School of Community and Public Affairs

Community Organizing 101

This course focuses on understanding power, context and agency, engaging in critical social analysis and developing practical skills required in community organizing. The course explores popular education in community mobilization and collective action, and prepares students to run a successful strategic campaign, including identifying and analyzing targets, tactics, allies and potential opponents.

This course is designed to give students the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of social transformation strategies, and above all to equip themselves to apply them. Focusing on practice and popular education, the pedagogical approach enables students not only to acquire knowledge and skills, but also to equip themselves to pass them on to others in the field. A dynamic, interactive learning environment is created using the flipped classroom. This pedagogical model allows maximum classroom time to be devoted to exercises, discussions and projects.

Objectives:

« Discuss the oppositional approach to community organizing

« Explain power, interests, and balance of struggle

« Analyze a strategic campaign to obtain a demand based on an analysis of power dynamics

« Discuss popular education pedagogy

« Use the basic elements of Socratic dialogue to better understand the course material and practice sharing conversational space in a group.

SCPA 450/A (Winter 2025): 

The aim of this course is to explore the increasing reach of neoliberalism as a global ecological phenomenon. Neoliberalism is defined as the privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the private sector, lowering of income and corporate taxes, the insertion of barriers for labour organizing, and induced scarcity in spending for public services (Naomi Klein, 2014). Global capitalism has come to reflect the hegemony of the Washington Consensus  - a set of 10 economic policy prescriptions promoting free-market policies, including trade liberalization and fiscal and monetary reform among others. It also reflects a “There is No Alternative” (TINA) framing, squashing the possibility of alternative social systems and alternative worldmaking visions. As an all-pervasive modus operandi of human interaction with each other and with the living Earth, capitalism is an ecological system of its own. Through showcasing the premise of global(ized) capitalism and its regional flavours, the course will also touch on the response of collective movements for social justice, responding to the social and environmental fallout of a world order that precludes the possibility of alternatives. We will explore global justice movements in the areas of migration, labour, climate, access to land, and food policy, among others. Finally, this course will link the fallout of global capitalism to the rise of far-right populist movements that are both a consequence of globalized neoliberalism and aim to impose an authoritarian neoliberalism that silences dissent and opposition to the TINA frame.

SCPA 481/A (Winter 2025): SETTLEMENT AND INTEGRATION

SCPA 505/GA (Winter 2025): COLLECT ENTERPRISE/ENTREPRISES

SCPA 510/GA (Winter 2025): FLD PROJ & MENTORSHP/PROJET SU

SCPA 298/GA (Summer 2025)

SCPA 508/GA (Summer 2025): FIN CED INITIATIVES/FINANCEMEN

SCPA 543/GA (Summer 2025): SPEC TOP CED/THEMES CIBLES CED

SCPA 212/A (Fall 2025): INTRO/GLOBAL MIGRATION

Social Debates and Issues in Public Affairs and Public Policy

SCPA 498/A (Fall 2025): SPEC TOPICS COM STDS,PA& POL