Welcome to the Social Justice Syllabus Project
The goal of this website is to promote the ideal of the educated person as envisioned by the 19th century philosopher, John Stuart Mill. In his classic, On Liberty, he wrote that to be truly educated on an issue, students could not just hear about the arguments for various sides of an issue from their professors. Instead, a student had to hear the arguments for and against something from those who really believed in the point of view they were advocating. In this way, students would be exposed to the best arguments given in their most believable form, and so they would have to engage in true thinking when choosing to be for or against a certain issue.
The term social justice is one that has come to dominate the discourse on college campuses today. And many professions, like occupational therapy, which is the profession I am currently studying, have codes of ethics which require adherence to social justice. In college classrooms across the country, students are nearly invariably provided with the voices that support only one perspective in regards to social justice. The Social Justice Syllabus Project is designed to provide students with those voices that advocate a different perspective.
The term social justice is one of the most elastic in the English language. Its elasticity applies to what the term means, how the term is evaluated, and the subjects that could fall within its purview. This website is meant to serve as a resource for students looking for alternative materials that address the types of issues typically covered under the banner of social justice. You are invited to explore the various materials in each of the sections.
The Syllabuses section provides books and articles categorized by subjects such as Race, Globalization, Poverty, and Health Care. The Lexicon section provides examples of usage according to various themes, and the Articles section provides links to material available online. The Videos section includes both short segments and long lectures on disparate topics, and the section titled Political Filtering contains my book, The Practice of Political Filtering in Occupational Therapy. It is a book that examines the processes of knowledge acquisition in the field of occupational therapy. I hope you find the materials stimulating and I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section.
Contact: socialjusticesyllabus@yahoo.com
