Fall 2007 Course Description
Advanced Topics in Public Policy
| Section Title: |
Building and Sustaining Communities |
| Instructor(s): |
Lodis Rhodes |
| Course: |
P A 388K - Advanced Topics in Public Policy
(previously Seminar in Topics in Public Policy) |
| Unique Number: |
65580 |
| Day & Time: |
Wednesdays, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM |
| Room: |
SRH 3.106 |
| Waitlist Information: | For LBJ Students: UT Waitlist Information
For Non LBJ Students: LBJ School Waitlist Instructions |
This course fulfills requirements for the following specialization(s):
- Social and Economic Policy
- Urban and State Affairs
Description: Community is a commonly used but seldom defined term. Poverty is an equally elusive term. We hear the terms in everyday conversation and see them frequently in the social science literature. While we may feel confident when we use the terms, we are usually not very precise or accurate in our references. Others, then, easily miss our meanings. Lack of precision and accuracy leads to misunderstandings, flawed research, and faulty policy.
Community and poverty are, however, useful theoretical concepts. This course helps you think more clearly about them. It does so in three ways. It emphasizes geo-spatial analysis as a way to ?see? community as a complex social system. It also helps you identify and examine the defining characteristics of community and the processes required to sustain it as a self-generating and regulating system. The basic assertion is that poverty and inequality are largely induced conditions that reduce a community?s capacity to sustain itself.
Students interested in the course should be well grounded in the social sciences. It helps to have a specific interest in one of the applied, policy-related fields of planning, public health, information technologies, education, law, or community development. The course may be useful to students interested in the policy and service oriented NGOs (non-governmental organizations).
Return to Fall 2007 Course Schedule
