Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/University of California, Berkeley/Environmental Justice: Race, Class, Equity, and the Environment (Spring 2014)/Course description

It's likely that students in ESPM 163ac will be editing around thirty articles. They'll be working in groups, but each student will (obviously) have their own individual account. Students will have received two hours of training about the mechanics of editing Wikipedia, as well as our policies, guidelines, and culture before they begin to make significant edits (barring any class members who are already established Wikipedians, of course.)

All article topics will be pre-vetted both by the Graduate Student Instructors of the course, and by User:Kevin Gorman (who is the Wikipedian in Residence at UC Berkeley.) Some students will be working on existing articles in mainspace, while some will be working on new, sandboxed articles. Edits should start to trickle in soon after students start registering, and we've set a couple of waypoint deadlines to ensure that students don't wait till the last minute, as has happened in some other classes. Please don't hesitate to point out any problems with the edits of students in the course; besides for the individual student, User:Kevin Gorman will generally act as a first point of contact (but please don't hesitate to contact any of the listed instructors or online ambassadors about issues.)

Syllabus
This course engages environmental problems, community responses, and policy debates regarding “environmental justice” (EJ) issues – essentially the race, class, and equity implications of environmental problems and policies. The course presents empirical evidence on distributions of environmental quality and health, enforcement of regulations, access to resources to respond to urban and industrial problems, and the broader political economy of decision-making around environmental and health issues. The course explores and critically analyzes philosophies, frameworks, and strategies underlying environmental justice movements and struggles of African American, Latino American, Asian American, and Native American communities.

The course seeks to prepare students to critically analyze environmental outcomes and processes, providing frameworks for evaluating the equity implications of environmental policies and programs, and distributions of environmental amenities and burdens. Case studies of, and research methods for, identifying environmental, health, and social inequities that underlie environmental justice claims will be incorporated throughout the course. Students will also analyze community and government responses to environmental injustices, and critically assess recent strategies to promote more ecologically sound and socially just development. The course will include cases of environmental problems in communities that are predominantly African American, Latino American, Asian American, and Native American. These cases will be analyzed using social science research methods, and discussed within a broad political economy framework, essentially asking why environmental problems play out differently for different groups, and why some groups are more effective than others in mobilizing to pressure for environmental improvements.

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