Social Justice

Our mission is to raise awareness of the legal and ethical dimensions of art collection stewardship and offer on-campus training to students who are committed to implementing ethical practices in museums and other cultural institutions. ACE's blog explores issues related to the legal and ethical dimensions of art stewardship including articles on Nazi-era art, Native American collections, global repatriation and antiquities.

The focus of COSA is on free and open-source digital tools for creative expression. Free and open-source digital tools allow anyone with access to a computer to begin creating. We want to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute and will especially focus on bringing women, minorities and other underrepresented communities together as contributors to the ongoing innovation and growth of these tools.

Students are encouraged to think critically across disciplines and can gain important skills necessary for ethical and engaged citizenship in today's diverse, global society. Knowledge and understanding of race and ethnicity provides excellent training for careers in business, law, education, social work, journalism, the arts, nonprofits, government and public policy agencies, and increasingly in science and technology fields.

DU PAI empowers individuals to see themselves as leaders capable of creating meaningful change, both inside prison systems and well beyond. Through initiatives including theatre performances, podcast episodes, art workshops, leadership programs and newspaper issues, DU PAI delivers arts-based experiences that are educational, therapeutic and reflective.

The Holocaust Awareness Institute (HAI) works within the Jewish community, the University of Denver and with people of all faiths and cultures to explore the meaning of the Shoah and its lessons for future generations. HAI is a campus and community resource for coursework, teacher trainings, education materials and programming, and is a leading agent in the region for promoting education about the Holocaust and related ethical and social justice issues.

We form impressions of others with surprising ease, and with shockingly little information. Others’ faces, bodies and language all command attention, combining to provide rich impressions of others’ traits, emotional states, motives and social status. But not all cues are created equal, and similarly, not all people are treated equally. 

SPA works to examine extremely fast, unintentional, and at times pre-attentional responses to others' faces, bodies and movements. In general, we are interested in characterizing the extremely early stages of social thinking and examining how they contribute to social problems and solutions. The SPA lab emphasizes the early stages of social thought but we do so with an eye towards identifying and solving social problems. 

The Spanish Program for Heritage/Bilingual Learners is an initiative to meet the educational and linguistic needs of our changing student population. It is designed specifically for heritage or bilingual speakers of Spanish, or students who have a personal, familial or community connection to the Spanish language.

The Spirituals Project works to preserve and revitalize both the music of Spirituals, and their teachings. Along with research and educational work, The Spirituals Project keeps the music alive through its Spirituals Project Choir, a multi-ethnic, intergenerational choir.

Our mission is to advance SEED Science, an approach to understanding stress, early experiences and development that promotes intergenerational health, wellbeing and resilience by fostering rigorous interdisciplinary, policy-relevant research with collaborative community partners.