Social Justice in Modern America: Understanding the Historical, Cultural, Economic and Legal Factors

Faculty Advisor: Professor of African, American and African Studies, Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan

Research Program Introduction

Looking at the Black Lives Matter era, does it feel like history repeats itself, or are we moving forward? To what extent should we look at modern America through the lens of slavery, legal issues, race, inequality, and social justice? What is “epistemic oppression” in modern America? 

Epistemology is the study of the nature and creation of knowledge, evidence, and justification. How should we talk about marginalized discourses in modern America? According to the philosopher Michel Foucault, “discourses” are ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity, and power relations inherent in such knowledge and relations between them. How are discourses on race, racism, ethnicity, gender, and power inscribed in social media? 

These are some of the questions we will attempt to address in this program. We will take a multimedia and interdisciplinary approach to a range of historical, cultural, economic, and social questions crucial to African American and American Studies, as well as to other fields in the humanities and social sciences. Using films, art, podcasts, documentaries, newspaper articles, short stories, and essays, the program will offer a historically grounded but also contemporary, intimate, personal, and artistic exploration of the modern American experience. 

Students will also learn general and subject-specific research and academic writing methods used in universities and scholarly publications. They will focus on individual topics and generate their own work products upon completing the program.

Possible Topics For Final Project:

• How do you analyze marginalized discourses produced in social media today? Here, we discuss Asian American Violence, Black Lives Matter, and other ongoing social injustices.

• How are discourses on race, racism, ethnicity, gender, and power inscribed in social media? 

• Modern America has many minorities in its prisons. How can we discuss how law works and what legal issues are at stake in some of these communities?

• How did the pandemic uncover social inequality? There is a class of people in America who suffered more from this pandemic because of a lack of resources. How do you read this social injustice?

• How do you understand discourses on gender and power in modern America? There is an innovative way of conceptualizing practices that effectively “silence” gender and how power suppresses some women’s voices within society.

• How do we discuss slavery in the US today? To discuss this topic, it is essential to be informed by the historical background of modern America and the legacy of slavery.

• Analyze issues of race, inequality, and social justice using texts such as James Baldwin's “Letter to My Nephew,” Amanda Gorman’s poem, and other visual material.

• Other professor-approved topics in this subject area that you are interested in

Program Goals

1. This activity aims to engage students in a discussion about the legacies of Slavery in recent literary and visual works in the US and to explore how these legacies may extend to other formulations of “blackness,” such as social injustice, Black Lives Matter, and different issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

2. To learn how to “break down” and deconstruct complicated images in the media and literature that represent problematic stereotypes of race, racism, and Ethnicity.

3. To question the epistemological problem of categorization and to extend it to other areas of their own academic inquiry.

4. To understand how legal issues are a significant problem that extends into everyday realities and that they aren’t simply a topic that should be dealt with in “ethnic studies,” but how race creeps into subjects that seem to be divorced from it.

Program Details

• Cohort size: 3 to 5 students

• Duration: 12 weeks

• Workload: Around 4 hours per week (including class and homework time)

• Target students: 9 to 12th graders interested in sociology, history, social justice, law, social media, American and African-American Studies, racial dynamics, comparative literature, and more.