Justice Studies
The undergraduate minor in Justice Studies (JUST) offers students the opportunity to integrate social sciences, humanities, and law in the empirical and theoretical study of legal, political, and economic systems of justice. The Justice Studies curriculum is designed to equip students with a comprehensive but contextualized understanding of justice and injustice from diverse perspectives, including taking seriously the importance of race, class, gender, sexuality, ecology, and indigeneity in struggles over the meaning and delivery of justice and injustice. This entails a consideration of how precarious populations in local and global contexts often articulate claims to justice that challenge a status quo. To study the politics of justice is to study the sociopolitical forces, structures of power, cultural rhetorics, and historical roots of conflict, harm, and inequality while contextualizing the role of social movements, grassroots organizing, and legal tactics and strategies for struggling for a more just world.
Program Overview
The Justice Studies interdisciplinary program (IDP) integrates social sciences, liberal arts, and law into a transformative, self-guided curriculum, offering a comprehensive but contextualized understandings of justice and injustice. Our curriculum aims to empower students to engage meaningfully with the challenges of justice in a highly complex and stratified world. What is justice? Who gets to define justice in any given society? How is justice, and injustice, defined in context? How do conceptions of justice change based on time and space, history and geography? These are just a few of the questions that animate Justice Studies curriculum. By drawing from multiple disciplines, Justice Studies provides a holistic view of justice systems, laws, policies, and the social forces behind structures of power and injustice. Students will explore the empirical and theoretical study of conflict, inequality, and harm, while contextualizing the role of social movements and grassroots efforts, including within Knoxville and the Appalachian Region. The program also houses the Appalachian Justice Research Center’s (AJRC) community justice research lab (AJRL 460 & AJRL 461) where students collaborate with local and regional organizations on participatory justice research. There are also internship and independent study opportunities.
Justice Studies welcomes all students, including those from underserved communities.
Why Justice Studies?
Justice Studies faculty ensure that our students are theoretically knowledgeable but also equipped with practical problem-solving skills for diverse career paths and engaged citizenship in a highly stratified world.
Our program is the home for the curriculum offerings of the Appalachian Justice Research Center (AJRC), including its community justice research Lab that offers students the amazing opportunity to work in close partnership with community organizations to help solve real-world social problems through participatory justice research. We offer several other culminating experience options for students to demonstrate their expertise in justice scholarship such as internships, independent studies, and collaborative projects with select faculty.
From start to finish, our program emphasizes strong theoretical foundations combined with hands-on learning meant to empower students with a well-rounded perspective for grappling with the complexities and challenges of justice. Here at Justice Studies we welcome all, especially indigenous, Black, LGBQT+, poor and underserved students, and anyone else who seeks to take seriously the call for justice. Join us!
Careers
Justice Studies prepares students for careers in a variety of professional fields, including non-profit organizations, grassroot institutions, think tank and policy fields, media and journalism, higher education, government, and law.
Featured Courses
JUST 300
Foundations in Justice Studies
In this course we survey the amazing interdisciplinary terrain of justice. What is justice? What does its study demand? What are its conditions, possibilities, and limits? What is Justice Studies and what specifically could and should it mean in our region of the world? Here, we introduce key concepts and methods in the study of law, justice, and community. We bring into focus the conceptual foundations, theoretical debates, historic movements, and contemporary issues surrounding the meanings of justice. And we do so in relation to community collaborative work in the diversity that is Appalachia with its connections to national and global issues.
JUST 400
Special Topics in Justice Studies
This course will offer rotating special topics in the area of Justice Studies whose content and instructors will vary. Potential course topics will draw from the wealth of scholarly expertise in the UT system to cover a range of classical and emergent forms of justice: restorative justice, reproductive justice, disability justice, economic justice, indigenous justice, racial justice, transformative justice, youth justice, housing justice, science and justice, philosophies of justice, digital justice, energy justice, design justice, environmental and land justice, and more!
JUST 455 / SOCI 455
Law & Society
At the intersections of justice are foundational relationships between law and society. The study of law and society is a look at law from the outside in: As the singular social institution which carries the force of violence and the protection of rights, what makes the law law? What is its structural role in society? How are laws and legal processes shaping and shaped by political forces, inequalities, and social change? How is social change impacted by laws (but often not in the way we might imagine)? How is law (always) present in our everyday lives? How – and to what extent – does social science and empirical research inform law and legal policy? How does law want us to think? Why do lawyers think the way they do? How is the profession transforming in the current moment? Got questions like these? This course is for you. Writing-emphasis course. Satisfies Volunteer Core Requirement: (SS) (WC)
JUST 460 & 461 (Undergraduate)
LAW 860 & 861 (Graduate)
Appalachian Justice Research Lecture and Lab
The Appalachian Justice Research Lab (AJRL) is an interdisciplinary laboratory space designed to conduct and disseminate research that supports the needs and priorities of marginalized communities in Appalachia. Working under the supervision of multi-disciplinary faculty and in collaboration with community partners, students from multiple disciplines will conduct research and produce work products appropriate to projects housed within The University of Tennessee’s Appalachian Justice Research Center. This is the centerpiece of the Justice Studies curriculum with limited student placements by application only targeted to current community research projects, running in spring semesters each year.
Complementary Minor
The JUST Minor is intended as additional study for undergraduate students who are concurrently enrolled in a degree program at the University of Tennessee. Students will select their courses from a menu of curated courses from a variety of different departments and programs. Degree programs that might pair well with the JUST Minor are Africana Studies, Anthropology, English, Geography and Sustainability, Global Studies, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Religious Studies, Sociology (and Criminology), Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and many more.
