Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching & Service

While Georgetown students were on spring break, about 150 high school students and teachers from 26 local schools came to campus March 8 and 9 for the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium for the greater Washington metropolitan area. The symposium was coordinated by Andria Wisler, PhD, executive director of the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service and associate teaching professor in the program on justice and peace, and G. William Rebeck, PhD, professor of neuroscience.

On February 23, 2018, the Center for Social Justice hosted Jad Melki, Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the Lebanese American University, who spoke to Georgetown students and faculty about how ISIS crafted their communication strategy to advance their cause. Jad Melki is an award-winning journalist, who has worked with both U.S. and Arab media for over 15 years. During the talk, he shared his first-hand experiences and analysis of ISIS’s propaganda campaign and its effects.

A world free from sexual assault and harassment begins with conversations in middle school and high school, human rights activist Marissa Alexander proposed during her keynote address at the “Are You Ready” program. Hosted by Health Education Services, the Women’s Center and the Center for Social Justice as a part of Social Justice Week, the annual event was designed to address interpersonal violence through a social justice lens, according to the event’s invitation.

The university’s Center for Social Justice launched the program in 1997 in response to Congress’s passing of the America Reads Challenge Act, a law intended to improve literacy in elementary schools across the country and engage college students in volunteer and federal work-study programs, that same year. Local chapters on college campuses formed in response.