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Social Justice

Getting started with a Social Justice research project

If you've been assigned a paper or project, it's important to narrow your topic down to something manageable.  For example, "Racism in the United States" is a topic that is too big to cover adequately in a 3-5 page paper.   Try to narrow big concepts into specifics: choose a specific population, geographic location, time period, etc. 

  • Good places to start narrowing your topic and gathering keywords are Wikipedia, "Related Words" (see below) and Encyclopedias (see below). 
  • If you are having trouble narrowing your topic, please don't hesitate to get in touch with a librarian (or your instructor) for help.  

NOTE: Encyclopedias and Wikipedia are not generally considered college-level research material.  This means you should not rely on them as sources for your projects/papers.  They are excellent, though, for narrowing your topic down and for finding keywords and concepts for further investigation.

Here are a just few encyclopedias from our digital collection to help you get started on Social Justice related topics:

Related Words

Use this website to take your keyword searching to new levels: type in your topic and it will generate a word cloud with topics and terms related to yours.  By trying alternative keywords and related terms, you'll take your searches to new levels and discover more information. Click the elephant:

Related Words website's logo

dividerFAIRFIELD CAMPUS
4000 Suisun Valley Road
Fairfield, CA 94534
(707) 864-7000
dividerVACAVILLE CENTER
2001 North Village Parkway
Vacaville, CA 95688
(707) 863-7836
dividerVALLEJO CENTER
545 Columbus Parkway
Vallejo, CA 94591
(707) 864-7292
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE
530 Hickam Ave., Bldg. 249
Travis Air Force Base, CA 94535
(707) 424-2431