Feminist Social Action

Feminist Social Action

WGST 3090 Tuesday 6:30 – 9:15 Forest Drive 1118

description | grading | attendance | academic conduct | readings and web links | syllabus |

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:

• 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;

• Use what you are learning in the classroom to identify specific campus and community issues important to feminist social activism;
• Work with faculty and community to design community engagement, service learning, and local activism projects;
• 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:

• Analyze texts and information critically;

• Clearly articulate, both orally and in writing, complex ideas and relationships to diverse audiences;
• 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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

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:

1. Project Title
2. Project Team Members (include all names and complete contact information, including phone, email, and mailing address)
3. Project Overview (100 words or less: Explain the purpose and goals of the project)
4. 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.)
5. Necessary Resources (A statement about what you will need in order to do your project/activity)

Proposal Models:

• Third Wave Foundation’s Organizing and Advocacy Grant Guidelines http://www.thirdwavefoundation.org/programs/advocacy.html
• Not a model exactly, but useful: FMFL’s How-to Guidelines http://www.feministcampus.org/know/training-units
• Sample grant from the American Philanthropy Review http://web.archive.org/web/20001218024300/http://charitychannel.com/GuestShare/Tim_Puffer/
• MUST SEE site with every resource you could possibly imagine about finding and applying for grants: Deborah Kluge’s Proposals workshops http://www.proposalwriter.com/grants.html

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