School of Community and Public Affairs

This course focuses on understanding power, context and agency, engaging in critical social analysis and developing practical skills required in community organizing. It 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

SCPA 201/A (Fall 2024): PUBLIC POLICY &INTEREST

SCPA 215/A (Fall 2024): ECON FOR PUB POL&COM DEV

SCPA 352/A (Fall 2024): COMMUNITY AND LOCAL ACTIVISM

This course provides an overview of Community Economic Development / Social and Solidarity Economies (SSE), and of their relationships and role within a political economy lens. Its aim is to provide a general and critical foundation which touches on and draws upon other elements of the program as a whole. This course traces the theoretical and conceptual roots of CED/SSE, including within a historicized lens in specific contexts (including in Quebec). The aim is to critically situate CED/SSE within and beyond the ongoing neoliberal conjuncture, as well as within a conceptual understanding of community organizing. Students will be offered strategies for thinking about public policy evaluation, in terms of intersectionality, climate and environmental justice, and in achieving well-being and basic human needs (foods, housing, community). This course focuses on the social, political and economic environment in which CED/SSE initiatives operate to identify the opportunities, strengths, limitations and potential of place-based, community-based development strategies. Special importance is given to the perspectives of CED/SSE that emerge out of ecological movements, feminist movements, visible minority communities, Indigenous communities, the working class, and in social justice transition movements. The course will place special emphasis on the links between CED/SSE and the potential for system change. Without romanticizing the role of CED/SSE, we will explore how community organizing can promote degrowth and transitions to a post-capitalist society, as well as greater resilience and collective adaptation in the face of ecological collapse, social alienation, and the harmful effects of social inequality. We will begin by examining the CED/SSE background in Quebec but will also explore different examples and case studies from across the world.

SCPA 5060/GA (Fall 2024): FIELD PROJ PREP/PREP AU PROJET

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