Center for Social Concerns Newsletter | July 2024

Summer is a time of exploration, a change of pace that allows for reflection and discovery.

At the Center for Social Concerns, we help Notre Dame students take full advantage of their time in the summer by supporting a variety of programs that enable them to think carefully about questions of justice and the common good, delve into original research under the guidance of faculty mentors, and learn the importance of solidarity with marginalized communities.

More than 200 Notre Dame undergraduates are spending this summer in Center for Social Concerns programs at sites nationwide and around the world. They’re working with an array of people facing complicated challenges — including the unhoused, citizens returning from incarceration, individuals with disabilities, refugees, and more.

Read on to meet some of the students.

Rita Barhouche loves working with kids and teaching them science, technology, engineering, and math through STEM activities. She’s tapping into those passions this summer through NDBridge, a program that enables students to work with faculty on justice-related research while living alongside marginalized communities. This summer, 114 rising sophomores are participating in NDBridge at 15 sites in the United States and 15 sites abroad.

Barhouche, an aerospace engineering major, is working at Claver House — a residential, interfaith community in The Ville neighborhood of St. Louis. Her research is focused on how mentorship positively influences youth development and empowerment.

“This experience has taught me a lot about how to act with people of different backgrounds. I’m now more comfortable in the neighborhood and am trying to debunk the misconceptions about it and its people,” she said. “We are all the same, we are all human, we have just had different experiences — and this is the beauty of life. I’m not here to teach them how to live. I’m here to show them that people are here for them.”

How are traditional craft knowledge and skills transmitted across generations? And how do the prevailing narratives and perceptions around the craft producers’ economic status influence efforts toward sustainable livelihoods and empowerment within the craft sector?

Brian Johny, a rising senior majoring in biological sciences and studio art, is researching these questions while working with the Association of Craft Producers in Kathmandu, Nepal, through a Center for Social Concerns Summer Fellowship. The fellowship provides opportunities for students to explore their vocations while researching questions of justice in communities around the world. This summer, 70 rising juniors and rising seniors were placed at 24 sites across the country and 21 international sites.

Johny said his first instinct upon arriving in Nepal was to introduce more modern designs and efficient production methods. “However, I’ve learned that sometimes traditional, slower methods are crucial for maintaining the unique character and cultural significance of certain crafts,” he said.

“I understand that this process is fundamentally localized and contextual and is guided by artisan communities themselves based on generations of traditional knowledge systems,” he said. “In addition, by exploring the socioeconomic background and narratives of artisans, I cannot universalize the experience or impose other references.”

Alice Lei, a rising junior majoring in political science, is one of the Center for Social Concerns’ McNeill Common Good Fellows, an interdisciplinary community of 15 scholars eager to explore how to live an ethical life of meaning, purpose, and impact.

With funding support from the fellowship, Lei is spending this summer in Spain. In early July, she took a one-week course in Barcelona on decolonizing knowledge and power. The lectures were taught by international faculty and followed by workshops that included conversations about navigating universalist and localized approaches to creating a decolonial world. Now she’s in Granada, exploring the city’s settler colonial past and how she observes history to be erased.

“In my broader research I want to understand regions in various stages of settler colonialism — from Palestine, to Granada, and to the United States — and how decolonization can be approached in each context,” Lei said.

“One takeaway is that the common good would not reflect a justice-monist world,” she said. “There is no one solution to oppression or harmful structures. Context matters, and context can be better grasped by having conversations with others.”

The Center’s Higgins Labor Program offers Summer Labor Fellowships that enable students to develop skills in organizing, research, advocacy, and communications. This summer, five fellows are working at Unite Here Local 1 in Chicago, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs, also in D.C.

Hayden Kirwan, a rising senior majoring in history, is working on the communications team at the Bureau of International Labor Affairs. (He’s pictured second from right in the above photo.)

“I have researched International Labor Organization conventions, the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, and the rights of migrant workers through my assignments,” he said. “My responsibilities also include uncovering worker-centered stories from some of the bureau’s technical assistance grants. My efforts for this project have concentrated on workers in the fishing sectors of Ecuador and Peru.”

Kirwan said the fellowship has expanded his vision of where work for the common good occurs. “Some of my coworkers perform highly technical research into supply chains and patterns of human trafficking from a desk,” he said. “That work has a tremendous impact, as research and the voices of workers inform everything the bureau does on the ground.”

Rising junior Ashley Estelle is working at a nonprofit called Remerge in Atlanta as part of the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty internship program, which is supported by the Center for Social Concerns.

Estelle is enrolled in the Center’s Poverty Studies Interdisciplinary Minor to complement her history major. At Remerge this summer, she’s doing community outreach and programming while working closely with the unhoused community around Sweet Auburn, a historically black neighborhood. “I’ve done a lot of research on the history of the neighborhood and how we can take advantage of such history to help the community now,” she said. “I’m a history major so I’m trying to take advantage of being in an area with important connections to the civil rights movement and the development of Atlanta as well.”

She said it has been beautiful to see how Remerge pursues its goal of creating relationships with unhoused people by collaborating with artists, educators, religious leaders, and other partners. “The most important thing I've learned this summer is the importance of collaboration and collective efforts for change,” Estelle said. “Understanding the importance of collaboration relates to the common good by showing how diverse groups can unite to address shared challenges.”

Join us to celebrate our students and their exploration into questions of justice at the Research for the Common Good Student Symposium and Andrews Family Reception. The ceremony is at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 19, in Room 215 of McKenna Hall.

Women played an integral role in the founding of the Center for Social Concerns in the early ’80s, so we’re highlighting women who have been a part of the Center’s story and hearing about what they’re doing now.