Introducing the SoJust Blog
Welcome to the SoJust blog, where we highlight news, thoughts, and issues pertaining to the programs that comprise UFV’s new School of Social Justice and Global Stewardship!
SoJust is a place where students, scholars, activists, and communities collaborate to build a more just and equitable world. Together, we work, play, live, and learn on Stó:lō Téméxw, the bountiful, beautiful, and sacred homelands of the Stó:lō peoples who have stewarded these territories since time immemorial. We are inspired by and seek to centre Indigenous knowledges and the voices of minority and marginalized peoples in imagining and creating socially just and sustainable alternatives for social and environmental justice. As programs, faculty, staff, and students, we are committed to reconciliation and decolonization, peacebuilding, equality, plurality, and reciprocity, global citizenship, and community and planetary wellbeing.
Recently, many of us are experiencing a sense of permanent or even existential crisis. We are beset with and must confront multiple instabilities and precarities: the climate emergency, war, displacement, and migrations, pandemic illness, racism, sexism, terrorism, the ongoing colonization, subjugation, and extraction of the natural and human worlds, proliferating inequality and economic insecurity, and the general unsuitability and unsustainability of our systems. Our needs for distributive justice, restorative justice, gender justice, climate justice, human rights, the rights of nature, sustainability, democracy, and freedom are urgent, complex, and profound. Students and faculty in SoJust’s programs work to understand these issues, imagine alternatives, and work toward systemic change on these fronts.
As a school, SoJust is the institutional home of several academic programs. SoJust is comprised of the major and minor programs in Global Development Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies, along with programs in Diaspora Studies, Indo-Canadian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Migration and Citizenship. SoJust’s interdisciplinary framework enables us to explore and support intersections among our diverse programs, to develop and realize our intersections through lively, productive, and timely conversations, and to study, work – theoretically, experientially, and affectively – towards, and advocate, for transformative social change, whether in the classroom or in practica, community-engaged, and other forms of experiential learning.
In the coming months, we hope to establish a regular blogging presence, featuring work by Sojust students, faculty, staff, and guests. Be sure to bookmark our site and check back for future blogposts!