What is the meaning of justice for global citizens, for individuals and groups within national boundaries? How can we best achieve it, especially in the context of modern democracy? What are the various forms of injustice in our contemporary society? How is inequality interconnected with race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality? With colonialism and nation building? With labor and production? In our food system and our relationship to the environment? How is the tension between justice and inequality manifest in the prisons and legal system? In our access to civil rights and civil liberties? In the lives of migrants and immigrants across the world? What are the historic legacies of inequality and oppression? How have they shaped societies and the lives of individuals? Why are we so often blind to injustice and oppression in our midst? Finally, as Babson students, what is our relationship to issues of justice and equality? How can we best work to address the injustices of our contemporary world?
This course is a sustained engagement with the institutional arrangements and practices that we are conditioned to accept as natural. From law to borders, race to poverty, we ask: Who benefits from the way things are — and at what cost? What do we owe to others and to the truth? We begin with the premise that many forms of inequality and injustice are not accidental, but generated and sustained by political, economic, and cultural forces that often go unquestioned. Our task is to make these forces legible — to draw ourselves a roadmap out of Plato’s cave. In that spirit, an overarching theme of the course is ideology: the assumptions we uncritically accept as natural or inevitable. Why are we so often blind to oppression in our midst? And what does that blindness enable? Through philosophy, poetry, reportage, drama, novels, and film, we will explore how power disguises itself as “common sense,” how ideology shapes our understanding of justice, and how injustice is rendered invisible or “ordinary.”