Welcome to Gender Equality and Social Justice at Nipissing University

Do you want to make the world a more just and better place? Are you passionate about issues like human rights violations, sexism, racism, homophobia, and poverty? Would you like to understand these issues better? Then the Gender Equality and Social Justice (GESJ) program is for you.

GESJ is an interdisciplinary program with courses in the areas of Culture and Criticism, Power and Inequality, and Human Rights and Social Justice. We ask how race, class, colonialism, ability, sex, and gender intersect in everyday acts of power, oppression, activism, and resistance.

This program will provide you with highly transferrable skills in critical thinking, research, writing, argumentation, analysis, and communication.

As one of few programs of its kind in Canada, the GESJ program will teach you to think critically about who has the power in the world, and why, as well as how to resist, shape, and change power for social justice. This program is highly interdisciplinary with close links to Social Welfare and Social Development, Religions and Cultures, Political Science, and Philosophy, and is designed for those with interests in critical studies of popular culture; the politics of resisting inequality through the law; globalization and human rights; violent conflict and international justice; transnational organizing for social justice; histories of colonization; feminist philosophies; postmodernism; theories of justice; and the intersections of race, class, ability, sex and gender.

Students of the GESJ Department will receive a broad liberal education in Humanities and Social Sciences. Through a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, you will examine the social and cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, race and class, and how these social categories relate to our knowledge, experience, relationships and the quality of our lives.