Social Justice Coursework

Reflection on the Social Justice Coursework in the MA in Human Rights and Social Justice Program

The social justice coursework within the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice program offered a profoundly different, yet complementary, intellectual formation from the human rights stream. Whereas the human rights curriculum trained me to analyze legal frameworks, historical trajectories, and institutional responsibilities, the social justice coursework demanded that I confront the structural forces of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and neoliberalism. These courses asked not only what rights are, but why injustice persists, who benefits from it, and what forms of resistance are possible. They required a different kind of engagement: one grounded in critical theory, relational accountability, and a willingness to interrogate the systems in which we are all embedded.

Social Justice as Structural Critique: Capitalism, Neoliberalism, and Inequality

My work in States, Violence, Revolutions, and the Emergence of Global Capitalism and Risk, Place and Social Justice sharpened my understanding of social justice as a structural project. Through research on Argentina’s neoliberal transitions and on Nepal’s migration crisis, I came to see how economic systems produce vulnerability, stratify populations, and normalize inequality.

In my essay on neoliberalism and capitalism’s impact on Indigenous peoples, I examined how these systems commodify land, labour, and culture; how they generate harmful stereotypes; and how they produce material and bodily harm through policing, incarceration, and dispossession. This analysis made clear that social justice cannot be pursued without confronting the economic ideologies that shape public policy and social life. Neoliberalism’s insistence on individual responsibility, market supremacy, and austerity is not merely an economic doctrine, but a worldview that undermines collective wellbeing and erodes the social fabric.

Similarly, my research on Nepal’s outmigration crisis revealed how global capitalism creates structural dependencies such as remittance economies, brain drain, and rural depopulation. These are not simply economic trends; they are social justice issues that expose the uneven distribution of risk, opportunity, and precarity.

Colonialism, Land, and the Politics of Storytelling

The social justice coursework also required me to confront the ongoing realities of settler colonialism. In Indigenous Ways of Knowing and in my research on the reserve system in British Columbia, I examined how colonial land policies, the doctrine of terra nullius, and the frontier myth continue to shape Indigenous–state relations. These courses and projects emphasized that social justice is inseparable from land justice, and that colonial narratives, whether in textbooks, tourism, or political rhetoric, continue to legitimize dispossession.

My work on the commodification of Indigeneity, particularly the appropriation of symbols such as the Inukshuk, revealed how cultural theft operates as a form of soft power that reinforces colonial hierarchies. Social justice, in this context, requires not only material restitution but epistemological repair: challenging the stories that have been told about Indigenous peoples and amplifying the stories they tell about themselves.

Violence, Memory, and the Social Life of Trauma

While the human rights coursework examined trauma through legal and political frameworks, the social justice coursework approached trauma as a social, cultural, and gendered phenomenon. In Trauma, Rights and Justice, my research on communal grief in Newfoundland, Nicaragua, Bosnia, and Ukraine revealed how war restructures social life and places disproportionate burdens on women. Social justice demanded that I look beyond individual suffering to the collective, intergenerational, and structural dimensions of trauma.

This work illuminated how communities absorb violence, how gendered labour sustains social cohesion, and how memory becomes a site of both pain and resistance. Social justice, in this sense, is not only about addressing harm but about understanding how harm circulates through social systems and how communities mobilize to survive it.

Representation, Media, and the Politics of Visibility

In Art, Media and Dissent, I explored how representation functions as a site of struggle. Through my humanitarian photography project and my analysis of Alanis Obomsawin’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, I came to understand representation not simply as visibility but as responsibility. Social justice requires asking: Who is represented? Who is erased? Who has the authority to tell a story? And who bears the consequences of misrepresentation?

My artist statement and curated photo series forced me to confront my own positionality as a photographer, and how images can either reinforce or challenge systems of exclusion. This course made clear that dissent is not only expressed through protest or policy critique; it is also enacted through creative practice, ethical storytelling, and the refusal to reproduce harmful narratives.

Risk, Place, and the Uneven Distribution of Harm

Risk, Place and Social Justice deepened my understanding of how risk is socially produced. My research on Nepal’s migration crisis demonstrated how political instability, natural disasters, and economic precarity intersect to create uneven landscapes of vulnerability. The course taught me to identify the gaps in missing data, flawed policies, and planning oversights that reveal whose lives are valued and whose are rendered expendable.

This course made explicit what the social justice curriculum as a whole reinforced: that inequality is not accidental. It is produced through decisions, systems, and narratives that privilege some while exposing others to harm.

Social Justice in Practice: Field Experience in Nepal

The field school in Nepal provided a lived encounter with the social justice issues I had studied theoretically. Working with NGOs focused on disability rights, women’s empowerment, youth mobilization, and rural development revealed how social justice work unfolds in contexts shaped by poverty, political instability, and global economic pressures.

These organizations were not merely filling gaps left by the state; they were actively resisting the structural forces of neoliberalism, patriarchy, caste hierarchies, and migration pressures – issues that shape everyday life. The practicum made clear that social justice is not an abstract ideal but a daily practice of solidarity, advocacy, and community engagement.

A Distinctive Social Justice Formation

Where the human rights coursework taught me to understand rights within legal and institutional frameworks, the social justice coursework taught me to interrogate the systems that make rights violations possible in the first place. It taught me that social justice is not only about reforming institutions but about transforming the conditions that shape human experience.

Finally, it taught me that social justice is a collective, relational, and ongoing practice, and one that requires humility, courage, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. It is work that extends far beyond the classroom, and work I feel prepared to continue because of the depth, rigor, and ethical grounding this program provided.