Displacement Studies and Human Rights Major

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Overview

Degree Level: Undergraduate
Degrees Offered: Bachelor of Arts

Department: Historical and Political Studies
school/college: College of Arts and Sciences

Bachelor of Arts in Displacement Studies and Human Rights

The Displacement Studies and Human Rights (DSHR) major at Arcadia University is designed for students who want to pursue a concentrated course of study examining and addressing solutions to the systematic and unevenly distributed forms of displacement that transform people into refugees; internally displaced persons; transnational migrants; and so on. This course of study requires students to develop a grasp not only of the causes of sustained displacement, including, but by no means limited, to genocide and targeted persecution; resource exploitation and environmental racism; acute climatological events and ongoing climate change. Students also come to comprehend that displacement is most often the ongoing product of complex interactions between different causes which together create dislocation.

The DSHR major takes a holistic, antiracist, and social justice approach to human rights and displacement, in several respects. First, students in this major develop a critical and historically grounded understanding of human displacement, which situates contemporary processes of global dislocation in the ongoing legacies of European Colonialism’s foundational projects: Indigenous dispossession and the chattel enslavement of Africans. Second, DSHR empowers students to draw connections between the global dislocation of, say, asylum seekers from the Global South and the dislocations rendered by gentrification and eminent domain in the Global North. Finally, students learn to cultivate applied practices in partnership with displaced persons, including training and internships in international law and domestic refugee law, that allow them to develop and realize their own human rights-informed social justice projects that foster human emplacement.

Through this major, students will:

employ an antiracist and social justice approach to scholarship and advocacy grounded in a grasp of the central role that patriarchal white supremacy plays in the social justice and human rights issues revealed in processes of displacement.
cultivate a comprehensive, critical understanding of the causes of global displacement, relating these to processes of displacement in our communities and lived experience.
develop proficiency in inductive research methods and forms of data collection and analysis, such as case analysis; interviews and observations; reflective writing; and ethnographic discourse analysis.
build a portfolio of professional skills they know how to market and effectively apply to their post-baccalaureate career paths.

Displacement Studies and Human Rights Abroad

Arcadia University is ranked in the top 10 in the country for study abroad. We encourage you to explore all your options.

LEARN MORE ABOUT STUDY ABROAD

Featured Courses

Antiracist Immigration Law and Advocacy

You will apply different perspectives to critical analysis of U.S. policy responses as it relates to the humanitarian crisis in the Global South. Learn about the historical development of humanitarian elements of immigration law. Develop knowledge of the current eligibility requirements for specific forms of humanitarian relief. You will gain an understanding of how gender, race, and class disparities relate to relief access. You will work on redacted versions of real cases, completing the actual steps legal advocates and their clients take to build a successful petition for humanitarian relief.

Social Life of War

Everyone has a war story. Everyone is impacted by war. Reveal your personal war stories and build from those to understand war and violent conflict from a socio-cultural perspective. Discover why war and violent conflict result in humanitarian crises at the social level and atrocities and tragedy at the personal level. Learn how war fundamentally alters people’s social worlds, life trajectories, imagined communities, and understanding of their position in time and space. Explore why assumptions can cause of violent conflict. Ask hard questions about how human beings socially construct our enemies and make atrocities seem legitimate.

Law, Disorder, and Globalization

Examine how politics help construct inequality in the U.S. You will learn how they shape international relationships between the U.S., Europe, and nation-states in Latin America and Africa. Learn why criminalization creates social hierarchies, and why some types of people and some nation-states are seen as inherently criminal and disorderly. You will discuss cases that enable you to understand the factors that motivate the penal turn and its material consequences that encourage future criminalization, such as for-profit prisons.

International Human Rights

The interrelated problems of defining human rights and protecting those rights have challenged the international community since the end of the Cold War. Study the rhetoric of humanitarian intentions, which can serve as a cover for the actual neglect of human rights. Explore the nature and evolution of human rights, the problems entailed in humanitarian action, and the potential for building a viable international human rights regime.

Model United Nations

Gain an understanding of the United Nations and international organizations with a focus on international negotiations. Study the structure and the work of the United Nations, and other international organizations. You will participate in a Model United Nations competition with student teams from around the world.

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