What is social justice? 30 students and researchers from the University and the university of Maryland tried to answer this very question in a bi-national seminar, held on campus. Their conclusion: the term is so subjective that in some cases it might split the very groups it should unify.
Whether if in the streets of New York or throughout Israel, protest movements have demanded social justice time and time again all over the world in the recent years. But do the meaning of the concept and the actual outcomes from demanding it correlate? According to Dr. Roni Strier from the School of Social Work, who initiated the seminar, part of these movements’ failure to make a change lies in their lack of understanding of what social justice really means: “Social justice has become an umbrella term under which all sorts of groups try to promote different, and sometimes contrasting, agendas. What actually happened on the streets during the social protests was that those who stood together and called for social justice didn’t always know what they, or the ones standing next to them, were really demanding”.
