Source: University of California, Davis
Program: Department of Human & Community Development
Course: CRD240: Community Development: Theories For Practice
Instructor: Dr. Chris Benner
Description
Community development interventions in this course are understood as activities to facilitate, strengthen, and improve less-advantaged communities, empower their residents to define and participate in the development process, and interact in larger social, political, and economic systems on behalf of the community.
This course is an opportunity for students to explore, develop, and apply an interdisciplinary set of theories useful for understanding and acting within the professional and academic field of community and regional development. This course starts from the basic assumption that community development is best characterized as complex. Complexity signifies that the amount of possibilities from which to choose by far exceeds what ever can become an implantable praxis. Hence, this abundance makes any applied decision precarious. It is against this canvass that the various elements of this course are projected. The many theoretical as well as –and thus- political approaches we will discuss in this course are meant to let the participants understand why the business of community development is a constant, never ending, and often contradictory process of shifting social figurations.