1 1 Community Organizing and Social Change Portland State University, Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning USP 316 – Spring 2019 Lincoln Hall 339, Tuesday – Thursday, 12:00 - 2:00 Rachel Slocum, Adjunct professor Email: sloc@pdx.edu Office: URBN 370 B Office Hours: Tuesday 2:00-3:00 Skype: rbslocum (for appts. outside office hours) D2L course page: https://d2l.pdx.edu/d2l/home/747611 More information about your professor: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachel_Slocu m/research Course Description Community organizing is one means through which people mobilize to collectively act to change or preserve the status quo. This course explores and analyzes the history, philosophy, and goals of protest movements and community organizing efforts that seek progressive change. In addition to an overview of approaches to organizing and the key protest movements of recent times, you will learn the basic elements of organizing, the power of public story, how to reframe a dominant narrative, and the building blocks of a policy brief. Subscribing to the principle that learning comes through critique, this course will critically examine the practice of community organizing at a moment of existential crisis in a time of increasingly generalized precarity and persistent racial oppression. Community organizers’ work aims toward ideals that lie forever on the horizon. To chart a path toward that horizon, they must understand the history and theory of systems against which the oppressed struggle. 1 Tim DeChristopher’s statement to the judge before being sentenced to two years in prison for civil disobedience (bidding on fossil fuel leases without intent to pay).