George Mason University

This concentration is designed to prepare students with the knowledge and competencies necessary for vocations or further study related to social, political, and economic equality; human rights education, advocacy, and law; and domestic and global justice. Students examine local, societal, and global issues through both a human rights lens, focusing on the fundamental rights of human beings and how they are secured or denied, and a social justice lens, focusing on societal inequalities and how they are sustained or alleviated. By doing so they develop nuanced understandings of the relationships between individual experience in a local context and global systems of privilege and oppression. These understandings are applied to the study of a variety of forms of exploitation ranging from racism, sexism, and heterosexism to environmental degradation and animal abuse; violations of fundamental human rights such as human trafficking and denial of access to education; and the theory and practice behind movements fomented in response. Graduates are well prepared for local or international work in legal, non-profit, educational, and community change organizations and governmental agencies.