Taught By:
Miram Shakow
Professor of Anthropology
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
The College of New Jersey
shakowm@tcnj.edu
Read profile here.
Course Description:
This course provides the opportunity for you to develop skills to take meaningful and effective action on climate change and other social issues. Climate change is one of the most critical issues of our time, yet most people find it difficult to incorporate a response to climate change into their daily lives and our current political systems are just beginning to address this problem of large scope and complexity.
The purpose of the class is to empower you to understand climate change, learn the effective ways to address climate change policies, and to act. You will get out of this course what you put into it. It's intended for people who care about their planet and their communities and are willing to work for it Through the key concepts of environmental justice and climate justice, you will choose an issue and launch a campaign to institutionalize the solution to that issue.
What is unique about this course is that it is designed to do social action. Instead of just reading about it in a book, you will learn about how to bring about social change by doing it. We will still use “book knowledge,” but my hope is that this knowledge will be challenged by what you’re learning in your social action campaigns, and that you will develop a more critical and deeper understanding of public issues and community change through action and reflection. Thus, this course is an action-oriented, solutions-based, course on community activism.
