Bridging Gaps: Social Justice Studies at the University of Victoria

Abstract

‘We all want to change the world,’ wrote John Lennon in the 1960s, and since 2009 the University of Victoria has offered an undergraduate program for people with the same aspiration. In September of that year, UVic launched Social Justice Studies (SJS), the first Canadian program of its kind west of Saskatchewan. Within SJS at UVic, issues pertaining to law and criminal justice are set within a wide-angle view of justice and injustice. The program focuses both on the conditions that create and perpetuate kinds of inequality and oppression – class, environmental, racial, gender, sexual, among others – and on the social and movements, policies and visions that point, however tentatively, to a just world. (The program’s website is at http://web.uvic.ca/socialjustice/). In this essay, I reflect on the origins and development of the program, its pedagogical aspirations and design, and the challenges it has faced in its first five formative years.