We have developed this course around five overarching skills that we feel are central to any student's college education and crucial if you are to be effective participants in the civic lives of your communities after college. In the major project for this course, we ask you to further develop these skills in a context that is meaningful for you. We call this exercise the Historically Informed Political Project.
Any activity is political if it affects how people in a society govern themselves.
In this class, we invite you to embark on a political project that reflects your own personal values and assumptions about the world you live in. This course requires that your political project engage with a California issue that has both environmental and social dimensions. To put it another way, the goal of the historically informed political project is to have you choose some issue or activity in your life, carefully consider the values and assumptions embedded in it, try to understand how your behavior affects others, understand how history has shaped the issue, and consciously act in consonance with your values and assumptions and understanding of history through any public system of governance to achieve a specified goal related to that issue or activity. Many of us live our lives without carefully examining what values and assumptions drive how we relate to the rest of society. The political project requires that you become conscious of those values and assumptions and that you intentionally choose the values and assumptions that will determine how you act politically.