ASPP- UT/ GT.1000 / 2000 Sem 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Professor Kathy Engel
What's Love Got To Do With It? All School Seminar
Professor Kathy Engel
ASPP-UT 1000.001 OPEN TO SOPH, JUNIORS, SENIORS
ASPP-UT 2000.001 (Graduate section)
Undergraduate and Graduate
Thursdays 3:30 – 6:15pm
4 points
This course will explore the meaning and practice of building relationships and community in the process of creating projects, campaigns, and organizations for social change. Telling stories, listening well, learning how to understand and value the full array of human resources available to any endeavor, are all essential components of building and cohering communities and campaigns. Opening up spaces that have been historically closed as the result of power inequities and traditional forms of domination, both overt and subtle, and imagining new ways of coexisting, are built on these practices, when employed with care and consciousness. In some cultures within the U.S., the power of the conversation has always been recognized, on the porch, in the kitchen, at the place of worship, on the street corner. But have all our languages been honored, written and unwritten? Our understandings of work, time, legacy, beauty, for example? Even within organizations seeking to create social change, the value of story and all that implies, and relationship, have more often than not been minimized, if not disregarded, in the attempt to create strategies, affect policy, within a perception of urgency and scarcity. Perhaps the time and care it takes to listen to a relative stranger, respond, and inevitably transform as a result, would seem to contradict the immediacy of responding to a news event or passing a bill, for example. There are real, persuasive pulls at work in this tension. We will look at current efforts led by young people in groups such as The Young People's Project, and activists in the "Occupy" movement, who are utilizing methods of communication and processes of decision making that have evolved from earlier traditions, designed to ensure the value of each participant's voice and perspective. Readings will include "Letters to Poets," (Ed Jennifer Firestone & Dana Teen Lomaz)"The Gift," (Lewis Hyde) "Bridge Conversations,"(Arts & Democracy) "New Map of Love," (Carol Gilligan) and "Enacting Pleasures"(ed Peggy Cooper Davis and Lizzy Cooper Davis), "The World Cafe," (Juanita Brown with Davd Isaacs and the World Cafe Community) and "The Next American Revolution" (Grace Lee Boggs). Students will engage in individual and group projects that involve collecting stories.
This course will count toward general education requirements for TSOA students (Humanities).
