Added in the fall semester to the more than 100 minors offered at Elizabethtown College was the Transformative Justice minor, an interdisciplinary program focused on the analysis of systemic disparities and marginalization of racial and other societal minorities.
“We wanted it to be more than just learning content,” Associate Professor of Education and minor advisor for Transformative Justice Dr. Shannon Haley-Mize said. “We wanted it to get students to think about how they move in the world, how they show up in the world, and how the world is shaping them.”
With the introduction of the new minor came two new courses to go with it—TJ200: Foundations of Global White Supremacy and Dehumanization and TJ300: Emergent Strategy and Social Change Movements.
“The first one, which is on white supremacy and global colonization, is taking sort of a global lens to look at the historical ways that we’ve set up our societies to be oppressive,” Haley-Mize said. “The emergent strategy class is all about what can we do about all of these problems that we talked about in the first class.”
TJ200 and TJ300 also can count towards core requirements as a Nonwestern Cultural Heritage course and a Humanities course, respectively. The first TJ200 class held last semester had 30 students enrolled in it.
The creation of the TJ minor came about over the past two years as Haley-Mize, other faculty and students sought to bring back an academic discipline they thought was missing from the College’s catalog after the Peace and Conflict Studies minor was axed. That minor was eliminated in 2019 due to budget constraints and low student enrollment.
“We wanted to resurrect it but to do something a little bit different and sort of retool it to be more modern and engage with more contemporary topics,” Haley-Mize said. “I think there was a lot of concern when the Peace and Conflict Studies minor was eliminated because that really is part of the heritage of the College.”
The minor has three tracks, Generalist, Race Issues and Global Issues, depending on which specialty within the TJ curriculum students taking the minor want to focus on. The electives required for these tracts range from criminal justice courses to religion and sociology courses. The electives under the Race and Global tracks are also included within the Generalist track.
“The race track is more focused on the classes that we have on campus that deal specifically with racial issues, so that’s for students who want to complete the minor who have more of an interest in racial inequity specifically in the United States,” Haley-Mize said. “Generalist is broad, and the third one, the global track, is for students who are really more interested in thinking about systems, oppression, privilege, white supremacy from that global lens.”
Although most of the students that have expressed interest in the TJ minor have been criminal justice or political science majors, Haley-Mize says that the minor should be seen as something students in any discipline should enroll in.
“From my perspective the topics that we discuss and the TJ classes and across the minor are really applicable to all humans,” Haley-Mize said. “So, there are some majors that it fits like a natural fit, like CJ for example, but I also believe that really any major should be thinking about how systems operate within their lives.”
So far five students have declared the TJ minor. The first person graduating with the minor will be this May. TJ200 is being offered in the coming fall semester.
“Hopefully it will get some traction, and we’ll get some more people actually declaring the minor,” Haley-Mize said. “But even if they don’t want to do the minor, they can take one or both of the classes.”
