
Power Building and Community Organizing for Social Justice
What is collective power? How do you build it? What is social justice? How do you achieve it? In this class students will ask the question of what it takes to build the kind of movements, and organizations, that seek to bend the arc towards justice through activism.
The class will seek to understand the tactics and strategies that groups develop to build community power, how groups organize and escalate, to contend with global markets, political hierarchies, and economic and political power structures. We will briefly look at the political framework of racial capitalism and the neoliberal project as the context through which power is wielded and against which campaigns are developed and waged.
Participation is key, and students will practice “group work”, review and create a case study, and should seek to develop their own viewpoints on the phrase “theory of change”.