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CDSC Events - Spring 2013

Suffering the Grasses: Documentary Screening and Discussion with Syrian activists. March 6, 2013. Valley Performing Arts Center. Room LA 181.

Black and Latina/o Migrant Relations. March 11, 2013. 4:00-6:30 p.m. USU, Thousand Oaks.


Panel on Spirituality and Social Change: Monday, March 18th, 2013. From 4 to 6:45 p.m. Location: Music Recital Hall (located in Cypress Hall).

Monthly Soulcial Justice Poetry Lounge:

Flier for Poetry Lounge

CDSC hosts the Soulcial Justice Poetry Lounge on the following dates this Spring:

Thursday, February 21st

Thursday, March 14th

Thursday, April 18th

Aronstam Library, Manzanita Hall 240 from 7-9 p.m. We have Open Mics!

Click here for flier.

All events are free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.


Related Campus Events

Please send information on related campus events to sheena.malhotra@csun.edu

 

CDSC Sponsors at CSUN

Academic Departments:

Student Organizations

Administration

Resources

  1. Videos of Rev. Lawson's Public Lectures 2010-11
  2. Videos of Student Marches and Protests
  3. Article on "Why Civil Resistance Works"

Education Protests

4. Game link on Civil Disobedience

5. Curricular Resources on Nonviolence

6. CDSC - Working Bibliography

7. Film Recommendations

8. Library Resources for Researching Civil Discourse & Social Change

9. Office of Student Affairs

 

Contact Information

Marta López-Garza

Chicana/o Studies & Gender and Women's Studies.

Chicana/o Studies Office Location: JR 121A

Gender and Women's Studies Office Location: JR 340

Office Phone Number: 818-677-4785

email: marta.lopez-garza@csun.edu

Kathryn Sorrells

Communication Studies

Office Location: MZ 344

Office Phone Number: 818-677-2104

email: kathryn.sorrells@csun.edu

 

Site Credits

Click here for Site Credits

Civil Discourse & Social Change: Vision Statement

The problem is not a budget crisis but a vision crisis.

Reverend James M. Lawson Jr.

In its third year, Civil Discourse & Social Change Initiative (CD&SC) at California State University, Northridge continues its work to address current socioeconomic and political issues in light of historic movements, theories and methodologies for social change. The CD&SC initiative’s mission is to create a proactively engaged campus based on humanistic values, inclusivity and social justice. The goal of our initiative this year, as with the previous two years, is to collaborate across colleges and departments, among students, faculty and staff alike, to reflect and discuss approaches to providing affordable quality public education that serves the interests of students, their families and the community.

Education Protests

Many are alarmed by the current trajectory of our public education system. The de-funding of higher education threatens to re-establish exclusionary conditions reminiscent of the pre-Civil Rights Era. This transformation runs counter to California’s mandate of the 1960s to promote quality education for all. California’s economic success and technological growth, ranked among the highest in the nation in earlier decades, is dependent upon affordable post-secondary education. Yet, massive budget cuts have resulted in dramatic tuition increases, limited access for new students and restricted classes and services across the CSU system. Consequently, the CD&SC initiative is working across departments and colleges and with surrounding communities to realize our vision, Education is a Human Right.

Reverend James Lawson, a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King and a leading architect of the Civil Rights Movement, remains committed  to working closely with California State University, Northridge campus community on our Civil Discourse and Social Change Initiative. Devoting his life to nonviolent social change informed by the philosophy practiced by Mahatma Gandhi, Reverend Lawson, now in his eighties, reminds us that nonviolence does not mean passivism. Rather, nonviolent action means engendering another view of power—an alternative to violent, destructive power—where people power is used to create equity and justice.

 

 


Reverend Lawson's Bio

James Lawson was born in Pennsylvania in 1928. His father and grandfather were Methodist ministers, and Lawson received his local preacher's license in 1947, the year he graduated from high school. At his Methodist college in Ohio, he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), America's oldest pacifist organization.

Rev. Lawson being arrested in Nashville during the civil rights struggle.

After spending time in prison for refusing the Korean War draft, he obtained his B.A. in 1952, and spent the next three years as a campus minister and teacher at Hislop College in Nagpur, India. While in India, Lawson eagerly read of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the emerging nonviolent resistance movement back in the United States.

By 1957, Lawson decided he could no longer sit on the sidelines. He began holding seminars to train volunteers in Gandhian tactics of nonviolent direct action. James Lawson helped coordinate the Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Meredith March in 1966, and played a major role in the sanitation workers strike of 1968. On the eve of his assassination, Martin Luther King called Lawson "the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world."

In 1974, Lawson moved to Los Angles to be the pastor of Holman Methodist Church. He spoke out against racism, and challenged the cold war and U.S. military involvement throughout the world. Even after his retirement, Lawson was protesting with the Janitors for Justice in Los Angeles, and with gay and lesbian Methodists in Cleveland.

Source: PBS website http://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/witnesses/james_lawson.html