From Local to Global Justice: Responses to Structural Inequities

SBS 524 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

The COVID-19 pandemic, alongside other recent crises, has exposed and intensified long-standing structural inequities across health, education, and social systems. These disruptions reaffirm the need for analytically grounded, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive approaches, as well as the tools to design, implement, and evaluate effective interventions.

In SBS 524: From Local to Global Justice: Responses to Structural Inequities, students examine social change strategies aimed at addressing systemic injustice, with a particular focus on health. The course critically evaluates a range of interventions, from community organizing and social movements to institutional reform and policy at local, national, and global levels.

SBS 524 challenges students to move beyond the language of equity and justice to analyze what meaningful social change entails in practice. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and comparative case studies, students develop frameworks to analyze interventions and consider their role in advancing more equitable systems.