Spring 2009 Course Description
Advanced Topics in Public Policy
| Section Title: |
Leadership: Rethinking Civic Activism and Organizing Strategies |
| Instructor(s): |
Lodis Rhodes |
| Course: |
P A 388K - Advanced Topics in Public Policy
(previously Seminar in Topics in Public Policy) |
| Unique Number: |
62381 |
| Day & Time: |
Mondays, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM |
| Room: |
SRH 3.103 |
| 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):
- Public Management and Leadership
Description: Scholars have not been very effective in connecting community leadership with shifts in policy. There are many examples of leaders who inspire, help reshape lives, and build highly visible organizations. Scholars, however, are mostly unable to move from describing micro-level individual activities to capturing macro-level structural changes that actually transform community and policy. The difficulty stems from the narrow ways scholars tend to think about public and private spheres of activity and how they interact to influence the politics and process of policy.
This course sketches a different way to ‘see’ public and private spheres of interests. It assumes a healthy community is defined by strong relationships among its members and their social institutions. Healthy communities do not just happen. Community activists and leaders build them from the inside out. The challenge is to better understand the process of ‘organizing’ relationships. In effect, stable, durable community relationships are the ‘pre-political’ stage of change in public policy. It is the structure, skill, and collective competencies embodied in the relationships that drive changes in and community. This more expansive view of the interaction of public and private realms is examined through a closer look at several social movements and the activists/leaders involved in them.
Return to Spring 2009 Course Schedule
