HJS 310 Comparative Perspectives on Justice

3 hours 

This course studies justice in the non-Western world as it is variously represented in historical, literary and philosophical texts. The course builds analytical skills and extends its coverage across geographical boundaries to the Mideast, Asia, Africa and the Americas. By studying how social, political, and religious institutions shape understandings of justice and injustice, and how these concepts define race, gender, ethnicity and class, the course focuses on articulations and practices of justice that are different from the Western constructs. Through comparative investigations of encounters between societies resulting from conquest, trade and social exchange, the course explores justice as culturally inflected, the product at once of a particular regional or national identity and history, and of intercultural contact.