In this community-engaged environmental practicum, we will examine the “nuts and bolts” of social change: what it is, what it looks like, how it happens, and how to do it. Specifically, we’ll engage diverse efforts currently underway in Vermont aimed at enacting a just transition away from an unsustainable, oftentimes inequitable status quo.
What kinds of strategies might be needed at this critical juncture to effect real structural transformation, change the rules of the game, and dislodge “business as usual”? How do organizers go about building power and fostering the collective capacities needed by ordinary people to fight their way out of the everyday crises rendering life precarious? What sorts of methods, frameworks, and underlying assumptions about making change to different groups bring to this work?
Students will partner with a range of organizations as they attempt to work out the necessary preconditions for achieving systemic change (tracing how to actually get from “here” to “there”); to bring together the requisite coalitions of actors who will carry out that change (out of what can be a fractious set of constituencies); and to assemble the various practical building blocks needed for a sufficient and equitable response to the startling task of overhauling “all aspects of society,” as scientific bodies like the IPCC have demanded. In sum, project teams will support the work of community partners pressing for change, and sometimes even transformation: each in their own ways, within their respective contexts, and positioned in unique roles with different “theories of change.”
You don’t need me to remind you that these questions are more than just an interesting intellectual exercise. Much is at stake in our collective assessments — and corresponding choices — about where, how, with whom we focus our efforts at this pivotal moment. And don’t let the word “theory” give you the wrong impression. This kind of work is inherently messy and personally involving. An important goal of this class is to give you some exposure to this reality as you learn how practitioners of “social change” contend with the everyday dilemmas, entrenched power structures, dynamic relationships, idiosyncratic personalities, emotional rigors, and occasional windows of opportunity that all combine in different ways to define the terrain of today’s ongoing struggles to transform our world.
DANIEL CHIU SUAREZ 