RADHIKA RAJKUMAR 

Imagining Justice Interview Series

At the end of an undergraduate course titled Imagining Justice, I conducted a series of interviews with my peers in December 2016 on what they understood the concept of justice to be, and how they experienced or did not experience justice in their day to day lives. The course had endeavored to properly digest histories of oppression and justice movements by first asking the baseline question of what justice is. Realizing not only how unintuitive, but also how amorphous and difficult, answering that question was, we understood how crucial building and critiquing foundational definitions of justice is to the strategic pursuit of it.

I groped around for definitions of justice by interviewing four of my peers, friends also enrolled at NYU. As outsiders to the class's scaffolding of the conversation, their blank-canvas input was critical for this project. As a tiny sample of the relatively homogenous environment of NYU, the interviews meandered in surprising ways, demonstrating how the interviewees' perceptions of justice were shaped significantly by their differences from each other. This project was not only an exercise in the struggle of justice discourse, but was also an opportunity to create media that represents marginalized groups and gives voice to their experiences.

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