Once you train your eye to look, it is not hard to find that the world is rife with injustices both great and small. One goal of this course is to prompt students to identify moments of systemic injustice, placing individual incidents within their larger social contexts, and to see them in places that may previously have gone unacknowledged. These can be structures of power that create inequities that you notice, race, ethnicity, or gender (or, ideally, an intersection) -motivated bias you see embedded in laws and policies, everyday cultural discourse you hear that contributes to exclusion, or something else. Not only is an understanding of systemic injustice at the core of what you need to be successful in this class, and so worth practicing, being able to identify these systemic power issues requires a skill called “systems thinking” highly sought after from college graduates in nearly every field. And it’s a critical step toward disrupting those harmful systems to create a more just world. TASK: Write in a “diary” recording instances of systemic injustice you witness in your day-to-day life, your studies, or in the global news. You should describe the phenomenon you witnessed or read about as well as any additional research you did to understand what was happening, then analyze it according to the course concepts we are discussing. What impact does it have? How did you distinguish this as systemic injustice? What categories of identity were in play? What contextual or historical information do you need to understand this incident with the appropriate depth and complexity? What would need to change for this wrong to be righted on a systemic level? Be sure to focus on impact of the phenomenon you chose (rather than the personal intent of the participants or a change in personal beliefs). If you’re not sure where to start, you can always start backward from a big concept to a local example. I’d recommend considering the phenomena mentioned in our modules as inspiration. For example, if you learn something new about US immigration policies or problems in ethnographic studies, you can look for an effect of that phenomenon within your daily experience (maybe your neighbor immigrated to the US and encountered difficulties, maybe there’s a recent ethnographic study you encountered in your studies that is flawed in a critical way) or in the global news (where are refugee crises happening in the world, what prompted them, what policies have other governments implemented, etc.). Not only will you chose your best entry to expand and share with the class, but this assignment will also serve as an extended brainstorming activity for your upcoming group podcast assignment, so you’ll want to choose examples you feel strongly about, and that are complex enough for further inquiry should you choose. TO DO THIS ASSIGNMENT WELL, YOU WILL NEED TO: 1- Identify a possible example. Be sure you’re prepared to claim it’s an illustration of a systemic injustice. 2- Consider its context (i.e. do the people involved have a history of oppression as part of their group identity, is this an isolated incident or part of a pattern, etc.) 3- Do some background research to ensure you understand that context 4- Apply course concepts about systemic injustice to this incident and analyze it according to those concepts Test your analysis—what would need to change to solve the problem? Can you point to what systemic change would need to happen? You’ll get better at this each week as you learn more, and you’ll see more and more examples the further we get into the material. Be patient with yourself. Jot down ideas throughout the day then return to them later to consider which you’ll select for the week. A major part of this assignment is that early thinking stage in which you’re considering what qualifies, before you even write a word. You’re training your mind to think and experience the world in these terms through regularly practicing this kind of analysis.
