Course Syllabus

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.

Overview and Objectives

Policies and Services 

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.