Promoting justice from the margin.

Higher education marginalizes women, especially women of color. Their experience at the margin can strengthen women to define, do and model justice.

Dr. Sarah Willie, featured speaker at the National Association for Women in Catholic Higher Education (NAWCHE) conference in June, said women faculty at Catholic colleges are marginal by definition.

"You negotiate freedom within ideologies of constraint, interpret compassion within a complex world in terms of good and evil, and you participate and urge others to do so when participation has paradoxically been both 'open to all' and narrowly defined and exclusive," she said.

An associate provost and associate professor of sociology at Swarthmore College PA, she has taught in the women's studies and black studies programs at Bard, Colby and Swarthmore colleges.

Her scholarship on marginalization and minority/majority relations rests on experience. She graduated from white-majority Haverford College PA and was an exchange student at historically black Spelman College GA. Her PhD is from Northwestern University IL. She's the author of Acting Black: College, Identity, and the Performance of Race (2003).

What is 'justice?'

Most people equate justice with fairness. Her dictionary offers righteousness, fairness, equity, moral rightness and a system of laws, defining the words in terms of each other.