The Department of Exercise & Sport Studies is transforming our research and teaching focus to highlight the social, cultural, and political foundations of health justice. We are an interdisciplinary social science department and our mission is to provide innovative, research-based knowledge about health that is expansive and critical. We center a social model of care, going beyond solely the medical; and move away from medicalizing individual bodies as the problem. Instead, we focus on systemic inequality as the social problem to be solved.

 

We are developing exciting new courses that meet this new focus. In the meantime, we continue to also offer established ESS courses. For a full course list, please visit the Courses tab on our website.

 

 

Mission

The goal of Health Justice & Community (HJC) is to provide a rigorous, foundational education that will enable students to not only understand the way that health is constructed in relation to power but also to seek different ways of knowing and engaging justice. HJC is grounded in the following three principles of health justice:

 

1. The healing of individuals is contingent on the healing of social ills.

2. Forms of health care that ration care based on demonstrations of deservingness and normative values are harmful.

3. Collective care based on mutual social relations must center the most vulnerable and precarious.

 

HJC offers interdisciplinary and experiential courses that generate innovative knowledge about health justice by centering knowledge produced by those who are most impacted. The department is committed to maintaining a student-centered approach to undergraduate education that continuously blends theory and praxis. Hands-on research, internships, and independent studies that allow students real world engagement, training, and collaboration are a core part of the HJC experience.