IST1001-1-WI16 - Identity, Power and Difference

Instructors:

Joshua Bartholomew, jbartholomew@iliff.edu, (617) 888-4551. Office hours available upon request
Laura Rossbert, lrossbert@iliff.edu, (303) 941-9382. Office hours available upon request.

Welcome
We are excited to spend this quarter with you, walking together as a community as we have conversations about identity, power, and difference, and how that interacts with religion/spirituality and personal vocation. The conversations we will have, and the learning that will take place will be significant. IPD demands not only academic work, but emotional and spiritual work as well. Please remember to practice self-care and find ways to process the materials from this class.  The various ways to contact us are above, including online/via phone office hours. We are also happy to converse via email, or set up other times to speak via email. We promise to respond to emails within 48 hours, so please don’t leave a question until the last minute. You are also encouraged to be in dialogue with your fellow students before we meet in person through online discussion boards, but also through other mediums.

Course Description

Identity, Power, and Difference cultivates students’ ability to engage in social and theological analysis, particularly about social structures, ideologies, and embodied practices that lead to domination or oppression. It facilitates critical thinking about social locations, power and privilege, and what effect these have on students' professional and vocational contexts (as pastors, ministers, educators, and religious and non-profit community leaders). The course takes the perspective that this sort of analysis is crucial to serving effectively in today’s complex social environment. It encourages students to deepen their commitment to dismantling privilege and oppression at individual, institutional, and societal levels. It also seeks to help students move within their varied levels of awareness about matters of power and difference to action. The course is focused around five themes, listed below.

This course embodies Iliff’s core commitments to respect difference and foster just relationships both in this context and beyond the school.

Course Overview

This course invites students to explore their own social location and professional identity within the matrices of difference and power within their cultural and religious contexts. It helps students to develop and/or enhance professional skills for working sensitively and openly across difference and becoming social justice allies. Skills include: analyzing systemic oppression, understanding one’s social location in light of that analysis, becoming aware of one’s own assumptions and patterns of response, becoming willing to work in the midst of uncertainty, becoming prepared to take risks and fail and still take the risks again, developing constructive practices of alliance, resistance, and resilience.

Identity, Power, and Difference is a course without easy answers that requires honest, paradoxical, and critical thinking. As we move into this work together, we find the words of Kathleen Talvacchia from her book Critical Minds and Discerning Hearts: A Spirituality of Multicultural Teaching particularly helpful:

I often remind myself (and others at the seminary) of an important reality: It is not that there is a solution already in existence that will assist us in negotiating the necessary conflicts that social structural difference and diversity impose, one that we are refusing to implement. Rather, we are creating in our struggles a blueprint that we can bring to our work in the world. It is the profound work of co-creation with God and prophetic reimagining forming new models of community in a pluralistic world. We are discovering ways to live in diversity that respect difference and foster just relationships (3).

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, the student will be able to:

• Critically identify their social location and its shifting, contingent nature; move from individualistic to structural conceptualizations of the nature of identity, power and difference.
• Consider the ways in which social structures, systems, and institutions (impersonal forces) are real and have real effects on human bodies; interrogate how we exercise power through our entanglements in a web of oppression and privilege.
• Deploy theological, personal, and social tools to recognize and respond to the dynamics of privilege, oppression, and power playing out intrapersonally, interpersonally, in ministry/work contexts, and in the larger world.
• Grapple with what it means to engage this analysis and action as life-long commitment to effectively and intentionally implement the work of justice and peace.

Struggle with the demands of being in solidarity/allyship across multiple axes of difference in various contexts of power and privilege in which we are connected historically and communally.

Degree Learning Goals

MDiv Degree Learning Goals supported by this class

• Demonstrate personal and professional self-awareness and emerging competency in characteristic practices of religious leadership

4.1 Articulate a vision for increased social justice in relationships, communities, institutions, and systems and structures of power

4.3   Demonstrate an awareness of the importance of social location (race, class, gender, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability/disability, etc.) for self-understanding and professional practice

4.4   Complete a power analysis of systems and relationships and make strategic decisions for how one intervenes as a religious leader

 MAPSC Degree Learning Goal supported by this class

1. Students will identify and critically evaluate the ways in which their personal, religious, and cultural experience, along with their activities in pastoral and spiritual care, shape their theology, moral orientation, and vocational formation.

MASC Degree Learning Goal supported by this class

Students will demonstrate personal and professional self awareness, including strategies for continued spiritual development and self-care, an awareness of the importance of social location for self-understanding and professional practice, and an ability to clearly interpret one’s beliefs and behavior to the community one serves.

Degree Learning Goals: Please take some time to look over the Professional Degree Learning Goals (MDiv, MASC, MAPSC) and the Academic Degree Learning Goals (MTS, MA).

Incompletes:  If incompletes are allowed in this course, see the Master's Student Handbook for Policies and Procedures.

Pass/Fail:  Masters students wishing to take the class pass/fail should discuss this with the instructor by the second class session.

Academic Integrity and Community Covenant:  All students are expected to abide by Iliff’s statement on Academic Integrity, as published in the Masters Student Handbook, or the Joint PhD Statement on Academic Honesty, as published in the Joint PhD Student Handbook, as appropriate.  All participants in this class are expected to be familiar with Iliff’s Community Covenant.

Accommodations:  Iliff engages in a collaborative effort with students with disabilities to reasonably accommodate student needs.   Students are encouraged to contact their assigned advisor to initiate the process of requesting accommodations.  The advising center can be contacted at advising@iliff.edu or by phone at 303-765-1146. 

Writing Lab:  Grammar and organization are important for all written assignments.  Additional help is available from the Iliff Writing Lab, which is available for students of any level who need help beginning an assignment, organizing thoughts, or reviewing a final draft. 

Inclusive Language:  It is expected that all course participants will use inclusive language in speaking and writing, and will use terms that do not create barriers to classroom community. 

Five IPD Course Themes

Theme One: The Social Construction of Difference; The Contingent Nature of Identity, Theology; Moving from Individuals to Systems

The first theme of the course is about exploring the socially constructed nature of identity, power, and difference. This involves each of us examining our own individual identities and social locations critically. We hope to move from an individualistic worldview to an idea of a structure/system that we participate in/benefit from/are disadvantaged by. This work is foundational to being in a school of theology. All theology is socially contingent and our respective social location shapes how we do theology. Being an effective minister or religious leader requires an examination of our power and privilege and its effect on those around us in our communities and society. The critical consciousness of our place in the world and how we benefit from the oppression of others is part-and-parcel of engaging in theology which stands for justice, equity, and equality.

Theme Two : The Relationship between Privilege and Oppression: The Race-Class Nexus and Other Forms of Intersectionality

The focus here is on how oppression and privilege are linked. Privilege/s depend upon oppression/the oppressed to exist. We will explore how categories of identity are interrelated, and how we are connected to others historically and communally.

Theme Three : How oppression/ privileged works intersectionally in everyday experiences through structures, institutions, and systems.

Just because differences may be socially constructed and culturally mediated does not mean they don’t have significant material and psychological consequences. Oppression and privilege are not just concepts. They are real and have real effects on human bodies. Here we explore the ways in which oppression and privilege play themselves out daily through personal and institutional practices. On personal, congregational, community, national, and global levels, oppression and privilege get played out differently and often in unconscious and obscured ways. Individuals can benefit from or be hurt by unjust structures without being at fault, but that doesn't get us off the hook for trying to make things better.

Theme Four : Modes of Resistance

It's not easy to face our own intersecting identities, and doing the hard work of self-examination of privileged and marginalized identities is demanding. At times, each of us may feel boxed-in into one's identity and find that pressure difficult to negotiate. As challenging as it may be, the best practice at these times is to explore this experience openly with a community of accountability. This isn't one-time kind of work; our efforts must be persistent and proactive.

Theme Five : Active Solidarity

One of the overall objectives of this course is to move from awareness to action and deepen our commitments to dismantling privilege and injustice at all levels. Here we will explore what anti-oppression social transformation looks like. We need to be able to think and analyze situations in context, understanding dynamics of difference and power, so that we can more effectively participate in creating and implementing just communities, both religious and otherwise.

Assignments and Readings

Our plan to cover the themes of this class are below. Please note that for each theme we will have two days of class focused on that theme. The readings are due on the first day of class covered, and a written reflection will be due by the second. So, for example - for Theme II, the readings will be due for class on January 25th, and the reflection paper will be due for February 1st. In the assignments section you will see the questions or material we invite you to reflect upon in those responses. We expect that you will have done the readings and demonstrate that in your reflections. You are not required to relate all of the readings to each response, but ensure you mention readings in each reflection.