Howard E. Woodin Environmental Studies Colloquium Series: Social Change and/or Transformation

ENVS 0401 B Community Engaged Environmental Studies Practicum Presentations: Social Change and/or Transformation

This section of ENVS 401 explores the question of “social change”: what it is, what it looks like, how it happens, and how to do it. Specifically, our will seminar will engage diverse efforts in Vermont broadly aimed at enacting a just transition away from an unsustainable, oftentimes inequitable status quo. What kinds of strategies might be needed at this critical juncture to effect real structural transformation, change the rules of the game, and dislodge business-as-usual? How do organizers go about building power and fostering the collective capacities needed by ordinary people to fight their way out of the everyday crises rendering life precarious? What sorts of methods, frameworks, and underlying assumptions about making change do different groups bring to this work? Students will partner with a range of groups as they attempt to work out the necessary preconditions for achieving systemic change (rigorously tracing how to get from “here” to “there”); to bring together the requisite coalitions of actors who will carry out such change (out of what can be a fractious set of constituencies); and to assemble the various practical building blocks needed for a sufficient and equitable response to the startling task of rapidly overhauling “all aspects of society” (as scientific bodies like the IPCC have demanded). In sum, project teams will support the work of community partners each pressing for change, and sometimes even transformation: in their own ways, within their respective contexts, and positioned in unique roles with different theories of change.