The Inclusion Initiative: Social Justice and Racial Equity is a thematic programming opportunity in the College of Humanities & the Arts at SJSU. During the last few years, our country has been experiencing a racial reckoning starting with the murder of George Floyd. Issues of racial equality and social justice and exposure of inequality and injustice have been in our minds and will continue to do so. As a university, we owe it to our students to teach them ways of thinking through these issues and informing their lives. But we in the humanities and the arts have the rational and creative powers and the disciplinary tools to not simply admire each other’s works but to include in our circles what is perceived as “the other” and to value the multiplicity of colors, genders, shapes, beliefs, opinions and habits, as they all define our humanity.

Our college’s Inclusion Initiative: Social Justice and Racial Equity will be an exercise in releasing the artistic, creative and intellectual geniuses in our students to express their ideas and analyses of what inclusion means, to visualize life in an inclusive social environment and to create representations of such life, and to discover the multiple implications of social justice and racial equity.

Please note: If you revise or remix an assignment from any of these, please be sure to add a citation to your assignment in the same fashion that you would for any piece of scholarship. (See "Citational Practices" in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities)