Social Justice
and Leadership
Why Does Social Justice Matter?
DPLS 705 examined the societal history, implications, mindsets, and politics of social justice and injustice through an explicit leadership lens. The course asked students not merely to understand inequality but to interrogate their own positionality within it — exposing assumptions about privilege, oppression, race, class, gender, and sexuality as conditions that leaders both inherit and perpetuate.
This course arrived at a moment of convergence: a scholar who had spent 25 years in learning and development, relocated to Northwest Arkansas with a 46-year geography of residential mobility, and now living five miles from the Trail of Tears, was finally putting scholarly language to what life had already taught her about the intersection of power, place, and purpose.
Social justice — the full and equitable participation of all people in a society, the fair and humane distribution of resources, as well as making a priority of people's physical and psychological safety.
Required Texts & Scholarly Dialogue
The course drew on a deliberately varied canon — from the Arbinger Institute's conflict resolution framework to Clare Land's decolonizing solidarity work to Shawn Ginwright's four pivots — each engaging justice from a distinct philosophical vantage point.
The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict
The Arbinger framework reframes conflict as a function of "the box" — the self-justifying mindset that dehumanizes others. In a social justice context, the anatomy of peace asks leaders to examine how internal states of self-betrayal and self-deception perpetuate systemic harm, not merely in obvious acts of oppression, but in the quieter refusal to see others as fully human.
The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves
Ginwright's four pivots — from a problem focus to a possibility focus, from transactions to transformation, from self-care to collective care, and from resilience to healing — provided the course's generative framework. His insistence that justice work begins in the body and the spirit, not merely in policy, aligned with the scholar's servant-leadership formation and contemplative practice.
Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles
Land's work complicated the well-meaning posture of solidarity by examining its hidden power dynamics. For a scholar whose CBPR work had already grappled with the ethics of insider-outsider research in Lincoln, Arkansas, Land's decolonizing framework deepened the question: what does it mean to support a community you cannot claim as your own without reproducing the very hierarchies you seek to dismantle?
White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of "Post-Racial" Higher Education
Cabrera's examination of white male student resistance to racial equity in higher education spoke directly to the scholar's experience as a faculty member who taught first-generation, veteran, and racially diverse students at GGU. The concept of "white immunity" — the structural insulation from racial consequences — named something observable but previously unnamed in classroom dynamics and institutional culture.
Educated: A Memoir
Westover's account of self-education in the face of family trauma and systemic exclusion held a mirror to the scholar's own non-linear educational journey. Her memoir illuminated how access to education is never merely institutional — it is always already personal, familial, and political.
What the Course Asked For & What Was Brought to It
Complexity of Leadership
Expand understanding of the complexity of leaders, leadership, and leadership studies — particularly where leadership intersects with systems of power, privilege, and oppression.
Wicked Problems in Social Justice
Identify larger, adaptive, and wicked problems within the field and practice of leading — including poverty, inequality, race, class, gender, and sexuality — and examine them through a leadership lens.
Philosophical Inquiry
Propose, examine, and critique philosophical leadership questions with the intent to sit with rather than resolve complexity — cultivating tolerance for ambiguity as a scholarly and leadership competency.
Positionality Examination
Challenge and expose one's own views, assumptions, and social location — examining privilege, oppression, and identity not as abstractions but as lived, traceable conditions shaping leadership practice.
Intersectional Life Mapping
Produced a rigorous intersectionality paper tracing 46 years of residential mobility — 24 whole-house moves, 12 partial relocations — as the analytical thread connecting race, class, geography, trauma, and resilience across El Sobrante, Richmond, Walnut Creek, and Rogers, Arkansas.
Colonial Narrative Deconstruction
Critically analyzed Raoul Peck's four-part documentary through three lenses — colonialism as genocide, racism and dehumanization, and historical continuity — integrating personal proximity to contested history: the Trail of Tears five miles from the family ranch.
Original Scholarly Contribution: Mother-Scholar Literature Review
Conducted and published a literature review on mother-scholarship as an emerging social justice framework — tracing its origins through IAMAS, current empirical research, and implications for Jesuit higher education.
Creative Integration: The Obituary
Authored a self-written obituary — a creative artifact that synthesized the course's social justice themes into a personal legacy statement, naming Courageous Steps, maternal health advocacy, intersectional equity, and core values as the through-lines of a life committed to justice with humor.
Four Forms of Scholarly Witness
The course produced four substantively different artifacts — a positionality paper, a documentary journal, a peer-level literature review, and a creative legacy document. Together they demonstrate the range of ways a scholar can engage justice: through analysis, through critique, through scholarship, and through story.
24 Moves, One Life: Residential Mobility as Intersectional Autobiography
The intersectionality paper used a single, verifiable fact — 24 whole-house moves and 12 partial relocations over 46 years — as the structural spine of a critical positionality analysis. Drawing on Webb et al.'s research linking residential mobility to adverse adult outcomes, the paper traced how each move reshaped identity across El Sobrante, Richmond, Walnut Creek, and Rogers, Arkansas.
The paper concluded with an acknowledgment of arrival — not merely geographic, but vocational: "I found my place in this world." Northwest Arkansas, with its blend of equity-focused philanthropy, skilled workforce development, and community-centered social justice programming, named as the place where the researcher's intersecting identities finally cohere.
"At the core of what is emerging in this community... is a trust fall into leaders who use their wealth to build others up."
Exterminate All the Brutes: Colonialism, Genocide, and the Integrity of Historical Storytelling
Raoul Peck's four-part HBO documentary series became the occasion for one of the course's most searching reflections. The journal organized three central arguments: colonialism as genocide (the Doctrine of Discovery as the legal architecture of dispossession); racism and dehumanization; and historical continuity (the present-tense problem of silenced narratives).
"I live in Arkansas, a state that participates in reconstructing historical narratives through suppression of history. I am deeply impressed by the opportunities to share the struggles and stories of what we are discussing at the Ph.D. level."
Exploring the Complexities of Mother-Scholarship: A Social Justice Perspective
The mother-scholar literature review is simultaneously a doctoral artifact and a field-building contribution. Beginning with Cheryl Matias' coinage of the term at AERA 2011 and tracing through IAMAS, Adrienne Rich's foundational critique of institutional motherhood, Sara Ruddick's maternal thinking as intellectual practice, and empirical research on mother-scholars of color facing dual invisibility — the review established the field's current state and its significant gaps.
The scholar's own participation in three online doctoral mother groups (totaling over 25,000 members), and her active co-creation of a Medium blog with Lanya McKittrick, Ph.D., launching January 15, 2025 for mother-scholars with children with disabilities, positioned the review as practitioner-scholarship — not merely describing the field, but extending it.
Katie Reginato Cascamo Ph.D., Advocate for Equity and Laughter, Passes Away at 100 + 1 Day
The self-written obituary is the course's most formally unusual artifact and its most integrative one. The obituary names Courageous Steps as "a social benefit organization that focused on leadership development for mothers engaged in maternal health transformation" — elevating voices, challenging systemic injustices, and advocating for intersectional equity. It distills five core values: Wholeness, Service, Purpose, Integrity, and Accountability.
"She arrived with a glass of wine in one hand, laughter on her lips, and likely a witty quip about how even angels could use a little more organization."
What This Course Made Visible
Geography Is Never Neutral
From Richmond's wartime migration history to the Trail of Tears five miles from the ranch, every place in this scholar's life is saturated with social justice history. DPLS 705 gave frameworks for reading geography as power — for understanding that where you live shapes what you see, what you miss, and what leadership you are called to offer.
Both/And Is a Social Justice Practice
The intersectionality paper named the "both/and" posture not as compromise but as intellectual discipline: holding Richmond values and Walnut Creek ambition, honoring Italian immigrant resilience and confronting the privilege that came with it, being insider and outsider simultaneously.
Scholarship Is a Form of Advocacy
The mother-scholar literature review and the Peck journal both demonstrated that writing is not merely reporting — it is intervening. To name a field, extend its research agenda, and connect it to Jesuit institutional reform is an act of advocacy. The obituary made this explicit: the scholar's legacy is what she chose to study and why.
Humor Is a Justice Posture
The obituary's insistence on laughter through grief is not frivolous — it is a survival technology and a leadership stance. Communities in the midst of oppression have always used humor as a way of claiming dignity. A social justice leader who cannot hold joy alongside sorrow will burn out long before the work is done.
From Social Justice Lens to Leadership Practice
DPLS 705 placed a formal social justice framework around what Courageous Steps had already been practicing: the recognition that maternal health advocacy is social justice work; that NICU Parent Leadership operates at the intersection of race, class, healthcare access, and power; that the communities most harmed by inadequate neonatal care are the same communities most excluded from its governance.
It also generated a new scholarly contribution — the mother-scholar literature review — that extends the field's intersectional understanding and seeds future research in disability, gender identity, and care work. That literature is now part of the dissertation's broader scholarly ecology.