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SJ - Social Justice (Concentration)

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Program Electives

Thematic Area Electives

Students concentrating in Social Justice must take at least one course from each of the following thematic areas:

  • Systems, Institutions, and Policies (SIP): Courses in this category explore the ways that structural power dynamics, political economy, and/or social policies produce and reproduce inequity.

  • Power, Positionality, and Responsibility (PPR): Courses in this category theorize and respond to the ways that social location positions people in relation to identity, power, and difference. Courses might explore how different identities and vectors of difference (including race, gender/sexuality, class, ability, religion, nationality, and others) are constituted and intersect.

  • Social Movements and Liberation (SML): Courses in this category engage with concrete cases of historical and contemporary struggles against social injustice, or with practices of social movements.

SIP

PPR

SML

ANTH-101

Becoming Human: An Introduction to Anthropology

*

ANTH-153

REL-153

Religion and Native America

*

*

ANTH-201

The Strange Familiar: Fundamentals of Cultural Anthropology

*

ANTH-206

Anthropology and Europe

*

ANTH-217

Language and Culture

*

ANTH-223

REL-223

Religion and the Spirit of Capitalism

*

ANTH-228

Medical Anthropology

*

ANTH-247-A

ENVS-303-A
Offered Spring 2027.

ST: Land, Water, Justice

*

*

ANTH-303

Religion and Gender in Global Context

*

ANTH-313

Communism, Socialism and the Environment

*

ANTH-318

Anthropology of Design

*

ANTH-320

Language and Nationalism

*

ANTH-321

Anthropology of the State

*

ANTH-349

Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of Cities

*

ANTH-358

Social Bodies, Diverse Identities: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender

*

ARTH-135

IRES-135

Architectures of Race

*

ARTH-210

Museums and the Politics of Display

*

ARTH-211

Monuments and Memorials

*

ARTH-351

Los Angeles: Art, Architecture, Cultural Geography

*

ARTH-353

Blackness and the Arts

*

ARTH-355

Indigenous Aesthetics: Native North American Art and Visual Culture

*

ARTH-357

Art and Architecture of Colonial India

*

ARTS-103

Foundations: Art and Public Engagement

*

ARTS-314

ENVS-314

Art and the Anthropocene

*

CS-215

MATH-215

Introduction to Data Science

*

ECON-205

An Introduction to Development Economics

*

ECON-258

Global Political Economy

*

ECON-345

Political Economy of Women

*

ECON-388

Labor Economics

*

ENGL-201

Shifting Grounds: Writing, Exile, and Migrancy

ENGL-231

Introduction to Shakespeare: Race, Nationality, and Power

*

ENGL-232

Introduction to Shakespeare: Work, Wealth, and Status

*

ENGL-245

Native American Literatures

*

ENGL-246

Introduction to African American Literature

*

ENGL-270

Special Topics in Underrepresented Literatures

*

ENGL-346

History in African American Narratives

*

ENGL-376

Studies in Colonial and Anti-Colonial Literature

*

ENGL-377

RWPD-380

Rhetorical Bodies

*

ENVS-353

SOC-353

Environmental Justice

*

*

course

The Monstrous Other: Race, Gender, and Colonialism in Horror Media

*

FMS-220

Identity, Gender, & Media

*

FMS-230

Science Fiction & Society

*

FMS-265

Understanding Media Industries

*

FMS-307

REL-307

Mediating Religions

*

FMS-315

Bad Objects: Popular Culture and Questions of Taste

*

FMS-330

Media, Politics, & Power

*

FMS-340

Globalization, Culture, & Media

*

FMS-345

The Middle East in Cinema & Media

*

FMS-350

Latinxs in U.S. Media

*

GERM-219

REL-219

Modern Jewish Thought

*

GLIT-230

GNDS-230

IRES-230

Unsettling Masculinities in French Fiction and Film

*

GNDS-100

Introduction to Gender Studies

*

GNDS-210

IRES-210

Problems with Privilege

*

GNDS-238

Men and Masculinities

*

GNDS-250

RWPD-250

Rhetoric, Gender, and Sexuality

*

GNDS-300-A

ST: Black Feminist Organizing

*

HISP-143

U.S. Latinx Literatures and Cultures: An Introduction

*

HISP-325

Translation: Healthcare and Language

*

HISP-326

Translation: Public Affairs, the Law and Language

*

HISP-425

Tropics of Disaster: Hispanic Speculative Fiction in the End of Times

*

*

HISP-426

Queer Latinidades: Gender and Sexuality in the Americas

*

HISP-427

Crossing Borders: Latin American Narratives of Migration

*

HISP-428

Spanglish: Discourses of Language and Cultural Identity in the United States

*

HISP-444

Decolonial Strategies in Latin(o) America

*

HISP-445

Theater for Social Change in Latin America: Theories and Practices

*

HISP-457

The Persistence of Memory: Cultural Representations of Argentina’s “Guerra Sucia”

*

HISP-458

Visual Voices/Voces visuales: Hispanic Graphic Narrative

*

HIST-105

Histories of North America, c. 1600-1890

*

HIST-106

Development of the United States (1877-Present)

*

HIST-110

East Asian History 1600 to the Present

*

HIST-112

Modern Africa

*

HIST-120

POL-120

History and Politics of Mexican Food

*

*

HIST-180

Antiqui-tea: Spilling the Ancient Mediterranean

*

HIST-183

Revolution and the Impact of Mass Culture: Modern Europe

*

HIST-188

Modern Latin America

*

HIST-206

European Environmental History to 1800

*

HIST-208

Latinx in the US: A History

*

*

HIST-211

The World Wars in Africa

*

HIST-217

Decolonization in Africa

*

HIST-225

Cleopatra: History & Myth

*

HIST-230

International Relations of the Middle East

*

HIST-235

The Arab Spring in Historical Context

*

HIST-254

The Social History of Stuff: Power, Technology, and Meaning in the United States from the Cotton Gin to the Internet

*

HIST-264

People Called Female: US Perspectives

*

HIST-265

Neighbors: The U.S. and Latin America in the 20th Century

*

HIST-267

Protest & Organizing: A History of U.S. Social Movements

*

*

HIST-268

Im/migration and US History: Population Flows, Experience, and Nation

*

HIST-275

Modern European Imperialism

*

HIST-280

The “Other” Greece & Rome

*

HIST-288

Reform or Revolution: Latin America in the Twentieth Century

*

HIST-314

Colonial Moment in Africa

*

HIST-319

Women in Africa

*

HIST-330

Hail Caesar? The Roman Revolution

*

HIST-348

Horseriders and Samurai: Comparisons in Early Modern East Asia

*

HIST-364

Sugar, Sex, & Slavery: The History of the Black Atlantic

*

HIST-366

The Americas, 1968-1999: Dictatorship, Neoliberalism & Solidarity

*

HIST-370

Histories of US Genders and Sexualities

*

IDSC-400-B
Offered Spring 2026.

ST: History, Art, Protest: Curating "To Make Us Free: Witnessing Activism at Whitman & Beyond"

*

IRES-105

Introduction to Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies

*

IRES-180

REL-180

James Baldwin’s America

*

IRES-220

Settler Colonialism & Native Resistance

*

IRES-225

Race, Class, Violence

*

IRES-305

Continental Philosophy, Postcolonial Theory, and the Palestinian Question

*

IRES-325

Afro-Pessimism and Its Critics

*

MUS-160

Study of Jazz

*

MUS-354

Women Composers: Musical Innovation and Social Critique

*

POL-109

Introduction to U.S. Politics and Policymaking

*

POL-110

Introduction to the Politics of Migration and Immigration

*

POL-114

Introduction to African Politics

*

POL-119

Whitman in the Global Food System

*

POL-122

Introduction to Modern European Political Theory

*

POL-124

Introduction to Politics and the Environment

*

POL-125

The Politics of Indigeneity

*

POL-147

International Politics

*

POL-228

Political Ecology

*

*

POL-250

Reproduction and the State

*

POL-254

Gender and Race in Law and Policy

*

POL-255

Gender, Race and the Environment

*

POL-311

Deservingness in U.S. Social Policy

*

POL-323

Debt, Law, and Politics

*

POL-325

Queer Politics and Policy

*

POL-328

Contemporary Feminist Theories

*

POL-330

Indigenous Feminisms in the Americas

*

POL-331

The Politics of International Hierarchy

*

POL-333

Feminist and Queer Legal Theory

*

POL-334

The U.S.-Mexico Border: Immigration, Development, and Globalization

*

POL-335

The Politics of the Body as Territory

*

POL-345

Indigenous Politics

*

POL-354

Topics in Jurisprudence: Time, Law, and Justice

*

POL-359

Gender and International Hierarchy

*

POL-362

ENVS-362

Food, Culture, and Politics

*

*

POL-363

What is Capitalism?

*

POL-365

Political Economy of Care/Work

*

POL-370

Power, Pipelines, and Dispossession

*

PSYC-218

Psychology of Poverty

*

PSYC-230

Social Psychology

*

PSYC-239

Psychology of Gender

*

PSYC-309

Science of Sexual Orientation

*

REL-205

American Islam

*

REL-220

Introduction to Christian Thought

*

REL-270

Race and Religion

*

REL-303

Religion and Gender in Global Context

*

REL-304

Muslim Bodies

*

REL-325

Religion and Politics in East Asia

*

REL-350

Missionaries and other Anthropologists

*

RWPD-175

Persuasion, Propaganda, and Power

*

RWPD-230

Introduction to Rhetoric & Public Culture

*

RWPD-255

Social Justice Movements

*

RWPD-260

Rhetoric and Sensation in Civic Life

*

RWPD-325

Rhetorics of Health and Medicine

*

RWPD-332

Coalition, Identity, and Difference in Social Movements

*

RWPD-342

Rhetoric and Capitalism: Exploitation, Precarity and Social Change

*

RWPD-353

The Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Struggle

*

RWPD-360

Variable Topics in the Rhetoric of Social Protest

*

RWPD-365

Rhetoric and Violence

*

SOC-117

Principles of Sociology

*

SOC-209

Sociology of Health and Illness

*

SOC-212

Political Sociology

*

SOC-220

Latin@s in the United States

*

SOC-257

Sociology of the Family

*

SOC-258

Gender and Society

*

SOC-259

Sociology of Crime and Delinquency

*

SOC-267

Race and Ethnic Group Relations

*

SOC-278

Social Movements and Social Change

*

SOC-279

Sociology of Education

*

SOC-329

Environmental Health

*

SOC-369

Social Stratification

*

*

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