The world we inhabit is quickly becoming a highly diversified city planet.

So proclaims Timothy Garton Ash in Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, after he points out that roughly one in every 30 people will move to a new country of residence in their lifetime.

Garton Ash suggests that the current wave of mass migration—the most significant movement of people in recorded human history—means that most of us are destined to work, play, and live in densely populated enclaves where we will “routinely rub shoulders with men and women from every country, culture, faith, and ethnicity. Step into the metro, tube, U-Bahn or subway; all of humankind is there.”

Photo by sergio souza on Unsplash

There is no escaping our city planet. Even when we are not physically bumping up against difference, social media transforms our cell phones and computer screens into a global village.

On our city planet, more people will encounter more human difference than ever before. Successful academic and social encounters in this evolving world require constant engagement with people whose core beliefs differ from our own.

It is of paramount importance that we equip our students with strategies to effectively negotiate the inevitable conflicts that emerge from sharing spaces and resources with people who hold different values and perspectives. We must provide our students with the tools to transform their conflicting viewpoints into wellsprings of mutually beneficial and innovative solutions or risk leaving them to a life of conflict and social avoidance that will wreak havoc on political institutions, local communities, and their careers.

Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo’s revisioning of social justice education provides some guidance for the creation of a thriving and innovative city planet that produces a secure existence without eliding difference. In Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, they offer a compelling case for shifting away from a conceptualization of social justice education that emphasizes the pursuit of “fairness” and “equality.”

Sensoy and DiAngelo propose that educators take a “critical” turn and make social groups the primary unit of analysis as they consider strategies for countering prejudice, discrimination, and oppression. They argue that a “critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognize that society is stratified (i.e., divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.”

The authors’ focus on social groups contains a tremendous amount of merit. Social groupings inform our frame of reference and the values that guide our thoughts and actions. A critical social justice approach implores us to rethink the notion that we are autonomous individuals immune from social messaging and unimpacted by our social group membership. For Sensoy and DiAngelo, our failure to critically investigate the "social" leaves us ill-prepared to understand and respond to structural and social group-based injustices.

Alex Pentland’s work on social physics, the study of how the flow of ideas and information translates into behavioral change, offers additional support for Sensoy and DiAngelo’s recommendations for adjusting how we educate for social justice.

In Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter, Pentland argues that one of the significant flaws of many studies of human behavior is the assumption that we are “simply self-interested, self-commanded individuals.” To the contrary, social norms and interactions with other humans are the primary determiners of what causes we support and what actions we take.

Pentland’s numerous studies reveal that a better understanding of social networks and how they legitimize and transmit ideas will help us make better, more productive, and more creative decisions.

The Social+Justice Innovation Institute (S+JII) seeks to better serve students by focusing on social networks. We agree with Sensoy, DiAngelo, and Pentland that our critical times require an understanding of social justice that considers the “social” a separate and distinct unit of analysis.

Doing so requires an exploration of social injustice that places a much greater emphasis on the role social networks play in both sustaining and ameliorating oppressive systems. Putting social networks under constant and vigorous interrogation to assess who has access, when ideas are included, and how power is used will make our communities more just. Additionally, it will lay the foundation for innovative solutions to our most vexing social problems.

Preparing students to thrive on our densely populated and culturally diverse city planet requires a better understanding of social networks and social justice education.

Ed Lee III, EdD
Curriculum Director & Lead Facilitator
Social+Justice Innovation Institute

References

Garton Ash, T. (2016). Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Pentland, A. (2015). Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter. London, England, UK: Penguin Publishing Group.

Sensoy, Ö., & DiAngelo, R. (2017). Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.