Embodied Social Justice Certificate

Delivery Area: Online

Coordinator: Sarah Hentges (207) 262-7762 sarah.hentges@maine.edu

Embodied Social Justice (ESJ) is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary field that provides students with tools to transform themselves, their communities, and the world. This minor gives students a foundation in the theories, methods, and practices of Embodied Social Justice, a field that combines and expands critical educational theories, critical race theories, and intersectional feminist theory along with trauma studies, transformative justice, somatic approaches to the mind/body/spirit, neuroscience, disabilities studies, and radical self and community care.

The ESJ minor enhances the work students are doing in any of UMA’s majors and the certificate provides continuing education opportunities to graduates and professionals working in a variety of fields including health care, education, business, human services, and any career field that involves working with people. Students who pursue the Embodied Social Justice minor want to make a positive impact in individuals’ lives as well as effect systemic change and recognize that in order to create transformative experiences and institutions we have to start with ourselves.

Experts agree that we are experiencing a mental health pandemic that was well underway even before the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the problems. The old tools, approaches, and practices for addressing mental health are not enough. A model that considers the whole being within the context of social, cultural, political, and economic systems is a starting point for being able to address the issues impacting the physical, mental, and spiritual health of individuals and communities. We are going to need a multi-pronged approach and our students are going to need to be creative, empathetic, embodied, well-rounded critical thinkers and visionaries.

Students in the ESJ minor and certificate program will work with faculty doing cutting-edge work in the fields of health equity, health communications, medical sociology, expressive arts therapies, feminist fitness and yoga, critical/creative writing and social justice movements.

In the Embodied Social Justice minor and certificate programs, students will:

• Learn to make critical and creative connections between the structural and the individual, the personal and the political.
• Discover and create tools for radical self-care and community care with equal emphasis on both.
• Be encouraged to draw from personal, educational, and professional experience.
• Develop deeper awareness and understanding of the interlocking systems of oppression and the functions and pitfalls of privilege.
• Engage in research and civic engagement while fostering their academic voice, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, and community connections.
• Develop a multi-faceted understanding of trauma as embodied (“the issues are in our tissues”) and better understand a variety of body-based practices for managing and healing individual, collective, compound, intergenerational, and race-based trauma.
• Learn communication, advocacy, and facilitation strategies for working with individuals, groups, communities, and institutions.
• Develop tools, skills, and practices that can be applied in a variety of service sectors and professional fields.