Justice, Power, and Persuasion Instructor: Juliet Shields, English What is justice? Does might really make right? And if not, who gets to decide what’s right and wrong, just and unjust? How can a lone individual change an entire society’s beliefs about right and wrong? This seminar will explore the answers that great thinkers from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato to the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. have posed to these questions. Through a series of reading and writing assignments, class discussions, and group work, we’ll also try to come up with some answers of our own. Our reading selections will include political documents like The Declaration of Independence, essays like Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet,” and Truman Capote’s true crime novel, In Cold Blood. The final project will ask you to derive a definition of justice from a movie, book, television program, or newspaper or magazine article of your choice and to identify the strategies that it uses to persuade us of this definition. This class will be useful for any student seeking an introduction to the basic conventions of academic writing and research. However, the course content will particularly appeal to students planning to major in the Humanities or the Social Sciences. Meets: MTWTh 9:00-11:30
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