Sustainability Seminar

Seminar course overview

This is an anthropology course in which a decolonial ethnographic methodology frames our approach to community-based work. We will learn about, from and with the Spartanburg community through course readings, films, discussions, guest speakers, participant observation in city events and service-learning at a series of community-based organizations. We will consider the social, environmental and economic histories and contemporary realities across the city’s landscape, which will invite us to think through what sustainability means and looks like across Spartanburg’s neighborhoods. Community-based learning through ethnographic field methods will position us to learn about the ways community, change, equity and sustainability are envisioned by city residents as well as by local organizations.

Students will spend the year (re)designing, implementing, managing and leading programming at a site or a series of sites in Spartanburg. While some students will design new programming, most students will build upon existing programming created by previous cohorts in partnership with schools and other local organizations.

Through this course, students will:

  • Establish connections with local community members and organizations.
  • Identify community assets, needs and interests.
  • Identify diverse ways community members and local organizations conceptualize and experience sustainability in day-to-day life.
  • Develop community organizing and leadership skills.
  • Interrogate their positionalities and what it means to be a volunteer versus an advocate versus an ally.
  • Evaluate current community programming and brainstorm potential ways to contribute to efforts that seek to sustain, build upon, improve and/or change existing initiatives.
  • Design, implement and manage sustainability programming in partnership with the Spartanburg community.
  • Discuss sustainability, sustainability challenges and sustainability programming through an academic lens and through a grassroots lens by engaging in conversations and observations with the Spartanburg community.
  • Present community-based work in public forums in both written and spoken form.