The Society of Vincent DePaul Professors’ Global Justice Committee hosted the annual Social Justice Teach-In on September 10th, 2021.
The focus of the event is to discuss various disciplinary foci on current social justice crises in the U.S. and around the world. It brings faculty, students, and staff together in conversation to address these issues and ways in which it can inform work at DePaul over the academic year.
The 2021 Teach-In included presentations on a range of social justice topics such as immigration, human rights, and environmental awareness. The plenary session, “Addressing the painful history of slave ownership within the Congregation of the Mission”, discusses the history of slavery within the Vincentian mission and considers the question of “What is to be Done”.
Only a small sample of the 2021 Teach-In recordings is available.
A recent study by the Archdiocese of St. Louis identified Bishop Joseph Rosati, C.M., as having sold a 9 or 10 year old enslaved "negro boy" who he owned for $150 to a Vincentian Father John Bouiller in the 1830s. This Teach-In panel contributes to this conversation. It will discuss the history, ask “What is to be Done” regarding its legacy, and consider how DePaul can address practices of institutional commemoration.
This presentation will explore the radical roots of the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigns for the US presidency in 2020, by focusing on the historical roots of socialism and nativism in the earlier periods of US political development. Some questions to discuss will be: What political ideas and strategies for out time are suggested by exploring the radical roots of socialism and nativism in the U.S.? What issues that one seemed “unthinkable” have recently broken through into the mainstream political imagination recently? What other “unthinkable” issues may soon emerge? What are the political prospects and dangers of working in a populist framework aka Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump?
This panel will highlight matters of social justice entangled with the subject of cannabis, leveraging multiple disciplinary and practitioner perspectives. Since the State of Illinois legalized both medical and adult recreational use and sales of cannabis products containing the psychotropic compound THC, much public debate has ensued over the promise of social equity in this legislation and its recent amendment. Our panel considers this que question as a matter of racial and social justice, and we interrogate whether Illinois’ approaches to social equity can and will achieve outcomes for justice, particularly for Black and brown communities disproportionately affected by federal criminalization. We engage these questions as educators who teach in cannabis studies and allied areas.
The theme of this presentation will be exploring our capacity for fostering just and beloved community. It will review the context in which Martin Luther King raised this question in 1968, how it echoes the Vincentian question of “what must be done” to ensure justice and humanity for all, and the persisting relevance of both questions. We will then discuss how King’s question has been answered thus far, and how that guides us down the current social and political crossroads.