Reduced Inequalities

About the Goal

reduced inequalities

The United Nations aims to reduce inequality within and among countries by 2030.

Northwestern is engaged in a broad range of research projects and other initiatives aimed at realizing this goal, including work examining local and global manifestations of racism and economic and social inequality. Northwestern faculty are also engaged in initiatives examining human rights law, political corruption, property rights, the history and impact of social movements, and the unlawful deportation of individuals in the United States and elsewhere.

Northwestern Experts and Initiatives

Vilna Bashi Treitler

Vilna Bashi Treitler is the Weinberg College’s Osborn Professor of Sociology and a Northwestern Buffett Institute Faculty Fellow. As a sociologist and visual artist, Bashi Treitler’s scholarship and art centers on the intersection of race, migration, and inequality. She is the author of The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions, which traces the histories of immigrant and indigenous groups in the United States to show how different ethnic groups have negotiated America’s racial hierarchy. Since 2015, she has served as Vice-Chair of the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racism, Afrophobia, and Colorism as well as a Board member and UN Representative for the Drammeh Institute, an NGO committed to archiving and producing film footage to educate the world on issues of central importance to the African Diaspora.

Lina Britto

Lina Britto is an historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work situates the emergence and consolidation of illegal drug smuggling networks in the Caribbean and Andean regions of Colombia in the context of a growing articulation between the South American country and the United States during the Cold War. Her recent book, Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise (University of California Press, 2020), is based on extensive fieldwork and oral history in the Colombian Caribbean, as well as archival research in Colombia and the United States. Britto’s courses at Northwestern focus on the hemispheric history of the drug trade and the war on drugs, popular music and nation-state formation, oral history and Cold War terror, and contemporary Latin America in historical perspective.

Featured Course

Bilingual Reporting (333-0-20)

This is a bilingual course that explores the history, current state and future of the English, Spanish and bilingual audiences and the media outlets that seek to reach them. This class is for anyone who wants to better understand the role of media and journalists covering diverse communities. We will explore the complexity of language and culture, identity, race and ethnicity, nationality and class. Student will learn how to discover, report and share in a sensitive and compelling matter, the stories of people who identify as LatinX and/or have roots in Latin America, whether they live the United States or elsewhere.

Explore the course