Community Studies Advance Course Information-Fall 2003

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Fall 2003

This information effective for Fall 2003. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

Community Studies

[CMMU-080B] [CMMU-100M] [CMMU-100P] [CMMU-100R] [CMMU-100T] [CMMU-163]

80B. Civil Rights Movement: Grassroots Change and American Society

Note: Syllabus from fall 2001

Instructor: David Brundage
Office: College Eight 312
Phone: 459-4645
E-mail: brundage@ucsc.edu

Course Description:

The course will introduce students to the history of the civil rights movement, perhaps the most significant grassroots social movement in American history. Built around lectures and readings in primary and secondary works and featuring a number of segments of the public television series, "Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years," the course will devote particular attention to the role of rank-and-file activists in shaping the movement. We will also attempt to assess the ways in which the movement changed—and did not change—American society as a whole.

Students will be evaluated on the basis of (1) attendance at lectures and participation in required weekly discussion sections, (2) two essays (5-6 pages each), addressing key historical questions, and (3) an in-class final examination.

Assigned Books

Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil Rights Movement
Clayborne Carson, et al. (editors), The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi

These are available at Bay Tree Bookstore and are also on two-hour reserve at McHenry Library. The "Eyes on the Prize" series is also on reserve in the Film and Music Center at McHenry Library.

Topics and Reading Assignments

Sept. 19-21: Introduction to the course

Reading: Weisbrot, Freedom Bound, Preface and pp. 1-18
Moody, Coming of Age, pp. 11-138

Sept. 24-28: The roots of the movement

Reading: Eyes on Prize Reader, pp. 1-106
Moody, Coming of Age, pp. 139-214
Film: Eyes on the Prize, series 1, part 1 ("Awakenings")

Oct. 1-5: The sit-ins and the formation of SNCC

Reading: Weisbrot, Freedom Bound, pp. 19-44
Eyes on Prize Reader, pp. 107-132
Carson, In Struggle, Introduction, chs. 1-2
Moody, Coming of Age, pp. 217-58
Film: Eyes, series 1, part 3 ("Ain't Scared of Your Jails")

Oct. 8-12: Civil rights as a mass movement

Reading: Weisbrot, Freedom Bound, pp. 45-85
Eyes on the Prize Reader, pp. 133-65
Carson, In Struggle, chs. 3-7
Film: Eyes, series 1, part 4 ("No Easy Walk")

Oct. 15-19: Freedom Summer

Reading: Weisbrot, Freedom Bound, pp. 86-126
Eyes on the Prize Reader, pp. 166-203
Carson, In Struggle, chs. 8-9
Moody, Coming of Age, pp. 261-384
Film: Eyes, series 1, part 5 ("Mississippi: Is This America?")

Oct. 22-26: Culmination at Selma

Reading: Weisbrot, Freedom Bound, pp. 127-53
Eyes on the Prize Reader, pp. 204-27
Carson, In Struggle, chs. 10-11
Film: Eyes, series 1, part 6 ("Bridge to Freedom")
First essay due Monday, Oct. 22

Oct. 29-Nov. 2: New directions in the movement

Reading: Weisbrot, Freedom Bound, pp. 154-85
Eyes on the Prize Reader, pp. 228-87
Carson, In Struggle, chs. 12-13
Film: Eyes, series 2, part 1 ("The Time Has Come")

Nov. 5-9: A divided nation

Reading: Weisbrot, Freedom Bound, pp. 186-221
Eyes on the Prize Reader, pp. 288-332
Carson, In Struggle, chs. 14-15
Film: Eyes, series 2, part 2 ("Two Societies")

Nov. 13-16: The emergence of radicalism

Reading: Weisbrot, Freedom Bound, pp. 222-61
Eyes on the Prize Reader, pp. 333-499
Film: Eyes, series 2, part 3 ("Power")
No class, Monday Nov. 12 (Veteran's Day)

Nov. 19-21: Repression and decline

Reading: Weisbrot, Freedom Bound, pp. 262-87
Eyes on the Prize Reader, pp. 500-90
Carson, In Struggle, chs. 16-18
Film: Eyes, series 2, part 6 ("A Nation of Law?")
Second essay due Monday, Nov. 19
No class Nov. 22-23 (Thanksgiving)

Nov. 26-30: The legacy of the movement

Reading: Weisbrot, Freedom Bound, pp. 288-317
Eyes on the Prize Reader, pp. 591-722
Carson, In Struggle, Epilogue
Film: Eyes, series 2, part 7 ("The Keys to the Kingdom")

Final Exam: Tuesday, Dec. 4 (4:00-7:00pm)

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100M. Health Care Inequalities

TTh 2-3:45 p.m., Social Sciences 1, 145
Instructor: Andrea Steiner
Section: Some Thursdays, 6-8 pm, in Soc. Sci. 2-075
My office: College Eight, Room 128 (opposite men's room)
My contact info: (831) 459-1267; steiner@ucsc.edu
Office hours: Friday 10-1 and by appointment

Syllabus

Welcome to the seminar, Health Care Inequalities, which is designed as a foundational course for those students entering the community studies major who anticipate a focus on health issues (broadly construed). The class size is limited to 25. The following syllabus is meant to guide our inquiry during the quarter and to give you a clear picture of the expectations the department and I have of you.

Aims:

To study the principles by which societies and communities organize health care;
To compare these principles with the practice of health care; and
To examine the ways that individuals and communities pursue good health and seek to overcome systemic inequalities in gaining access to good health care

Objectives:

By the end of the seminar, you will be familiar with

The basics of how health care operates in the U.S.;
The social constructions by which health care is rationed, and inequalities in health care delivery are rationalized;
The general patterns of service delivery to a range of potentially vulnerable groups; and
The barriers to and opportunities for receiving appropriate, acceptable services.

You will be able to

Relate theory to practice, and personal experience to both;
Develop your listening and group participation skills;
Make a presentation;
Analyze scholarly literature; and
Think critically and reflectively about identifying and reducing health care inequalities.

During this course, you will also begin to prepare for your field study, which you will undertake after completing CMMU 102 and agreeing with your adviser (quite possibly, me) that you are ready to begin. This means you will arrange a part-time field placement in Santa Cruz, to be done as part of your CMMU 102 experience; and a 6-month full-time placement anywhere in the world, which will meet field study requirements of the major and which you will begin after completing CMMU 102. The department will help you with this via a series of workshops (required), and we will spend some time in this class considering what makes an appropriate field placement, why, and how best to prepare for it.

Note: The Field Study Workshops conflict with the time we have 100-M section. I propose that we meet in section on October 2 and 9, to help you organize into groups and start planning your presentations (see Expectations #5), and then that we reserve November 13 and 20 to discuss fieldwork, the final paper, or anything else you'd like some help with.

Expectations (including assignments and due dates):

In order to get the most out of this course, I ask you

To attend classes regularly and to arrive on time. If this is a problem for you, come see me right away. This includes section, which will meet at the start of the quarter to help you begin small-group work on your presentations (see #5 below; we may split the group into two groups—one to meet 6-7 pm, the other 7-8 pm).
To share your experience. Health care is a subject that engages on many levels. We have all been sick at some point, or know somebody who has. Increasingly, people of all ages live with some kind of chronic illness or with a disability. How is it/was it for you, your family, or your friends to (try to) connect with the medical system? In addition to confronting your personal experiences in writing, I ask you to share both experience and insights during class discussions. Community studies is about becoming an activist for social change, and activists—even the shyest of us—need practice speaking up. This class will be a safe, respectful place to practice.
To read and write quite a lot. In addition to the final paper, you will prepare five or six "reading reaction papers." They will form the basis of class discussion. Reaction papers should be 2-3 pages long, typed, and double-spaced. Each paper should summarize the readings and provide a commentary. Your commentary should critique the readings, explore ideas inspired by what you read, and identify at least two questions that arose for you. These questions might be points needing clarification, or they could be issues you would like to hear other students' views on. The summary:commentary ratio should be about 1:1. I am looking for comprehension, insight, and connection. The more you draw different readings together, the better. The more you consider how facts can be marshaled to explain something perplexing, or how theories can illuminate your understanding of an analyst's argument or a group of facts that analyst presents, the better. The due dates for reading reaction papers (mostly, but not exclusively, Tuesdays) are:

September 30, October 7, October 16, October 21, October 28, and November 4.
Late papers cannot be accepted, because they are tied to the seminar discussions.
You must complete five out of six possible papers. I would welcome your completing all six, but if you need to miss a week of writing, you can do that.

To ask questions whenever you are unclear. For all of us, the beginning of learning is to acknowledge ignorance. It's an uncomfortable feeling, but it's crucial to become good at embracing the steeper parts of life's learning curves. In this class, we are aiming for an atmosphere where learning can happen, and that means all questions are welcome. You can also talk with me during office hours.
To lead one discussion, as part of a group presentation. Responsibility for particular sessions will be arranged at the start of week 2. The group presentations give you an opportunity to explore a health care issue in greater depth than will be possible in class; in fact, there are too many aspects of health care to cover in a single 10-week course. Working with a small (about 4 person) group, you will examine an aspect of health care inequalities by combining library and Internet research with a study of the local context in Santa Cruz (city or county). You will then organize a 45-minute presentation on your findings. You can use mixed media, and can make the presentation didactic or interactive. I will accept supplementary materials—for example, handouts or brochures—but the emphasis should be on communication in the classroom. Often, but not always, your presentation topic and final essay topic (see #6) will be essentially the same.
To write a final research paper, in which you tackle a specific population group or aspect of health care where inequalities are an issue. I strongly encourage you to discuss the possibilities with me. You may be writing about your presentation topic, or you may prefer to focus on something more directly relevant to your field study. The paper will be due in four stages:

1-paragraph proposal, due Tuesday, October 7
2-page summary or outline, plus bibliography, due Thursday, October 23
10-15 page draft essay, as close to complete as you can get it, due Thursday, November 13. The reason I require an early draft is that it will give you the rewarding experience of seeing your work improve when you have the chance to revise and refine it. Often students don't get this chance, but it is the way that virtually all writing is done outside of university, so I'd like you to get some experience with that.
Final draft, 12-15 pages, due last day of class: Thursday, December 4. Sorry, No Exceptions.

To present—very briefly, at the end of the quarter—your fieldwork plans. By this time, if all is going well, you should have identified your part-time (CMMU 102) and full-time field study placements. On the last two days of class, you will have exactly seven minutes to tell your classmates the following:

Where are you planning to work? (organization, location, work focus if you know it)
How does it relate to communities you belong to, or have belonged to in the past? (To answer this question, you'll need to know something about the context in which you'll work.)
Which theories or ideas will be most relevant to your experience (Why? In what way?)
The point of this assignment is, first, to help you focus on learning about the place where you'll be. Whether you're in Santa Cruz, California / Nashville, Tennessee / or New Delhi, India, there is a local geography, history, demographics, and culture that will influence your social change work profoundly. I'd like you to start researching that. Second, it will allow you to inspire one another with your plans. Even if you aren't sure your plans are inspiring, please trust me: they will be. Third, it will help you reflect on the role of theory in social activism.

Finally, to set a personal health goal and make progress on it. Healthy citizens make healthy societies, and vice-versa. This quarter, let's use these weeks to make a personal commitment to health improvement. I will ask you to write down a specific goal and put it into a sealed envelope. (I'll do this too.) Your goal may be to change one of your own health habits, or it may be to engage in activism or other volunteer work that encourages others make changes in theirs. Occasionally during the quarter, I will ask you to reassess your position relative to the goal you set. At the end of the quarter, I'll return your envelope to you so you can see how you have progressed.

Evaluation:

I prefer to give narrative feedback rather than a letter or number grade during the quarter, although I do grade each assignment and keep a database of your marks throughout. If you want to know how you're doing, beyond the comments I make on your work, please let me know what kind of feedback would be most useful and I'll try to accommodate you.

Class attendance. Anyone who misses two unexcused classes will not pass. Anyone who missed two unexcused sections will not pass either. "I'm busy with other courses" is not a legitimate excuse, not even during midterms or finals.
Participation - 10%
Reaction papers - 25%. These will be assessed in terms of how well you understand the ideas, connect theory to practice, the quality of your interpretation, perceptiveness of questions or issues raised, and clarity of writing (including spelling, grammar and punctuation). Note: If you think writing may be a problem for you, please come see me as soon as possible so that I can help.
Presentation - 25%. This will be assessed in terms of background research, organization, collaboration with the rest of your group (as appropriate), and creativity in your approach to presenting in class.
Final research paper - 35%. This will be assessed according to the same standards as those for the reaction papers, and in terms of the success with which you identified academic sources, gathered local information, and developed in your analysis the implications for health activism.
Field study plans presentation - 5%. This will be assessed in terms of how well you answer the assigned questions in the time allotted.
Health goal - 0%. This one doesn't have "monetary" (academic) value; it's priceless.

Required Reading

Bodenheimer T.S. and Grumbach K. (1998) Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach. New York: Lange Medical Books.

Fadiman A. (1997) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Minkler M., Ed. (1999) Community Organizing and Community Building for Health. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.

… and the 100-M Reader.

All are available at Slug Books Co-op, 224 Cardiff Place (the 7-11 mini-mall off High Street). Phone is 469-SLUG.

Also recommended:

Boston Women's Health Book Collective (1998). Our Bodies Our Selves. New York: Simon & Schuster. A classic. Not just for women; a great source for men interested in women, too.

Daniels N, Kennedy, Kawachi I. (2000) Is Inequality Bad for our Health? A New Democracy forum, edited by J Cohen & J Rogers. Boston: Beacon Press. This is a slender volume, with an argument and debates on the topic. At times it's a little bit dense, but you will get a range of views on the question at hand.

hooks b. (2000) Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York: Routledge Press. Not specifically about health (not about health very much at all), but coherent, passionate, and challenging set of essays about the relevance of social class to, well, everything. bell hooks is a brilliant intellectual who connects theory to practice every day.

Klein R, Day P, Redmayne S. (1997) Managing Scarcity: Priority-setting and Rationing in the NHS. Bucks: Open University Press. Completely focused on the U.K., but very well written and doesn't shy away from the R-word.

Shilts R. (1988) And the Band Played On. St. Martin's Press. The definitive account of the start of the AIDS epidemic in America, and how homophobia delayed the government in addressing the problem and caused many preventable deaths. Although attention has now turned to the devastating effects of (again denied) HIV in Africa and Asia, and to the associations between IV drug use and HIV in the US, this book remains a classic contribution to the real world policy literature. It is very long, so give yourself lots of time to read it. Note: The movie version of this was absolutely terrible.

Sarton, M. (1973) As We Are Now. New York: WW Norton & Co. A novella, written when the author was about 60, it was one of the first and remains one of the best depictions of what institutionalization can mean for a person who is old. Very dark, but affirms the heroine's strength of will and independence. Although there's been tremendous progress in developing better long-term care options, many points of resonance remain and there is a lot of work yet to do.

Stoller N. (1998) Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores and Junkies Respond to AIDS. New York: Routledge Press. A great study by one of our community studies professors.

Strunk W Jr. and White EB. (My edition is 1979, but get the latest.) The Elements of Style. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co. If you want to make sure of your writing skills, this is the book. In his introduction, EB White says they always referred to The Elements of Style as “the 'little book,' with the stress on the word 'little.'” It's really got all you need.

And don't neglect the web … (as if you would!)

But don't confine your research to the web either. Also, be ready for a lot of biased reporting over the Internet as well as high quality cutting edge information. One interesting site: http://gopher.npr.org/ will let you into stories that deal with current issues about health care organization and distribution. Have a look.

Finally …

It would be great if you would clip newspaper or magazine articles, or let me know about any TV, radio, or other media that is relevant to our inquiry this quarter. Books too—whatever you found illuminating and want to share.

Weekly Course Outline

How to read it:

For each week, I note

What assignments to hand in this week (date noted);
Readings for this (not next) week. Unless otherwise noted, please try to read it all by Tuesday, so you are ready for the week's lecture and discussion. First day is an exception, because we have to start somewhere. BG means the Bodenheimer & Grumbach book (Understanding Health Policy), M refers to Community Organizing and Community Building for Health (edited by Meredith Minkler), and R-## means those are the pages in the Reader where you'll find that particular article.
Recommended chapters or articles (on reserve at McHenry Library) are also noted. The material on reserve tends to offer historical background, interesting case studies, and other expansions that may be useful in your final project research.
What assignments are due the following week (date noted); and
Whether there's Section or a Field Study Workshop.

Day 1 (September 25) - Introductions, syllabus review, the concepts of empowerment and critical dialogue. Defining health, defining health care.

Readings about the experience of health and disease:

R-1-17. Black et al., Eds. Health and Disease: A Reader. Open University Press, 1986. Introduction and chapters 6.1-6.7 (Van den Berg, The meaning of being ill; Macintyre & Oldman, Coping with migraine; Shearer, Disability: whose handicap?; Newton, This bed my centre; Bowling & Cartwright, Caring for the spouse who died; Littlewood & Lipsedge, Ethnic minorities and the psychiatrist; Earthrowl & Stacey, Social class and children in hospital.)

… and some general reflections about health:

R-18-23. Bowling A. The conceptualization of functioning, health and quality of life. Measuring Health, Open University Press, 1991.
R-24-27. Breslow L. A health promotion primer for the 1990s, chapter 54 in Davey et al. (Eds.) Health and Disease: A Reader. Open University Press, 1995.
R-28-30. Pietroni PC. The greening of medicine, chapter 56 in Davey et al. (Eds.) Health and Disease: A Reader. Open University Press, 1995.
Reading reaction paper #1 due Tuesday September 30 on up to 3 articles. Choose either from those listed above, or from readings for Week 1. In any case, please do today's reading as well as what's required for next week.

Week 1 (September 30, October 2) - Thinking about inequality (fairness, equity, need). Health inequalities.

Hand in reading reaction paper #1

Readings:

http://www.commerce.usask.ca/faculty/backman/lectures/HCA434/Ethics/Ethics2/slides23.htm John Rawls: A Theory of Justice. (Then, for a critique, you might try http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i45/45b00701.htm) (not in your reader; find these on the Internet)
R-31-35. Wilkinson R (chapter 40, pp. 492-496) in Kawachi et al. (Eds.) The Society and Population Health Reader, vol. I: Income Inequality and Health. New York: The New Press, 1999.
R-36-44. Mustard JF. Healthy societies: an overview. Chapter 1 (pp.3-11) in Tarlov & St. Peter, Eds. (2000) The Society and Population Health Reader: volume II: a state and community perspective. New York: The New Press.
R-45-46. Angell M. Privilege and health: what is the connection? New England Journal of Medicine, 329(2):126-127, July 8 1993.
R-47-51. Whitehead M & Dahlgren G. What can be done about inequalities in health? Chapter 53 (pp. 367-375) in Davey et al. (Eds.) Health and Disease: A Reader. Open University Press, 1995.
Reading reaction paper #2 due Tuesday October 7. Choose up to three articles and/or chapters from readings for Week 2.
One-paragraph proposal for final essay due Tuesday October 7.
Section meets this Thursday, 6 p.m.: Soc Sci 2-075. Topics: arranging working groups, investigating the idea of community. One reading (strongly recommended, but not required): M-68-83 (Walter C, Community building practice: a conceptual framework).

Week 2 (October 7, 9) - The health care system. Insurance, public and private, principles of organizing health care, principles of participation, the politics of reform

Hand in reading reaction paper #2 and proposal for final essay.

Readings:

BG pp. 1-25 (Introduction, Paying for Health Care, part of Access to Health Care), 53-77 (How Health Care Is Organized, I & II), 104-112 (Long-term Care), 185-194 (Conflict & Change in U.S. Health Care)
R-52-58. Institute of Medicine. A Shared Destiny: Effects of uninsurance on individuals, families, and communities. March, 2003.
R-59-66. Rothman DJ. A century of failure: Class barriers to reform. In Monrone & Belkin, The Politics of Health Care Reform: Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future. Duke University Press, 1994.
R-67-72. Broder JM. Problem of lost health benefits is reaching into the middle class. New York Times, November 25, 2002.
R-73-84. McCanne D, collator. A selection from McCanne's Quote of the Day. He reviews the media and health services/health policy literature daily, then selects, comments, and shares his favorite. Plus some other recent articles from the NY Times.

Recommended if you want more (on reserve at McHenry Library):

Holosko J & Feit MD (Eds.) Health and Poverty. The Haworth Press, 1997.
Wildavsky A. "Doing better and feeling worse: The political pathology of health policy." Chapter 12 of Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis. Little-Brown & Company. 1979.
Reagan MD. The Accidental System: Health Care Policy in America. Westview Press, 1999. Especially, chapters 1, 4, 7.
Reading reaction paper #3 due Thursday, October 16. Choose up to three articles and/or chapters from those listed under Week 3.
Section meets this Thursday, 6 p.m.: Soc Sci 2-075. Topics: Developing group projects, Examining the theory/practice connection. One reading, required (R-85-91): Bunch, "Not by degrees: Feminist theory and education." Bunch & Pollack (Eds.) Learning Our Way. NY: Crossing Press.

Week 3 (October 14, 16) - Access, quality, and rationing. Healthy people, healthy societies: risks of the health risk model and the community-based alternative

Hand in reading reaction paper #3 (Thursday)

Reading for Tuesday:

BG, pp. 25-32 (rest of Access to Health Care), 144-160 (Medical Ethics & the Rationing of Health Care), 127-143 (The Quality of Health Care); recommended: pp. 160-175 (Health Care in Four Nations)
R-92-97. Ricketts et al. Access to health services. Geographic Methods for Health Services Research: A focus on the rural-urban continuum. University Press of America, 1994.
R-98-102. Maxwell RJ. Dimensions of quality revisited: from thought to action. Quality in Health Care, 1:171-177, 1992.
R-103-107. Grumet GW. Health care rationing through inconvenience. New England Journal of Medicine, 321(9):607-611.

Reading for Thursday:

BG, pp. 113-126 (The Prevention of Illness)
M-chapter 2 (McKnight JL. "Two tools for well-being: health systems and communities").
R-108-123. Minkler M. (1993) Ethical Challenges for Health Promotion in the 1990s. Berkeley Wellness Lecture Series, October 12, 1993.

If you have time, start reading Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down this week. Also recommended (M or on reserve at McHenry Library)—but give priority to Fadiman; you can come back to these later—are:

M-chapters 3 (Minkler M & Wallerstein N. "Improving health through community organization and community building: a health education perspective"), 12 (Wallerstein N. et al., "Freirian praxis in health education and community organizing: a case study of an adolescent prevention program"), and 19 (Roe K. et al., "Community building through empowerment education: a case study of HIV prevention community planning").
Brandt AM. "The Cigarette, Risk, and American Culture." In Leavitt & Numbers, Eds. (1997) Sickness & Health in America. University of Wisconsin Press, chapter 32.
Labonte R. (1986) Social inequality and healthy public policy. Health Promotion. 1(3): 341-351, 1986.
Samuels B, Glantz SA. The politics of local tobacco control. JAMA, 266(15):2110-2117 (October 16, 1991).
Reading reaction paper #4 due Tuesday, October 21. Base it on The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down—any aspect of the book. You may want to refer to the study questions at the back of the book, or to other class readings.
2-3 page summary and bibliography for final essay due Thursday, October 23
Workshop #1 this Thursday, 6-8 p.m. (No Section)

Week 4 (October 21, 23) - Efficacy vs. effectiveness: the example of cultural competency (the story of Lia Lee). Poverty, race and class.

Hand in reading reaction paper #4 (Tuesday)
Hand in summary and bibliography for final essay (Thursday)

Readings for Tuesday:

Finish Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Recommended: BG, pp. 195-206 (The Health Care Workforce), especially pp. 202-204; Brown & Walmsley. When "ordinary" isn't enough: a review of the concept of normalisation. In Bornat et al., Community Care: A Reader. OU Press, 1997. (on reserve at McHenry Library)

Readings for Thursday:

R-124-129. Abraham, LK. "Where crowded humanity suffers and sickens": the Banes family and their neighborhood. In Henderson et al. (Eds.) The Social Medicine Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
R-130-133. Bhopal R. Spectre of racism in health and health care: lessons from history and the United States. BMJ, 316:1970-1973, 27 June 1998.
R-134-142. Lewis, DK. African-American women at risk: notes on the sociocultural context of HIV infection. In Women Confront the Problem of AIDS.
R-143-151. Doty MM. Hispanic Patients' Double Burden: Lack of health insurance and limited English. The Commonwealth Fund, February 2003. (Overview and Conclusion. Full report on reserve at McHenry Library)

Also strongly recommended (M and on reserve)—these are all great readings for a community studies major, and if you don't get to them this week, definitely try to get to them before the quarter is done:

M-chapters 10 (McKnight & Kretzmann, "Mapping Community Capacity") and 21 (Wallack, "Media Advocacy: A Strategy for Empowering People and Communities").
hooks, b. pp. vii-9, 24-37 (Preface, Introduction, Coming to Class Consciousness) of Where We Stand: Class Matters. Routledge Press, 2000.
Poppendieck J., Charity and dignity, chapter 8 (pp. 230-255) in Sweet Charity, Penguin Books, 1998.
Rosner D. Health care for the "truly needy": nineteenth-century origins of the concept. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly/Health and Society, 60(3):355-385, 1982.
Reading reaction paper #5 due Tuesday, October 28. Choose from readings for Week 4 (aside from Fadiman, and including any of the reserve readings) or from readings for Week 5.
Workshop #2 this Thursday, 6-8 p.m. (No Section)

Week 5 (October 28, 30) - Gender and health (especially but not exclusively about women). Politics of birth, politics of children's health.

Hand in reading reaction paper #5

Readings for Tuesday:

R-152-157. Hartigan P. The importance of gender in defining and improving quality of care: some conceptual issues. Health Policy and Planning, 16(Suppl. 1):7-12, 2001.
R-158-167. Hardisty J, Leopold E. Cancer and poverty: double jeopardy for women. In M Stooker (Ed.) Confronting Cancer: Constructing Change. Chicago: Third Side Press, 1993.
R-168-178. Burns AA, Lovich R, Maxwell J, Shapiro K. Women's health is a community issue. In S. Niemann, Ed. Where Women Have No Doctor: A health guide for women. Berkeley: The Hesperian Foundation, 1997.
R-179-199. Boston Women's Health Book Collective. Violence against women. Chapter 8 (pp. 158-178) in Our Bodies, Ourselves, Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Readings for Thursday:

R-200. (Reuters) Study affirms link of infant death and poverty. New York Times, December 14, 1995.
R-201-203. Oakley A. Doctor knows best. In Black et al., Health and Disease: A Reader, OU Press, 1986.
R-204-225. Broberg L. Who controls a woman's birthing process? Chapter 1 (pp. 6-27) in her ommunity studies senior thesis, "Experiencing the Power of Birth." Spring, 2002.

Recommended:

M-Chapters 13 (Gutierrez LM, Lewis EA. "Education, participation, and capacity building in community organizing with women of color") and 14 (Wohlfeiler D. "Community organizing and community building among gay and bisexual men: the STOP AIDS project").
Workshop #3 Tonight (No Section)
Reading reaction paper #6 due Tuesday, November 4. Choose from readings for Week 6.

Week 6 (November 4, 6): Old age (social construction of frailty, social construction of intergenerational warfare). Brave new worlds: politics of genomics

Hand in reading reaction paper #6

Readings for Tuesday:

R-226-237. Pampel FC. Images of old age. Chapter 1 in Aging, Social Inequality, and Public Policy, 1998.
R-238-243. Cassel CK. Issues of age and chronic care: another argument for health care reform. JAGS, 40:404-409, 1982.
M-chapter 15, pp. 244-260. ("Community organizing among the elderly poor in San Francisco's Tenderloin district," by Minkler)

Readings for Thursday:

R-244-249. Muller-Hill, B. Lessons from a dark and distant past. In Kuhse & Singer, Eds. Bioethics: An Anthology. Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
R-250-259. Selections from Cultural Survival Quarterly, Summer 1996 (Maybury-Lewis D, Science and sensibility; Weiss KM, Biological diversity is inherent in humanity; Mead ATP, Genealogy, sacredness, and the commodities market.)
R-260-264. Chadwick R. The Icelandic database: do modern times need modern sagas? BMJ, 319:441-444, 14 August 1999.

Also strongly recommended:

Gattaca, the film
New Yorker Magazine article titled "Decoding Iceland," January 18, 1999.
Moody HR. (1995) Ageing, meaning and the allocation of resources. Ageing & Society, 15:163-184.
Workshop #4 Tonight (No Section)
Draft final essay due Thursday, November 13. (Groups 1 & 2: you have an extra week. Hand in your draft essays no later than November 20, and preferably on November 18.)

Week 7 (No Class November 11; November 13 only) - Group presentations 1-2

Groups 3-6: hand in draft essay
Section may meet tonight (TBC): Soc Sci 2-075

Week 8 (November 18, 20) - Group presentations 3-6

Groups 1-2: hand in draft essay
Section may meet tonight (TBC): Soc Sci 2-075

Week 9 (November 25 only; No Class November 27) - Field Study Presentations

Final essay due Thursday, December 4
No Section Tonight: Happy Thanksgiving!

Week 10 (December 2, 4) - Field Study Presentations and Summing up

Hand in final essay. Sorry, No Exceptions.

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100P. Theory and Practice of Resistance and Social Movements

TTh 2-3:45 p.m., College Eight 252
Instructor: Paul Ortiz
Phone: 459-5583
E-mail: portiz@ucsc.edu

“Times would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not the quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.”

—C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary

“True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands—whether of individuals or entire peoples—need to be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work, and, working, transform the world.”

—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Class Description:

The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a social movement that will change the world. We will learn what communities past and present have done to resist, negotiate, and overcome systems of power including (but not limited to) colonialism, slavery, racism, and gender oppression. Along the way, we will explore the following questions: Where do ideas for democratic social change come from? How do "ordinary people" organize in the face of exploitation? How does historical memory shape identity and political action? How do people build the relationships of trust that form the building blocks of new social movements? Emphasis will be placed on subaltern groups including slaves, peasants, migrants, working-class women, and "second-class citizens"—the people that Herman Melville referred to in Moby Dick as the "mariners, renegades and castaways" of the emerging global economy.

We will examine the intersection between past and present struggles using an interdisciplinary approach that keeps individual agency and structures of oppression in dialogue and tension. We will draw upon readings, films, oral testimony, music, poetry, "incendiary literature," and other forms of evidence.

The course is designed for community studies majors who plan to do a six-month field study. Non-majors interested in the course are welcome to participate if there is enrollment space.

Reading, writing, and research assignments for this course will be substantial—not for anyone contemplating a four-course load. I recommend thinking of this course as a primary responsibility in the quarter you take it. To paraphrase C.L.R. James, "You don't play with revolution."

Course Format

Thursday Evening Workshops: 6 p.m.–8 p.m. SEM

Class Participation and Response Papers: The purpose of the weekly Response Paper is to help you to explore key questions as well as to prepare for seminar discussions. Your seminar interventions should be driven by your careful reading of the texts and direct engagement with your colleagues. If you have not done the reading for a particular class session, maintain a respectful silence, learn, and prepare for the next session!

Response Papers
Must critically engage with class readings. Identify the author's primary argument and move to your own analysis of the piece. On weeks when we sample readings from different authors, you will write comparative response essays, picking two or more essays or chapters to compare and contrast. Each student will write 8 response papers (each will be 2-3 pages, typed, and double-spaced). Papers are due on the week of the assigned reading.

Final/Research Project: Each student will write a 15-page research paper on an organization or movement involved in the work of social change. The paper should address the movement's origins as well as its theory and practice of organizing and interior social relations.

Class Discussions
I expect each of us to observe mutual respect towards each other. Social movements are built upon relationships of trust and reciprocity. Please design a name tag that will help us learn your name. We will wear name tags until we learn each other's names.

Grading: Class participation (10%); Response papers (40%); Final Research Project (50%)

Office Hours
My office is room #208, College Eight. My regular office hours are Wednesdays, 10:00-11:30 and 2-3:30 p.m. I am available for meetings outside of these times via appointment.

Required Texts: (Available at Slug Books and at McHenry Library Reserves.)

Resistance and Social Movements Course Pack
Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
Benedita da Silva, Benedita da Silva: An Afro-Brazilian Woman's Story of Politics and Love
Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle
Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory
Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists Against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954-1985
Adolph Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics And Other Thoughts on the American Scene
Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

Reading List

“To denounce hierarchy does not get us anywhere. Instead what must be changed are the conditions that make this hierarchy exist both in reality and in minds.”

—Piere Bordieu

Week of September 25: Major Themes

Thursday: syllabus and course review, admin work. Community studies majors' essays (if necessary)

Week of September 30: Theories of Hierarchy, Resistance, Social Movements

Key themes: "Seeing" resistance; sequential stages of movement building; community organizing; campus organizing; New Economy extremism; management theory in the 1990s; "classrooms to cubicles" ideology.

Tuesday: Syllabus review: Reading Discussion: George Lipsitz, "Taking Positions and the War of Position," in American Studies in a Moment of Danger, 271-291 Course Pack (CP)

Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes their Lives, 1-55.

Robin D.G. Kelley, "‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South," Journal of American History (June 1993), 76-112. (CP)

Thursday: Reading discussion: "Key Analytical Terms" from the syllabus.

Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, vii-xxiv. (CP)

Paul Ortiz, "From Slavery to Cesar Chavez and Beyond: Farmworker Organizing in the United States," in The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy, ed., Charles D. Thompson, Jr. and Melinda Wiggins, 249-275. (CP)

Week of October 7: Capitalism, Slavery, and the Modern Firm

Key Themes: Emergence of capitalism and slavery; internationalism; Liberation theology; leveller and digger traditions; anti-capitalism; commonism; American Revolution from below; music of resistance.

Tuesday: Lecture: "Why, How, and When: The Emergence of Slavery, Global Capital, and Colonialism"

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 8-70.

Thursday: Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, 143-247.

Marjorie Kelly, The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, 1-15.

Week Of October 14: Class, Race, and White Privilege

Key Themes: Racism; class oppression; politics of race in California and UC Santa Cruz; contemporary imperialism; militarism and racism; liberal racism.

Tuesday: Stan Goff, "Race Odyssey," in Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti, 17-33. (CP)

George Lipsitz, "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness," and "California: The Mississippi of the 1990s," in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics, 1-23; and 211-233. (CP)

Maurice Berger, "White," in White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness, 164-168. (CP)

Robin D.G. Kelley, "Identity Politics & Class Struggle," New Politics, vol. 6, no. 2 (Winter 1997), 1-11. (CP)

Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, "Color Blindness, History, and the Law," in The House that Race Built, ed., Wahneema Lubiano, 280-288. (CP)

Adolph Reed, "Tokens of the White Left," in Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene, 71-76.

Thursday: Film: "Blue Eyed" (Paul in Hartford, Connecticut for American Studies Conference).

Week of October 21: Women in Struggle: Gender and Organizing

Key Themes: Gender, class, and race; neighborhood-based organizing; coping with outsiders; religion and social change; Worker's Party of Brazil; love and resistance.

Film: "I Was Born A Black Woman: Benedita da Silva" (if available)

Tuesday: Benedita da Silva, Benedita da Silva: An Afro-Brazilian Woman's Story of Politics and Love

Thursday: Benedita da Silva, cont.

Adolph Reed, "The Curse of Community," Class Notes, 10-14.

Karyn Strickler, "The Do Nothing Strategy: An Expose of National Progressive Politics," CommonDreams.org, June 30, 2003.

Week Of October 28: Organizing the Civil Rights Movement, I

Individual Meetings to Discuss Final Projects

Key Themes: Recruitment as an organizing problem; preparation for starting a protest movement; Organizing across generational divides; women's leadership; Civil Rights Movement; citizenship; Highlander Folk School

Research outlines due Tuesday

Tuesday: Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, 29-131.

Paul Ortiz, “‘Eat Your Bread Without Butter, But Pay Your Poll Tax!’: Roots of the African American Voter Registration Movement in Florida, 1919-1920,” in Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, eds., Charles Payne and Adam Green, (forthcoming, NYU Press) 1-39. (CP)

Thursday: Library Research Workshop (Meet at McHenry Library)

Week of November 4: Organizing the Civil Rights Movement, II

Key Themes: Historical memory, iconography, and identity. Identity politics. Identifying and overcoming divisions within movements. Invention of tradition and uses of tradition in social movements and "imagined communities."

Tuesday: Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, 132-179; 363-390.

Adolph Reed, "Why Is There No Black Political Movement," in Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene, 3-9.

Thursday: Reading discussion, cont. Small Group Discussions on Research.

Week of November 11: Holding Up Half the Sky: Gender, Family Networks

Key Themes: sweatshops in the United States; immigrants and organizing; culture of poverty theories; consumer responsibility; "free market" as arbiter of labor conditions.

Film: "With Babies and Banners" (Women's Emergency Brigade, Flint, Michigan 1936-37)

Tuesday: Veteran's Day: No Class. Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory, introduction; chapters 1, 2, and 5.

Thursday: Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, chapter 6, conclusion.

Adolph Reed, "Pimping Poverty: Then and Now," in Class Notes, 101-109.

Week of November 18: Workers' Culture, Religion, and State Terror

Key Themes: Guatemalan workers' struggles; organizing against multinational corporations; sustaining a movement in a one-party state; surviving state terrorism.

Film: "The Real Thing"

Tuesday: Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists Against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954-1985, 1-79; 176-233.

Thursday: Reading discussion of Levenson-Estrada, cont., and Jane Anne Morris, Richard L. Grossman & Frank T. Adams, "Corporate Social Responsibility: Kick the Habit," and "Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation," in Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy: A Book of History and Strategy, 55-71. (CP)

Week of November 25: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Mandatory individual meetings to discuss final projects

Key Themes: false charity; education and self-reflection; hidden reciprocity; liberation pedagogy.

Tuesday: E.P. Thompson, "Sir, Writing by Candlelight," in Thompson, Writing by Candlelight, 39-49. (CP)

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 25-67. (CP)

Saul Alinsky, "Community Traditions and Organizations," in Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, 76-88. (CP)

Thomas Frank, "Casual Day, U.S.A.," in One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy, 170-219. (CP)

Thursday: No Class (Thankstaking Holiday)

Week of December 2: Rethinking Resistance and Social Movements

Key Themes: 1) Redefining resistance and social movements; 2) Making the history relevant to contemporary struggles; 3) Discussion of research papers in progress.

Tuesday: Reading discussion wrap-up.

Small groups reassess the following questions: 1) What is power? 2) What is resistance? 3) How are social movements organized? 4) What are the most effective ways of documenting resistance and social movements? Individual Presentations of Research Findings.

Thursday: Individual Presentations, continued.

Course evaluations, Potluck!

Research Papers Due: December 11, 5:00 p.m. (my office)

****************

Social Theory, Resistance, and Social Movements: Some Key Analytical Terms
Fall Quarter, 2002
Theory and Practice of Resistance and Social Movements

Throughout the course of the quarter, we will use many terms in discussions that are taken for granted. Some terms, however, need to be clarified because we often use them without critical reflection. Below are some key words as well as the ways that I have come to define these terms in my work as a historian/activist of social change. It is important to note that these definitions are works in progress. You will have your own important contributions to make in this discussion.

Recruitment
The most overlooked category of analysis in sociological literature on social movements. The most overlooked factor in organizing. Too often, would-be organizers assume that they will attract potential members by being "radical" without understanding that "radical" is an abstraction at best and a posture at worst. How do you go about recruiting folks to attend a meeting or event? Why do you decide to attend a meeting? Do you attend events organized by self-righteous individuals who have all of the answers? To quote Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Pure Food Campaign, “We can't go to the people with a laundry list of politically correct ideas and say, ‘Will you join us?’ You've just got to say, ‘What do you think are the most important issues?’” Martha Prescod Norman, a student activist in the civil rights movement during the 1960s, states, “If you're preparing to join with a community that's ready to struggle on the highest level—and that's what we're talking about: people lose their jobs, get shot, their homes get burned and so forth, and risk everything they have—of course, you have to let the people decide what it is they're going to struggle for.”

Experiential Learning
To move forward in life, it is necessary to learn from experience. Social movements arise from the ways that people interpret their experiences. A group of people may be impoverished for generations. It is not the poverty that spurs them to organize. After all, they have always been poor. At a certain moment in history, however, this group may interpret their experience of poverty, their relations to others, and draw certain conclusions that lead them to begin organizing. Above all, people must develop a new level of self-confidence before they engage in new types of social activity whether it is testifying before a board of supervisors, organizing a cooperative, or going on strike. Experiential learning stems from self-activity.

C.L.R. James emphasized that self activity boosts self-confidence: "You have to know what you are, and what you can do. And, this, nobody can teach you except yourselves, by your own activities and the lessons that you draw from them."

In the following passage, James describes an example of experiential learning, the formation of the workers' councils in the Hungarian Revolution. People used their experiences in workplace production to begin to build a democratic society. These councils formed the basis of a new Hungary before they were smashed by Soviet tanks:

The secret of the workers' councils is this. From the very start of the Hungarian revolution, these shop-floor organizations of the workers demonstrated such conscious mastery of the needs, processes, and inter-relations of production, that they did not have to exercise any domination over people. That mastery is the only basis of political power against the bureaucratic state. It is the very essence of any government which is to be based upon general consent and not on force. The administration of things by the workers' councils established a basic coherence in society and from this coherence they derived automatically their right to govern.

Vanguard
In contrast to the democratic model that we have outlined above, too many would-be organizers employ a top-down model of recruitment that can charitably be described as movement-killing politics. The "vanguard party" has been a destructive concept in the history of the modern left. Unfortunately, it is still a prevalent mode of organizing. Taken from V. I. Lenin's What is to be Done? (which V.I. later repudiated), Joseph Stalin and others took the concept of the vanguard to mean that only educated, elite party bureaucrats could lead the revolutionary process to success. This anti-democratic concept is alive and well in capitalist societies that breed on hierarchy and inequality. Arguably, the Democratic and Republican parties are vanguard parties—insofar as they formulate policies and strategies that have little resonance among ordinary people—that's us. Thus, low voter turnout rates.

Leadership
You will hear me say this many times during the course of the quarter: "Leadership is incidental to the movement." (A phrase I've learned from reading movement literature and participating in movement politics.) This is the central lesson of successful social movements that arise in repressive societies. Instead, I prefer the term, "organizing leadership," a term that arose from the modern civil rights movement. Amzie Moore, a civil rights activist in Mississippi,

recalled: "One great thing I think was organized introduced in the South with reference to SNCC's tactics was the business of organizing leadership. If eleven people went to jail this evening who the power structure considered leaders, tomorrow morning you had eleven more out there. And the next morning eleven more." The tactical advantage of this democratic model of organizing leadership is obvious.

Social Movement
One of the most abused terms in social discourse. Nascent movements form every day but few of them pass through the sequential phases necessary to qualify for "social movement" status. Larry Goodwyn lays out four essential elements of movement building: “(1) the creation of an autonomous institution where new interpretations can materialize that run counter to those of prevailing authority—a development which for the sake of simplicity, we may describe as 'the movement forming'; (2) the creation of a tactical means to attract masses of people—'the movement recruiting'; (3) the achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis—'the movement educating'; and (4) the creation of an institutional means whereby the new ideas, shared now by the rank and file of the mass movement, can be expressed in an autonomous political way—'the movement politicized'” (Populist Movement, xviii). Judged by this standard, there are few if any social groupings that currently qualify for the moniker "social movement." There are many social groups that could become social movements.

Education
There is no example of a successful social movement in history that does not successfully educate its members, especially after initial failures. When an incipient social movement runs into trouble or suffers initial defeats—and this inevitably happens in initial stages—movement organizers must be able to explain why the failure has occurred or else the nascent movement will collapse. "Movements for social change are incubators of new knowledge," historian Robin D.G. Kelley notes. "They are often the most exciting and vibrant centers of intellectual work." Martha Prescod Norman was 16 years old when she became an activist with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNNC student activists initiated the sit-in movement in 1960 and became the backbone of the civil rights movement in the South. She notes, "I've been to school a lot and I have never been in an environment that was as intellectually stimulating as SNCC."

Self-Righteousness
Here is a sure movement-killer. It is not that one does not have the right to feel good about one's philosophy. It is simply that condescending attitudes of self-righteousness are barriers to recruitment of new members. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, no one asked potential boycotters to follow a "party line" or sign a statement of principles. Such ideologically correct thinking would have killed the Bus Boycott in its tracks.

Ideology
Would-be organizers mistakenly think that correct ideology serves as the most important tool of recruitment. Not much evidence to support this idea. Every day hundreds of nascent movements shut themselves down in the process of drafting ideological manifestos prior to engaging in any kind of meaningful social action. This divorce between theory and practice is deadly. Few will join a group that gives them long lectures on ideology. One can get this treatment in the workplace, church, and family.

Relationships of Trust
Social movements are created by people who form relationships of trust with each other. Activists who concentrate on writing manifestos would do well to think more deeply about the ways they interact with other people. On this note, it is disheartening to find activist organizations that purport to maintain democratic ideologies, yet maintain distinctly undemocratic social relations among each other. Without a relationship of trust, an organization drifts towards bureaucratic inertia.

William Greider observes: "Politics begins in personal relationships. Indeed, without that foundation, politics usually dissolves into empty manipulation by a remote few. People talking to one another—arguing and agreeing and developing trust among themselves—is what leads most reliably to their own political empowerment" (Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy).

History
All social movements have a history. There is no documented case of a "spontaneous" social movement. Learn that history, or it has a way of sneaking up on you and overwhelming your activism. The Peace Movement of the 1960s had a pre-history that stretched back to the formation of World War I-era peace organizations such as Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, not to mention the Quakers and other dissenting groups. In the 1960s proper, the "Peace Movement" stumbled through five years of experimentation (roughly, 1963-1968) before it began to effect real social change.

As Charles Payne shows in his work on the civil rights movement in Mississippi, young student activists succeeded in building the movement because they were able to productively engage in conversations with older African American activists who shared their experiences with the younger folks. Intergenerational organizing was a prerequisite in the making of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Community
Like the term "social movement," "community" has been so overused and ill-employed that it has been drained of meaning. Today, one hears of "the American community," the "business community," and the "Latino community" (to take only three such examples). Employed in this manner, the term is often invoked to create a static, homogenous social group with identical interests. This is inherently anti-democratic and retrogressive on issues of gender (men usually get to define the meaning of "community"), and it leads straight towards the politics of tokenism and demobilization. Adolph Reed notes that "Community presumes homogeneity of interest and perception, at least in principle. A politics stuck in its name is threatened by the heterogeneous tendencies put in motion by open debate. It is a politics that always has depended on narrowing the active black public and fastening the population as a whole to a middle-class–inflected program" (Reed, "Issues in Black Public Life," 12).

Nationalism
Nationalism attempts to magnify difference at the expense of social solidarity. Nationalism replaces—often with military force—the idea of universal rights for all people with the notion that only people that practice a specific religion or who belong to a certain group should enjoy rights and privileges. In the 20th century, the U.S. practiced a kind of white nationalism that South Africa borrowed from to create apartheid. The nationalist project—I'm thinking here of National Socialism in Germany—involves freezing a culture (sometimes called "essentialism") and rejecting any "outsider" influence. People who criticize nationalist projects from the "inside" are often dismissed as "self-haters," "race traitors," and other epithets. As the pace of cultural change increases and as boundaries between "nations" become more porous, nationalism becomes more reactionary.

Nationalism is also often deployed to obscure inequality. Hassan al-Barghouti, founder of the Democracy and Workers Rights Center in the West Bank city of Ramallah, writes of nationalism: "This is our bane … the use of nationalist discourse to cover over social inequalities, real economic injustices, and the sorry state of our civil life generally."

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100R. Theory and Practice: Asian Pacific American Activism

Mon 3:30–7:00 PM, 165 Baskin Engineering
Instructor: Deborah Woo
E-mail: dwoo@ucsc.edu
Office: 324 College Eight
Office phone: 459-2625; Messages: 459-3516
Office hours: TBA

Draft

Course Description

This course is part of a series of introductory courses offered by community studies to potential majors.* As such, it is concerned with the relationship between theory and practice as applied to social movements or more formal organizational efforts at empowering relatively disenfranchised segments of society. The substantive focus of the present course is the Asian Pacific Americans (APA) population, and the operating premise is that the best way to learn about change is to participate through some activity. While it is not a prerequisite that you be presently involved in some kind of community-based activity, the mutual sharing of life experiences will be an important part of class discussion.

Throughout the class, we will discuss the relevance of key theoretical perspectives for evaluating the situation of APAs. By midquarter, you will be asked to identify a research topic that you would like to explore. The topic should ideally address some issue that has social justice implications. Some forms of social inequality are transparently more unjust than others. Parents have more power than their very young offspring, and sweatshop owners have more power than their workers, but the cultural assumptions, social interactional dynamics, and issues about relative power would be very different. Thus, the questions that animate almost all ideologies about injustice and inequality concern the social conditions under which mobilization for change is warranted and legitimate. An important part of your research paper will involve your providing the context (e.g., local, community, and/or global) that helps explain why some kind of change is needed and what forms of activism are possible. In short, the issue of activism among Asian Pacific Americans is to be framed in terms of one's own potential practice, which in turn is to be informed by lived theory, i.e., that which emerges in actual, real-life situations, where the challenge of making sense and making change are one and the same. Because of the critical role played by campus/community alliances in our program, guest speakers will be invited to relate how their lives and community-based activities have been informed by their social location and theoretical/political perspective.

* A major goal of the course is to enable students to explore a specific issue or area that might potentially be a focus of some kind of long-term community activism. If accepted as a major, this will mean a six-month internship at some agreed-upon organization. While an organization typically takes on one or two students from our department, there is no reason why one or more of you might not enter the same field study, as long as the organization is willing. Should you decide you would like to apply for admission to the major, the research paper prepared for this class will determine your eligibility.

Course Requirements

Students are expected to keep weekly 1-2 page typewritten responses to the readings, reflecting on how various theoretical perspectives have implications for their own practice. These, along with your written responses to the study questions, will serve as the basis for class discussion. By midquarter, students should begin focusing the research paper on a specific issue involving APAs as activists or as communities in need of organizing. Following the library visit, each student will be asked to give a brief presentation of major highlights from this research. The research paper is due on the last day of class. Final grades are comprehensive, including all aspects of a student's work over the quarter—attending class, participating in discussion session, the quality of the research paper, and the oral presentation. If you request a letter grade, it will be given only at the end of the quarter, in order to encourage a learning-focused environment.

Required Readings:

Zhou, Min and James V. Gatewood (eds.), Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplnary Reader (New York and London: New York University Press), 2000
Omi, Michael and Dana Takagi (eds), Thinking Theory in Asian American Studies 21 (1&2), 1995
Course Reader (CR), available at UCSC Copy Center

Class Schedule

Sept. 29: What is theory? practice? and why is the relationship between the two so important?

Assignment #1: Write a one-page essay on some kind of community organizing or grassroots activity in which you have participated. Describe the campaign and what you learned from this experience. (Alternatively, you might discuss your work as a volunteer or member of some student group, especially if it imparted valuable learning experiences or skills.) If you have not taken part in any community-based activity, describe one you might want to be involved in and what you would expect to learn. Each student will share his or her essays at the next class meeting.

Oct 6: Liberation Theory

Hugh Vasquez and Isoke Femi, Chapter 1, "Creating the Environment," and Chapter 2, "The Framework/Working Assumptions," 31 pp. (CR)
Russell Leong, "Lived Theory," pp. v-x in Thinking Theory
Ronald Takaki, "From a Different Shore—Their History Bursts with Telling," pp. 117-131 in CAA

Assignment #2: List of three to four defining moments in your life. Then pick the one that you think has had the most impact on your individual attitudes, interests, or perspectives towards social inequality, oppression, or activism. Write 1-2 pages and bring this essay to the next class meeting.

Oct 13: Ethnic, Class, and Race-based Theories

Vasquez and Femi, Chapter 3, "Definitions," 6 pp. (CR)
Keith Osajima, "Asian Americans as the Model Minority," pp. 449-458 in CAA
Lucie Cheng and Philip Yang, "The 'Model Minority' Deconstructed," pp. 459-482in CAA
Lai and Arguelles, "Introduction" and "The Model Minority?" 10 pp. (CR)

Study Questions: #1 on p. 295 of CAA

Oct 20:

Zhou and Gatewood, "Introduction—Revisiting Contemporary Asian America," pp. 1-29 in CAA
Jere Takahashi, "'From Our Own Point of View'—Coming to Terms with the 1960s," 27 pp. (CR)
Gordon Lee, "The Forgotten Revolution," http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/features/issues/summer03/theforgottenrevolution.php
Omatsu, "The 'Four Prisons' and the Movements of Liberation—Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s," pp. 80-114 in CAA

Study questions: #2 and #3 on p. 113 of CAA

Assignment #3: Students have access to a many resources on this campus that can help off-campus communities or groups. These resources can include vital information about the community or group itself or, alternatively, information that would be useful to the community or group with which you plan to work. Write a one-page about the issue or social problem you would like to explore at the library. Include specific questions you want answered. This is due no later than the next class meeting.

Oct 27:

Shirley Hune, "Rethinking Race: Paradigms and Policy Formation," pp. 667-676 in CAA
Andy Barlow, "Rediscovering Race in the United States: Theoretical Challenges" and "The Best and the Whitest: Racism and the Middle-Class Social Order, 1945-1975," 46 pp. (CR)
ASA, "The Importance of Collecting Data and Doing Social Scientific Research on Race," http://www.asanet.org/governance/racestmt.html

Study questions: #1 on p. 698 of CAA

Video: Race—The Power of an Illusion, Episode 3, "The House We Live In"

Nov 3:

Paul Ong and Karen Umemoto, "Life and Work in the Inner City," pp. 233-253 in CAA
John Horton, "Immigration, Alienation, and Political Change: A Positive Case from Los Angeles," 13 pp. (CR)

Study Questions: #1 on p. 295 of CAA

Nov 10: Meet at McHenry Library, Rm 167

Read any two unassigned chapters from CAA.

Nov 17: Nation and Gender-based Theories

Ling-chi Wang, "The Structure of Dual Domination," pp. 149-169 in Thinking Theory
Min Zhou and Regina Nordquist, "Work and Its Place in the Lives of Immigrant Women—Garment Workers in New York City's Chinatown," pp. 254-277 in CAA

Study Questions: #2 on p. 295 of CAA

Nov 24: Community-Based Perspectives

Lane Hirabayashi, "Back to the Future: Re-framing Community-Based Research," pp. 103-118 in Thinking Theory
Paul Takagi and Margot Gibney, "Theory and Praxis, Resistance and Hope," pp. 119-126 in Thinking Theory
Min Zhou, "Social Capital in Chinatown—The Role of Community-Based Organizations and Families in the Adaptation of the Younger Generation," pp. 315-335 in CAA

Study Questions: #2 and #3 on p. 352 of CAA

Dec 1: