Changemakers: Shaping social change in t

In the context of the climate change, this course asks: how do we shape, spark, facilitate, and accelerate social change?

In order to mitigate and/or adapt to climate change, individuals, communities, organizations, and societies around the world – especially in wealthy nations – face the urgent need to implement significant changes, quickly. To avoid the worst climate scenarios, energy systems, patterns of production and consumption, political landscapes, daily habits, and even modes of thinking must evolve at every scale. The risks and impacts of climate change are well known and all too evident; and yet, global emissions continue to rise, natural ecosystems continue to be exploited and degraded, and frontline communities and nations continue to bear the brunt. To date, we have largely failed to implement the necessary changes to our current social and economic systems, by multiple metrics and at multiple scales. This course asks: what skills and practices are needed to more effectively spark, facilitate, accelerate, and manage the personal, social, organizational, and political changes needed at a range of scales to mitigate and adapt to climate change, all in an era of increasing disasters and social upheaval?

Students will explore a range of texts and thinkers that grapple with the subject of change; gain fluency with a range of “change management” tools and frameworks; analyze strategies for facilitating, accelerating, or shaping change process in a range of organizations and systems; learn from a series of guest “change experts;” and build their own theory of change for a specific problem or system.

Authors may include: Adrienne Maree Brown, Kate Crowley, Dennis Dalton, Ruth DeFries, Eknath Easwaran, Mahatma Gandhi, Ezra Klein, Margaret Heffernan, Brian Head, Ian Hodder, Robert Kegan, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lisa Laskow Lahey, Jonah Lehrer, Andrew Marantz, Donella Meadows, Kendra Pierre-Louis, Horst Rittel, Isabel Romanzcy, Jonathan Safran-Foer, Leith Sharp, Twyla Tharp, Melvin Webber.