Taught By:
Gretchen Sneegas
Assistant Teaching Professor
Geography Department
University of Washington-Seattle
Read profile here.
Course Description:
Preliminary syllabus description: In this 300-level course, we will ask: what does action on climate change look like when we place social and environmental justice at its foundation? We will enact a climate justice-centered approach towards climate change adaptation and mitigation, prioritizing the needs of the most vulnerable among us. To do this, the course will center on an immersive, team-based social action project: your team will develop and enact a social action campaign to address an existing climate injustice. Your team’s campaign will seek to change a policy, whether on campus or in the broader Seattle or regional community, to address this injustice. While there are a mixture of individual and group assignments, this class is founded on a collaborative learning model, with the understanding that you can learn far more together than alone.
We will hit the ground running in this class! In order to be prepared to begin launching your campaign by mid-quarter, we will start by reviewing and developing the campaigns and associated actions for the class. The first three weeks of class will also focus on bringing you up to speed with the basics of current climate justice, geographic thought, and collective change theories.
In Week 4, you will select your campaigns and begin working in your teams. While the remainder of the quarter will still incorporate academic readings and discussion, our focus will shift to researching, designing, and implementing your team’s social action campaign in conversation with a local community organization. We will incorporate readings, videos, and guest lectures examining case studies of prior and existing environmental campaigns (including what worked and what didn’t), while building your skills and troubleshooting issues that come up in real time while completing campaign actions. You will apply and integrate foundational concepts discussed in class to your foreground climate justice as part of your team's social action campaign.
