Strategies to Advance Social Change Precapstone

How can we make change? In this course we explore the ethical foundations, principles, methods, tools, and skill-set essential for designing strategies to advance social change. We explore various perspectives and practices for students to equip themselves with the tools to imagine and design novel, rigorous, and equity-centered strategies to make progress towards justice in society. Together we engage with various ideas and materials drawn from law and policy, community organizing, advocacy, the social sciences, journalism, documentary film, community health, and personal narrative, as well as scholarly literature, both contemporary and historical, with an eye towards the future. The course emphasizes collaborative approaches for advancing social change through partnership, movement and coalition building, collective agency, empowerment, and organizing to cultivate and sustain collaborative efforts that leverage individual and collective agency and capacity for our liberation. Interrogating and dissecting harmful systems of power is central to our work, as students each develop individual projects that leverage inquiry for purposeful transformative action to help dismantle structures of domination and oppression. Students may not take both GOVT E-597a and GOVT E-1072 for degree or certificate credit.