Environment, Health, Resilience, and Justice in the United States (2 units, Summer 2020)
Straddling the lines between history, politics, geography, science, and critical theory, this course examines the relationships between environment and health to highlight how environmental factors and health outcomes are inextricably linked while being spatially and racially determined. These issues have come to the fore vividly through the current COVID-19 crisis. The four unit course is divided into three integrated components throughout the academic year: a 2-unit summer online course, a 1-unit community dialogue in the fall, and a 1-unit community-based project in the spring.
At the core, students will interrogate the sources of socioeconomic and racial health disparities through four key questions:
● What role have issues of class, gender, and race played in the inequitable distribution of toxics and pollution?
● How does living in toxic environments alter experiences of identity, health, and place?
● How have communities combatted environmental hazards of the city, field, and workplace?
● How do social movement efforts to address toxic exposures to their communities get translated into scientific and regulatory structures?
Engaged Reflection on Social Justice(1 unit, Fall 2020)
The ERSJ component links MSI’s academic content to diversity dialogue frameworks to help students cultivate the knowledge, skills, and attitudes associated with effective classroom engagement, socially responsible leadership, community and cohort development, and conflict resolution while also promoting practices of self and community care. The ERSJs will serve as an important foundation for students to understand power and their relationship to the systems that undergird environmental injustice and disparate health outcomes we studied in the summer class. The ERSJ sessions will help students build awareness around a range of issues related to Environmental Justice such as environmental racism, anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, social and economic disparities, and redressing existing inequities. The ERSJs will also help students process the emotional work of learning about spatial and temporal dislocations and health inequities. Grade on a CR/NC basis only.
Practicum (1 unit, Spring 2021)
Building upon the learning and experience gained through the Race and Community Exposures summer courseand fall Engaged Reflection on Social Justice (ERSJ) sessions and working in concert with their Multicultural Summer Institute (MSI) mentors, students will form teams and collaborate on equity-based, transformational projects that actively engage the campus community and perhaps extend to the broader community as well. The shape and form (e.g., art installations or performances, podcasts, protests, resource guides, webinars, wellness retreats, etc) will emerge organically through the collaborative process. Students will meet regularly (time TBD) to plan and execute the projects. In shaping the projects, students are expected to be collaborative, participate equitably, and to produce projects that uplift equity, justice, self and community care, and that aim to have a sustainable impact. Graded on a CR/NC basis only.
Students must earn credit in each of the three components to satisfy U.S. Diversity Core Requirement.