THE RIGHT TO WRITE
A trans-disciplinary student award that encourages future teachers and scholars to develop means and languages for educating our communities about the pasts and futures of democratic values, and place them in the broad context of our civic, institutional, and political attempts to create a world without inequality and violence.
Ahimsa Award in Global Justice and Civil Rights
The Ahimsa Award in Civil Rights and Global Justice will recognize the best written undergraduate thesis in history, philosophy, moral psychology, social theory, and political thought that engages with questions of freedom and constitutionalism, effects of inequality and identity on citizenship, and the future of the modern of the civic and social contract in the age of planetary crises.
Ahimsa means rejection of violence in all its forms. One of its greatest legacies is the moral link that the idea of political nonviolence forged between the anticolonial revolutions of the mid-20th century and the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, along with struggles for anticaste abolitionism and antiracial self-determination and climate justice worldwide. These democratic struggles continue today.
The award encourages future teachers and scholars to develop means and languages for educating our communities about the transitional features of ahimsa and place them in the broad context of our civic, institutional, and political attempts to create a world without systemic inequality and violence. The award-winning thesis will display a commitment to reimagining a politically animated nonviolence for our times. This is a trans-disciplinary award. Students from all departments in the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences (CLASS) are eligible to be nominated for it.
The Ahimsa Award in Global Justice and Civil Rights is a testament at once to our strong commitment to rigorous training and to the skills of our hardworking student-scholars who have decided to invest back in it.