students will have the opportunity to meet experienced writers and advocates who write for social change. We will seek inspiration and insight through community-engaged and campus speakers and events that will prompt us to complicate and elevate our understanding of why poverty exists and what we can do now and throughout our lives to make change. Introduction to Poverty Studies or an equivalent course is desired but not required.

As part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, the course involves inside students (people incarcerated at the Westville Correctional Facility in Westville, IN) and outside students (people enrolled at Notre Dame, St. Marys, or Holy Cross) learning with and from one another and breaking new ground together. Most weeks of the semester, outside students will travel to Westville for class sessions with the inside students. All students are responsible for the same reading and writing assignments, and participate together in class activities and discussions. Together, we will examine myths and realities related to crime and to punishment, explore the effects of current criminal legal policies, and develop ideas for responding more effectively to harm and violence in our communities. This is an Inside-Out course taught at Westville prison. Classes take place off-campus. Transportation is provided. Application required.

Topics may include close-up looks at a wide range of ideas—family, sport, education, history, etc.—but the ultimate goal is to describe real-world truth at the “felt-life level,” revealing something of what it means to be alive in this particular time and place. We wish to highlight the daily lives, cultural events, natural and built spaces, and social issues of South Bend.

Projects are collaborative, with students working in teams. With guidance, you will look for stories, request access and permission to tell those stories, and gather material en route to crafting meaningful narratives. Each group will produce several different stories, though subjects and forms will often converse with one another. For instance, storytelling teams may create short documentaries, works of prose journalism, photo essays, audio narratives, creative nonfiction essays, or more avant-garde documentary projects, etc. We will interrogate the boundaries between subgenres of the factual artforms. Students will decide which types of stories they will produce.

Telling others’ stories is a profoundly ethical act. It is also a creative process that allows us to grow as individuals and as a community. This challenging process demands your respect and your time as a media-maker. The class will regularly engage in discussions about media ethics and accountability, in the traditions of journalism and documentary filmmaking courses. You must be prepared to use resources to travel beyond campus and engage with people who are not students and may not be affiliated with the university. Additionally, you must act ethically as a storyteller and collaborator. Further, you must solve a range of challenges—conceptual, logistical, and narratological—while being prepared to spend time with your subjects outside of class time and often according to others’ schedules.

Students will be invited to examine the course materials in conversation with the mission of the Congregation of Holy Cross through immersion at each of the campuses and encounters with professionals whose work impacts sustainability.

We then turn to the question of what scientists and engineers owe their creations, which we address through engaging with the classic literary work, Frankenstein. Finally we will look into the relationship between technology and economy through the lens of community. We will ask how we actually create meaningful change and what systems are at play. We will read the work of technology ethicists and economists as well as moral theologians. Technologies and economies work together and against each other to create community; we will explore how to create and promote a just future.