Program in Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities

The Program in Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities (PJHC) provides students with a multifaceted understanding of human well-being both within the US and internationally. This interdisciplinary minor emphasizes a “capabilities approach,” which considers what people are able to do and be – for example, live to old age and engage in economic and political activities – rather than strictly what material goods they possess. The program also acknowledges the central importance of a variety of additional influences on well-being beyond income, such as gender, racial and ethnic disparities, health status, education, human rights, political freedoms, and material necessities like food and shelter. A key goal of the PJHC is to enrich students’ understanding of poverty and inequality so that, regardless of their choice of occupation, they will maintain a longstanding commitment to enhancing the well-being of all people. More generally, the program trains students to be leaders in solving global problems.

We hold a distinctive place at Rice as a school with a genuinely global expertise, engagement that reaches from ancient times to the future, and scholarly inquiry and commitment to real justice.

The humanities are usually understood as a set of academic disciplines that seek to examine and interpret the human experience — that of individuals as well as entire cultures. The Humanities at Rice engage in the discovery, preservation, and communication of the past and present in order to more deeply understand contemporary society while fostering the imagination of a new future. Yet, we also live and thrive in new spaces beyond the disciplines in our collaborative and interdisciplinary centers, programs and minors, which form the foundation for the more fully integrated and "connective humanities" we seek to expand.

This connective ambition aims to support cutting-edge research, to innovate and transform the Humanities undergraduate classroom, and to advance our PhD programs to national pre-eminence through cross-disciplinary hiring initiatives, joint faculty appointments, co-taught courses that conjoin disciplines, and a new infrastructure of support for collaborative research. This connective ambition extends beyond our classrooms to local institutions and publics that build upon the location of Rice in Houston and its ties to the Texas Medical Center, to the Menil Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and other cultural institutions, as well as Houston’s vast landscape of ethnic and religious communities.

We invite you to join us in exploring some of the biggest questions of our time — on who is at the center of the study of medicine; on ethics and morality in the face of disaster; on the place of law and politics in the future of democracy; on the digital arts that connect the arts and engineering; on the substance of real justice; and on the shape and consequence of a life well lived.