Course Syllabus

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Contact Info

Dave: dsunger@fas.harvard.edu

 

Office Hours

Book a time to chat. I'm generally available M, Th, F 9:30-12.

Required Books

We will read these books almost in their entirety and will be looking at the texts closely in class. You will want a copy you can bring to class with you. Paper copies will be available at the Coop Bookstore and can be found on Abe Books or Book Shop. There are also electronic copies available through library reserves link on Canvas. NOTE that only one person at a time can read the library's ebook of A Paradise Built in Hell.

  • Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009)
  • Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (State College: Penn State University Press, 2014) (ebook also available through Hollis)
  • Peter Utting, Jean-Louis Laville, and United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe, Just Sustainabilities (London: Zed Books Ltd, 2015)
  • David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2019).


Weekly Schedule

Readings, tutorials, and at-home activities should be done before class each week. See the assignments page for information about individual assignments and grading.

Note: We will be adapt and adjust the schedule along the way. I will send a weekly announcement with the definitive reading assignments and will update this page. 

 

Week 1 (1/25): Introduction

No Readings

 

Week 2 (2/1): Starting Points

 Reading

Tutorials

Optional Tutorial

At-Home Activities

  • Write 3 discussion questions about the readings. We’ll use these to organize our discussion. Write questions that you would want to spend 5-10 minutes talking about. Open ended questions will work better ones with correct answers. Clarifying questions are great (i.e. What does X mean by the term Y?) as are questions that compare ideas across readings or that are about applying ideas in another context. If in doubt, questions that start with “explain” or that use “how” and “why” framing usually work well. Check out the discussion question article if you want more inspiration.
  • Think about the best (and worst) class or group experiences you’ve had. What made those experiences so good (or bad)? What group agreements would you recommend for this class? In class we are going to write a shared list. Check out the Seeds for Change guide for more info on what an agreement looks like.

 

Module 1: Disaster Utopias

Week 3 (2/8)

Reading

  • Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, Chapters:
    • Prelude,  The Mizpah Cafe, Pauline Jacobson's Joy (pg 1-33)
    • A Tale of Two Princes (pg 73-97)
    • Hobbes in Hollywood (pg 120-134)

Tutorials

At Home Activities

  • Make a list of significant concepts/writers/thinkers in the Solnit reading. You could keep a running list as you read, but I’d like you to bring to class a list of 5 or so that you think are the most interesting. In class we’re going to draw concept maps with these lists.
  • Think about instances of the Alexander patterns that you pick. They could be real examples that you’ve seen or heard about or they could be imagined. Either way, try to picture yourself being in the space– how does it feel? Write yourself some notes. 
  • Start imagining what kind of thing you would find useful in a wiki related to the class. If it already existed, what would it be? Write yourself some notes.

 

Week 4 (2/15)

Reading

  • Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, Chapters:
    • Part 3. Carnival and Revolution (pg 135-182)

Tutorials

At Home Activity

  • Think back on the wiki project pitches and think about which elements sounded most interesting to you. If you were going to work on one of these aspects, which would it be? Write yourself some notes and we’ll compare thoughts in class and try to form some working teams to tackle different aspects of a larger project. 
  • Head to our Confluence site and take a look at the page creation tools and templates. If you want, try creating some test pages. You'll find the templates if you click the three dots next to the "create" button. Do any of these seem applicable to our wiki ideas?

 

Week 5 (2/22)

Reading

  • Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, Chapters:
    • Love and Lifeboats, Beloved Community, Epilogue (pg 267-314)
    • OPTIONAL: What difference would it make?, Murderers (pg 231-266)

At Home Activities

  • Write some notes about your observations and experiences from the Learning Lab activity. In class we'll debrief and compare notes. The sooner you make some notes, the better you'll remember your thoughts.
  • Imagine you are helping research a new chapter about the Pandemic for Solnit's book. Try to find 2 sources of information (any kind of media, genre) that would be useful in either 1) analyzing the media narratives/official response(s), or 2) finding examples of cooperation and community arising or assessing people general response in ways that would help relate the pandemic to the themes of the book. If the thing you want to find is out of the scope of what can be done in a week, just bring an idea for a plan. Write some notes about what you find and bring your articles to class. 
  • Think about what lessons or observations should we take from this book? Write down 2-3 and bring them to class.

 

Module 2: Co-operatives

Week 6 (3/1)

Reading

 

Week 7 (3/8)
Reading

Tutorial

At home activities

  • Choose a topic for the analysis paper, if you haven’t already. If you’re stuck, talk to me and we’ll find something.
  • Think about a general area of interest for your utopian/speculative design project. You don’t need a specific idea, just an aspect of the world that you’d like to spend some time thinking about. Like, if I were doing the project, I’d want to think about cooperative vision related to education/learning. You might be interested in medicine/health/caring, neighborhood/city civic life, homes and housing, music/film/arts, or any number of other areas. In class, we’re going to collect these big areas on the board, then divide up into big groups of people interested in each. From there, you’ll find a smaller subset of people (2-4) to work on the project. Hopefully this will make it easier to find people to work with who are interested in similar things.
  • Find a currently existing co-op that you feel a connection to and see what you can find about their vision, history, and organizational structure. It could be a co-op that is in an industry that you are interested or it could be located in a place that is important to you. There isn’t one big list of cooperatives, so this might take some googling.

Week 8 (3/15): Spring Break

 

Week 9 (3/22): Imagining the Future

Reading

Tutorial

 

Module 3: Commons

Week 10 (3/29)
Reading

Tutorials

 

Week 11 (4/5)

Reading

  • David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair, and Alive
    • Introduction (pg 1-12)
    • Chapter 1: Commons and Commoning (pg 13-28)
    • Introduction to Part II: Triad of Commoning (93-100)
    • Choose at least 7 patterns from Chapters 4-6 (101-200) (try to choose a few from each chapter)
    • OPTIONAL: Chapters 8 and 10 (and anything else from the book that looks interesting).

Tutorials

 

Module 4: Solidarity Economy

Week 12 (4/12)

Reading

Tutorials

Week 13 (4/19)

Reading

Tutorial

 

Week 14 (4/26)

Final Class

 

Course Summary:

Date Details Due