Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Focuses on the practical tools and conceptual approaches used in dialogue, with comparisons of the role and impact of dialogue among community, government, corporate, union, First Nations, legal-regulatory, advocacy groups and organizations. Emphasis is on interaction among interest groups and stakeholders, cultures of negotiation and decision-making, techniques of facilitation, and strategies for effective outcomes. This course can be repeated for credit up to a maximum of three times, if topic studied is different. Students with credit for DIAL 460 may not take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

In May 2019, The Guardian advised its readers of a change in its use of language to more accurately describe global environmental crises. Instead of ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’, the preferred terms would be “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” – a shift, the editors noted, that more accurately reflected the urgency and severity of climate science. As of February 2020, almost 1,400 jurisdictions around the world had formally declared a climate emergency, including the national governments of Scotland, the United Kingdom, France, Portugal and Canada. Close to 500 regional and municipal governments across Canada have passed such declarations, including the City of Vancouver and several other councils in the Lower Mainland.

Interpersonal communication about climate change, such as conversation among family, friends, neighbours and coworkers, plays an essential role in raising awareness and enhancing personal engagement with climate change. Yet research into public opinion suggests that such conversations are relatively infrequent, and often confined to relatively small segments of the population.

In this seminar, we will explore the opportunities and challenges for stimulating public dialogue and engagement with climate change, with a particular focus upon how framing it as an emergency shapes how people think and feel, talk and act about climate change – in their daily lives, in the institutions in which they work and learn, in their interactions with media, and in their political behaviour. In addition to investigating strategies and best practices to catalyze and sustain conversations about the meaning and implications of living in/with a climate emergency (and address the diverse barriers that often make such dialogue challenging), we will collaboratively design and implement one or more dialogue events to put this learning into practice.

We also have the opportunity of working with the City of Vancouver, as part of their City Studio program, to link our explorations of how to talk about a climate emergency to the efforts of City staff to integrate the City’s formal declaration of a climate emergency into engagement with local residents and citizens.

Course format:
The course will operate on two parallel tracks. The first track will consist of an exploration of selected academic scholarship, advocacy/NGO research, case studies, media texts and other material that investigate (and speculate) how to facilitate conversation and collaborative deliberation about climate change in various inter-personal, institutional and political contexts. The second track will involve the application of this knowledge to designing, planning, facilitating and participating in multiple dialogue events organized around the theme of climate emergency. Over the course of the term, these two tracks will inform and shape each other: experiences and reflections upon course readings and informal mini-dialogues early in the semester, for example, will inform collective decisions about supplementary course materials later in the term, as well as how to structure the larger dialogue at the end of the course.

The structure, organization and focus of the seminar – especially decisions about how to design and manage an end-of-term dialogue event about the climate emergency – will be heavily dependent upon student participation and engagement. This is not a traditional academic seminar in which students read and discuss texts as selected by the instructor.  While our initial meetings and discussion will be structured around pre-set material and themes, the evolution of the seminar’s format will be collaborative and student-driven.  Students will have significant opportunities and obligations to make decisions about key aspects of course content, priorities and activities.  This will require consistent and active participation of all students throughout the term. If you are unable to attend and participate in weekly meetings on a regular basis or prefer a more conventional pedagogical format, this course may not be a good fit for you. Please contact the instructor if you have any questions or concerns.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: