About the Center on Global Justice
The Center on Global Justice (CGJ) is an Organized Research Unit (ORU) at UC San Diego, launched in 2012 to advance interdisciplinary research on poverty and global development, with an emphasis on collective action at community scale. The CGJ is home to initiatives focused on global ethics and cooperation (the conventional terrain of global justice), but the majority of our initiatives localize the global, focusing on real-word intervention at local scale, in partnership with non-profits, government agencies and civic stakeholders—top-down and bottom-up.
Community partnership and public commitment lie at the heart of everything we do.
Social Science Research in Action
Our tagline “social science research in action” embodies six central commitments. Our work is:
Problem-Centered
A central aim of the CGJ is to preserve real-world, collaborative “problem solving” in the social sciences, and to resist disciplinary urges to relegate such work to the “applied” disciplines.
Cross-disciplinary
The world’s biggest and most urgent challenges don’t confine themselves to disciplines. Nor can our solutions be. We need to integrate diverse ways of knowing and doing to improve human life on our planet. We are committed to teaching our students how to think, communicate and act at the “interdiscipline.”
Cross-sector
As researchers, we are committed to working with partners across sectors, including communities, non-profits, government agencies, K-12 schools and cultural institutions. Our model is very different from “applied social science.” We develop solidaristic relationships with our partners, to co-produce new knowledge, new solutions, new advocacy strategies and meaningful interventions.
Committed to Diversity
The CGJ was founded on a commitment to advancing diversity and social equity on our campus, in our community, and across the globe. Everything we do is pursued with this commitment to diversity and social equity at its core.
Responsive-Dynamic
We respond to rigorous, inclusive strategies of evaluation and assessment, and are eager to tinker. We embrace the iterative commitments of Deweyan action-research.
Public
All of our work aspires to have genuine public impact, improving quality of life and increasing public knowledge.