Feminist Social Action
WGST 3090 Tuesday 6:30 - 9:15 Forest Drive 1118
description | grading | attendance | academic conduct | readings and web links | syllabus | galileo password | eaglesource
Course Goals and Objectives
Feminist Social Action combines historical and theoretical analyses of feminist social movements with community engagement and social action. Throughout the semester, we will consider and critique a variety of strategies that feminists have used, assess their effectiveness, and apply those ideas to bring about social change. My desire is that you:
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Learn about and reflect on women's participation in, contribution to, and transformation of areas of social life including culture, society, politics, economy and religion;
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Use what you are learning in the classroom to identify specific campus and community issues important to feminist social activism;
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Work with faculty and community to design community engagement, service learning, and local activism projects;
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Understand the relationship between local issues and the regional, national, and international stakes of these issues.
Crucially, we will be using our critical understanding of society and culture to thoughtfully and effectively act in response to the issues important to us, our lives, and our world.
As a result of the course, I would like you to be able to:
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Analyze texts and information critically;
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Clearly articulate, both orally and in writing, complex ideas and relationships to diverse audiences;
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Effectively organize a campus or community-based action project;
- Speak effectively in a variety of public venues (to the media, to social and civic organizations, at events).
What I Expect From You
Half of your grade will come from the social action/ project that you implement and/or participate in.
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At the beginning of the semester, you will write a project proposal in which you specify the project, the project team, the actions you will take throughout the semester, and the contribution your project will make to/for your target audience.
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Throughout the semester, I will get individual progress reports from you about this project, including your articulations of obstacles you are encountering and help you need from me.
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At the end of the semester, you'll turn in a project evaluation assessing the effectiveness of your project, what you learned from it, and what doing this project tells you about what/how you might do in the future.
Half of your grade comes from our class working sessions. We are going to run this class as though it is a committee. As your teacher, I am the committee chair for the semester. Each of you will be defining projects that are important to you, and, most likely, several of you will become involved in groups working on similar projects. Your interests and directions will spin off subcommittees for the semester. Our readings, which I've selected to give us both practical, hands-on ideas, models for how other people have engaged in social action, and historical perspective, will form the basis of about half of our meetings; think of our reading-discussion meetings as strategizing sessions. In order to carefully and critically think about actions we might take, we need both practical and theoretical resources.
Graded materials for our reading-discussion-strategizing meetings as well as subcommittee meetings will include:
- Reflections after each session (large group) about the important ideas, resources, or information that is relevant to the work you want to do in the world (these reflections will evolve from our readings and discussions).
- Minutes of subcommittee meetings.
- Reflections on group dynamics, leadership and team work styles, the obstacles you face for organizing and implementing a social action, and the organizing and implementing strategies that were most effective for you.
- Personal inventory -- throughout the semester, what are the strengths that you find yourself able to draw on? What are the areas you are least strong in and need to complement with others' talents/skills? Any effective social change requires both strong and effective leadership and the ability for diverse groups of people to work together towards a common goal. As you will see in our readings, political action groups are always plagued with their own internal political problems -- I want you to be able to think about these issues and to reflect on both your own leadership and group / team work style. You will turn the personal inventory in at the end of the semester, though you should be working on it -- in note form, through journal entries, in conversations with your colleagues -- throughout the semester.
Readings/Texts (Texts at the GSU bookstore)
Course Packet (at ReproGraphics, in shopping Plaza behind Wendy's, next to Hachi's)
Required:
- Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
- Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings by Miriam Schneir
- Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in American Since 1960 by
Flora Davis
- Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future by Jennifer
Baumgardner and Amy Richards
- Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism by Alice Walker
- That Take Ovaries: Bold Females and Their Brazen Acts by Rivka Solomon
- hooks, b. (2000). /Feminism is for everbody: Passionate politics/. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
- Labaton, V., & Martin, D. L. (Eds.). (2004). /The fire this time: Young activists and the new feminism/. New York: Anchor Books
- Tea, M. (Ed.). (2003). /Without a net: The female experience of growing up working class/. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.
- Ezekial, Judith. Feminism in the Heartland.
- Burn, S. M. (2005). /Women across cultures: A global perspective/ (Second ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.
- Ehrenreich, B., & Hochschild, A. R. (Eds.). (2002). /Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy/. New York: Owl Books.
- Seager, J. (2003). /The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World/ (Third ed.): Penguin.
The UVA Women's Center offers two courses on feminist activism, coupled
with an internship either in the center itself or at a local agency that
advocates for women in some respect. Among the books required for the
course (in addition to many individual readings) are:"Community Activism and Feminist Politics in the United States" & "Community Activism and Feminist Politics: A Global Perspective"
If you'd like copies of the syllabi, contact Dawn Anderson at
dla3y@virginia.edu. She's a member of this list, but I haven't seen any
response from her about this subject (apologies if she has and this is a
duplication!).
Recommended: No turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women, Estelle B. Freedman; Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End, Sara M. Evans; With all Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, Anne E. Brodsky; I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, Charles M. Payn
Shereen Siddiqui
Florida Atlantic University
siddiqui@fau.edu
Attendance
Come.
Syllabus
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- Course overview
- Introductions, definitions of interests and Projects
- Establishing Group Dynamic and Committee Structure
- Leadership style, self-assessment, Working Effectively in Groups -- Kellogg Foundation Leadership Online & Internet Starting Points:
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Monday, Jan. 16, 7:00 p.m.: Ghosts of the Mississippi, RU Theatre
Tuesday, Jan. 17,
Mrylie Evers-Williams: Tomorrow's Leaders: Their Voices, Our Journey
-- PAC
Post-discussion Coffee & talk; begin formation of subcommittees.
Handout: Model Reflection on Group Dynamics and Personal Inventory
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Semester Schedule and Checklist agreed on by Committee 1.10.06 Meeting
Grassroots: "Introduction," "Portrait of an Activist," and "Why the World Needs Another Advice Book" |
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Grassroots: "The Real World," "The Activist at Work," & "Creating Activism" -- Committee Chairs: Kaylie & Jenna
- By Feb. 3 Project Proposal Due
- First Notebook Entries Due Feb. 3. Committee decision from class 1.10 re: Notebooks: Include three subheadings
- Sign up for dates to chair committee meetings
- Finalize project groups; arrange with group members meeting time for next week, post to FaceBook, and notify me
- Reflections on Class Discussion. What ideas did you get? Who brought what to the table? What resources/knowledge do your committee members have for you to draw on? Who do you need to follow up with? Who has ideas/interests that you want to form coalitions/projects around? Who has a similar understanding of what kinds of issues we face and how to address them? Remember: these reflections are not about the readings per se -- they are about the discussion of the readings, where the readings are merely our starting point. Our agenda is: what do we do with the readings, how do we use them to catalyze your thinking and inspire our action? Your notebook reflections attend to the issues of catalyzing and inspiring.
- Group Dynamics. Throughout the semester, you need to pay careful attention to how a group functions. When I structure this, not as a traditional "class," but as a "committee," that means something. What does it mean? What am I asking us to do when I ask us to make decisions together about due dates, about how your journals will be formatted, about the operative details of the semester? What implications does this have for power, authority, collaboration, consensus? What is your experience of this process? How does the group dynamic evolve over time? Who is taking what kind of roles? Why? What makes an effectively functioning group? What derails group effectivity/function? Throughout the semester, what strategies are you finding for helping the group function effectively and well? I want you to reflect on these group dynamics in your subcommittees as well. REVIEW Kellogg Foundation Transformation Leadership links
- Personal Inventory. Any effective social change requires effective leadership with a sustaining vision, the ability to inspire, organize, and mobilize diverse groups of people around a common cause, and an ability to flexibly and creatively respond to changing circumstances. For this reason, our class will spend a significant amount of time thinking about how groups work and how WE work in groups. As the semester progresses, use your reflections on group dynamics, in both your subcommittees and in our large group meetings, to reflect on the styles for working with and leading groups that you have evolved. The Kellogg Foundation Leadership Traning Instutite defines transformative leadership as promoting:
- Personal and emotional stability and maturity among organizational participants through establishing a culture, context or field that supports advancement of self-knowledge, enhanced self-esteem, and emotional and physical wellness;
- Development of whole person relationships including recognition and regard for the uniqueness and diversity of individuals and the interrelated aspects of their lives (i.e. personal, professional and relational); and
- Development of the culture and resources for continual learning to empower individuals to grow, create and change themselves, the organization and the society.
From this perspective, analyze your ways of being in a group. Do you share power? Do you facilitate? What are you comfortable with and what you are not comfortable with? What are your triggers? What personality styles push your buttons? Do you help move things in the group along? How do you respond to moments when the group is "stuck"? How do you deal with your own emotional responses to collaborative work? Do you help fuel the group's creative, productive imagination? Are you emotionally generous to your group members? Do you get stuck? Do you pose obstacles to the group's productive functioning? If so, where do these come from, and why? What strategies have you learned in the past that you bring to group dynamics? As you watch other people's interactions, which styles are most appealing to you? Are there other relational styles that you might want to try on? Why?
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Subcommittee and Small Group Meetings
Turn in one copy of minutes for each group. As a group, you'll need to determine how you will take and approve the minutes and how you will turn them into me.
- Since you are meeting in subcommittees two weeks in a row, you will only need to turn in one set of notes for all of your meeting these next two weeks. Formats notes like this:
- Date, time, place of meetings
- Who is in attendance at each meeting
- What you accomplished at each meeting. For the first meeting, you will be setting goals, working out your project time line, establishing tasks, etc. For subsequent meetings, establish an agenda/set of goals to be accomplished at each meeting. Be clear about what needs to be done, who is doing what.
- The tasks assigned to each committee member, the timeline for completing each task, and a running checklist of what has been completed, what is pending.
- You'll need to pay careful attention to what kinds of dynamics are in place, what is allowing you to work efficiently, what impedes you. Depending on how comfortable you feel with your group, your group might decide to include the reflection on subcommittee group dynamics in the subcommittee notes, or you might prefer to include this in your notebook for the class. Of course, your notebook is always a place to record whatever you need to work out/think through, so you may find yourself including subcommittee dynamics in your notebook even if your group includes those in the subcommittee report.
Sample Project Proposal |
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wk 6
2.14 |
Subcommittee and Small Group Meetings (see week 5 instructions)
Minutes from Subcommittee Meetings Due |
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Grassroots: "The Revolutionary Next Door" and "Epilogue" -- Committee Chairs: Jessica, Doris
Feb. 24 Project Progress Report Due
Minutes from Subcommittee Meetings Due |
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Course Packet: From I've Got the Light of Freedom "If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me: The Redefinition of Leadership," "Slow and Respectful Work: Organizers and Organizing," and "A Woman's War"
Second Notebook Entries Due by March 10 – give attention in these notebooks to subcommittee analysis/ work – how is your committee working? What are you learning about yourself and how to work with people? What are you finding difficult? Pleasurable? Helpful? Obstructive? The personal inventory and group dynamics sections will be very important tools for me to help your groups – be thorough!
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Subcommittee and Small Group Meetings -- Minutes from subcommittee meetings due ASAP after group meets
Wednesday March 8 – Kate Raphael, IWPS Palestine
- noon, lunch with Kate
- 4:30 p.m., informal discussion/Pizza w/Kate
- 7:00 p.m., Kate's talk: Exploding Myths About Arab Women: Palestinian Women's Leadership in Resisting Occupation and Building Democratic Institutions
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wk 10
3.21 |
From No Turning Back: Feminist Visions and Feminist Strategies ch. 13 "New Words and Images: Women's Creativity and Feminist Practice" and ch. 14 "No Turning Back: Women and Politics
Wednesday, March 22: Bonnie Fisher “Sexual Victimization on College Campuses: What do We Know?” 7:00 p.m. Nessmith-Lane Assembly Hall
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Subcommittee and Small Group Meetings -- many of you have been implementing projects already --- if we are meeting for project participation -- update me in your minutes on what has happened, what you need from me. If your projects are already "done," use your minutes to evaluate the successes of your projet work and and analyze what you can do more efficiently next time.
Feminist Self Defense
Russell Union Room 2041
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From With All Our Strength ch. 4 "I've Opened the Closed Doors of Ignorance: Education as Revolution" -- Committee Chairs: Lynn-Cee, Crystal
Third Notebook Entries Due this week
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5:00 - 7:00 p.m.: Sexual Ed for the College Student Forum, RU 2048 -- come!! :-)
Class starts 7:00 p.m., meet in union 2041
From Tidal Wave "The Way we Were, the Way We Are," "Pesonal Politics," "Deep Currents," "Resurgence"
4. 14 Project Progress Report Due
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Finish Tidal Wave
Assertiveness for Women --
This program will give practical instruction on how women can learn to assert themselves in a positive and effective manner.
Facilitated by Dr. Prentiss Price of Counseling Center
12:00 PM-1:30 PM on April 18, 2006 Russell Union Room 2041
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One-on-One evaluations of strengths, target areas:
5:00 Heather
5:10 Kjasa
5:20 Diandra
5:30 Doris
5:40 Jessica
5:50
6:00 Megan
6:10 Jenna
6:20 Kaylie
6:30
6:40
6:50 Lynn-Cee
Class Begins: 7:00 p.m.
Oral Project Assessment and Evaluation: (Instructions)
7:00 - 8:00 p.m.: Doris, Lynn-Cee, Jessica, Diandra
8:00 - 8:20 Crystal
8:40 - 9:00 Kjasa
Last Notebook Entry Due |
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Final Exam
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May 2, 6:30 - 9:15 p.m.
Oral Project Assessment and Evaluation:
6:30 Megan, Heather, Jenna, Kaylie
7:45 Heather
Written Project Evaluation Due
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Overview of Leadership Qualities, Kellogg Foundation: http://www.wkkf.org/Programming/Overview.aspx?CID=148
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation's leadership development efforts are based on the accumulation of almost 70 years of experience using leadership development to create and sustain social and economic changes important to communities and the institutions that serve them. Leadership development has been and will continue to be an integral part of the Foundation's work since its inception, and has been a key factor in the Foundation's success over the years. What we've learned from past programming is simple: Where there are good leaders, greater program impact and sustainability are realized.
Leadership development, both current and future, is based on the following assumptions:
- The primary focus of leadership development at the Kellogg Foundation is to build institutional and community capacity to lead social, cultural, and economic change efforts that improve the social and economic well-being of people and their communities.
- Leadership development is strategically integrated throughout all programming goals, objectives, and priorities in order to realize greater impact, leverage new knowledge, promote sustainability, and have a positive influence on the transformation of individuals, communities, and institutions, through capacity building and public policy change.
21st Century Leadership Characteristics
In the context of current social and economic trends, the leadership skills and characteristics necessary for influencing future change will be the ability to:
- Bring people together being as inclusive as possible around a common agenda for collective action;
- Demonstrate collaborative and inclusive decision making in a community setting;
- Be flexible and responsive in the face of change;
- Engage in continuous learning and improvement;
- Create trusting relationships in a team environment;
- Communicate a compelling set of visions, purposes, and values;
- Be willing to develop, nurture, and create space for others to lead;
- Possess a global perspective and understand its impact on local communities;
- Use imagination and creativity in the solution of difficult problems;
- Be open to new and different ideas;
- Operate from a systems orientation; and
- Be capable of informing and influencing policy change.
Kellogg Leagership for Community Change http://www.klccleadership.org/
Transformational Leadership Working Papers http://www.academy.umd.edu/publications/klspdocs/tranformational_index.htm
Project Proposals: For the purposes of this class, I want you to apply our readings and discussions about social change to your analysis of your local situation in order to actually accomplish something on campus or in the community. But I also know that we have only 15 weeks, you are balancing other classes and work and the complexities of living a life. I want to give you tools and resources that you will be able to use in your activist future, but we all also need to remember that, while I want to introduce you to things you may be able to use in the future, it is not possible to absorb or remember everything that I am exposing you to. That is the context for this point: I want you to review a few project proposal guidelines from actual funding agencies that you may apply to in the future; this is so that you have a larger understanding of the role of a project proposal in funding activist work. However, many components of a standard proposal -- a budget, for example -- are not important for you this semester, for this class (because, of course, we have no money:-) So, while I want you to review these links and gain a general understanding of a project proposal, its format and purpose, the actual proposal that you turn into me will be less elaborate and more basic.
Proposal Format:
- Project Title
- Project Team Members (include all names and complete contact information, including phone, email, and mailing address)
- Project Overview (100 words or less: Explain the purpose and goals of the project)
- Activities, Outcomes, Strategies (500 words or less: Explain the activities you propose, who will accomplish which activities, and what you hope to accomplish with your project. Include a timeline/schedule for getting things done.)
- Necessary Resources (A statement about what you will need in order to do your project/activity)
Proposal Models:
Final Project Assessment and Evaluation:
You have two components to the final project assessment and evaluation: the written and the oral component.
- Written Component:
- I want you to reflect seriously and critically on what you have found out this semester about how to work in groups, how to effectively implement a project, what the obstacles you will face are (both structural and external -- getting resources, organizing people, planning, time constraints, etc. -- and internal -- burnout, emotional fluctuations, oscillations between excitement/enthusiasm/hope and confusion, periods of being overwhelmed, negotiating despair). What have you learned about yourself, about your strengths and what you need to develop or recruit people to help you with? What is the difference between what you hoped would happen with your projects and what actually happened? Explain this gap.
- Written project evaluations should be at least 2 pages, not more than 5. Consider this a final report on what actually transpired this semester, including an assessment of the actual project activity.
- Oral Component:
- The oral project assessment and evaluation gives you the opportunity to use your classmates to think through how your projects progressed this semester. Two of the important things that the oral dimensions adds are:
- An outside perspective -- your colleagues may well have ways of seeing/interpreting/imagining that may help you as you process your work from this semester;
- Re-affirmation -- no matter what went wrong in our project work (and things, always, go wrong!), there are productive lessons and important accomplishments that we need to focus on.
- The structure of the oral project assessment:
- Each individual speaks for about 10 minutes. During this time, reflect on your strengths, what you did well, what you realize you could have done differently, the group dynamics, etc.
- After each individual speaks, the group as a whole engages in cross-talk. What are the differences in your perceptions? Did you experience things/think about things differently than others in your group? If so, how? During the group's cross-talk, the rest of us remain quiet, listen, think, try to really hear/see the group assessing their work.
- Once the group is done w/individual and group reflection, the rest of us can enter the dialogue. Our job is to offer productive, positive feedback that highlights the strengths we each have to build from and offers helpful brainstorming about how to supplement our strengths with additional practices, tools, resources.
Supplemental Bibliography
- Alice Echols, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Notes Toward a Remapping of the Sixties
- Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left
- Jo Freeman, On the Origins of Social Movements
- Jo Freeman, A Model for Analyzing the Strategic Options of Social movement Organizations
- Jo Freeman & Victoria Johnson, eds., Waves of Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties
- Marco Guigni, Doug McAdam, & Charles Tilly, eds., How Social Movements Matter
- Doug McAdam, Culture and Social Movements
- Doug McAdam, The Classic Model of Social Movements Examined
- Carol Mueller, Conflict Networks and the Origins of Women's Liberation
- Helene A. shugart, Isn't it Ironic? The Intersection of Third-Wave Feminism and Generation X
- Arlene Stein, Sisters and Queers: The Decentring of Lesbian Feminism
- Verta Taylor, Social Movement Continuity: The Women's Movement in Abeyance