Social Thought & Polic. Econ 492H - STPEC Focus Seminar II
Fall
2018
01
4.00
Stellan Vinthagen
W 4:00PM 6:30PM
UMass Amherst
80287
Elm Room 212
vinthagen@soc.umass.edu
A four credit honors seminar for STPEC students who have completed STPEC 391H. Focus seminar topic changes each semester. Fulfills the STPEC Focus seminar requirement.
STPEC students only STPEC 391H Topic Title: Land struggles: Local communities' nonviolent resistance and construction of alternatives in the Americas
Course description: This course focuses on how ordinary people struggle for land and housing in the US and Latin America. It brings up the contexts, values, strategies, tactics and mobilization of movements like the Community Land Trusts (CLT) in the US, the landless workers movement in Brazil (MST), and the Indigenous peoples of Chiapas (Zapatistas). This course brings together two teachers that combine their academic and activist backgrounds in a collaboration, making sure the course has both a clear activist perspective and an academic basis. The course gives a necessary political-economic background to land issues and injustices, but focuses on how poor and marginalized communities go to direct action: try to create autonomy, self-governance and build their own constructive programs and resist injustices. Key themes are community based struggles and the combination of resisting injustice with building new societies and alternatives. Seminars will involve students through discussions, which follow up on background lectures, guest visits from researchers and activists, films, literature readings, student projects, etc. Assignments consist mainly of a book review, oral presentations, and a course paper analyzing a chosen case of relevance. Extra credits are offered for excursions to relevant projects in New England. The overall aim with this course is strategy and social change development: to critically assess popular land struggles, and what challenges and possibilities movement activists face when they try to combine resistance with the building of new societies. This course will be co-taught by Joanne Sheehan, activist and educator.
Course description: This course focuses on how ordinary people struggle for land and housing in the US and Latin America. It brings up the contexts, values, strategies, tactics and mobilization of movements like the Community Land Trusts (CLT) in the US, the landless workers movement in Brazil (MST), and the Indigenous peoples of Chiapas (Zapatistas). This course brings together two teachers that combine their academic and activist backgrounds in a collaboration, making sure the course has both a clear activist perspective and an academic basis. The course gives a necessary political-economic background to land issues and injustices, but focuses on how poor and marginalized communities go to direct action: try to create autonomy, self-governance and build their own constructive programs and resist injustices. Key themes are community based struggles and the combination of resisting injustice with building new societies and alternatives. Seminars will involve students through discussions, which follow up on background lectures, guest visits from researchers and activists, films, literature readings, student projects, etc. Assignments consist mainly of a book review, oral presentations, and a course paper analyzing a chosen case of relevance. Extra credits are offered for excursions to relevant projects in New England. The overall aim with this course is strategy and social change development: to critically assess popular land struggles, and what challenges and possibilities movement activists face when they try to combine resistance with the building of new societies. This course will be co-taught by Joanne Sheehan, activist and educator.