PUBM 5200 Diversity and Social Justice in Workplace

Course Description

This course will introduce, invite, and support you to engage in embodied diversity and social justice leadership praxis. The vision for this course is to foster trauma-informed, healing centered public service that compassionately centers the margins. My teaching philosophy is committed to Seattle University's mission to educating the whole person, to professional formation, and to empowering leaders to co-create a just and humane world that intentionally centers the margins.

This course will offer you foundational and emergent multi-disciplinary frameworks for building and sustaining individual and organizational change for diversity and social justice. One of the main premises of this course is that 'trauma is pervasive and social justice at its core is healing justice'. To heal from trauma of domination and oppression that may manifest as any of the "isms" (such as racism, sexism, heterosexism, trans*oppression, classism, ageism, ableism, casteism, and religious oppression), our classrooms and organizations must resist oppression and intentionally create space for collective healing. In doing the work of fostering diversity and social justice, we need to follow the leadership of those most impacted by systemic harms and inequities.

Through our time together, I hope to offer you foundational theories, ideas, frameworks, and core concepts of diversity and social justice. Some of the key diversity, social justice and equity frameworks that we will explore in this course include-examining and healing from white body supremacy culture, cycle of socialization, cycle of

liberation, building liberatory consciousness, operationalizing equity 2.0 or targeted universalism approach, restorative and transformative justice and disability justice frameworks. I will offer organizational scenarios and sometimes case studies to consider as we process and begin to explore operationalization of these theoretical frameworks. Through discussion boards, class discussions, race-based caucusing, and your final paper, you will be invited to apply and integrate these frameworks in your own organizational contexts, team contexts, and day-to­ day work and way of being such that is meaningful for your own and collective path of diversity and social justice.