Studying Social Change Up Close
Hart program sends history, policy students to South Africa to meet with former anti-apartheid activists
Thursday, April 3, 2008
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Durham, NC -- Students interested in studying apartheid can now take it out of the books and into the heart of South Africa through a new initiative in the public policy department.
Documenting and Engaging Movements of Social Change (DEMOSC) debuted this spring as an unusual undergraduate component of the Program on History, Public Policy and Social Change—a program that aims to examine social revolutions in the 20th century, including the civil rights movement in the United States, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the struggle for democracy in Eastern Europe.
Associated with the Hart Leadership Program, DEMOSC is organized around the research of co-directors William Chafe and Robert Korstad, an HLP faculty member. The summer portion of this year’s pilot project—“A Comparative Study of Non-Violent Social Revolutions in the United States, South Africa and Eastern Europe”—will allow a group of students to travel to South Africa to study the struggles of apartheid and to develop research service-learning projects that contribute to the oral histories of the country.
“The mission of the program as a whole is to show how an understanding of the past and the narratives we tell about the past shape the public policy challenges we see today,” said Rachel Seidman, associate director of the HPPSC and a visiting professor in the public policy department.
As with the Hart Program’s Service Opportunities in Leadership (SOL) program, DEMOSC will consist of a spring course that will introduce students to the broad themes of the project, an immersive summer research component in the relevant country and a fall capstone element that will link students to projects in local Durham communities that involve similar issues of history, memory and social justice.
“SOL demonstrated that linking experiential learning opportunities directly to a student’s academic curriculum provides a much more in-depth learning opportunity,” Seidman said.
This summer, the students in the program will travel to Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town, South Africa to study and develop oral histories with residents who were active in or affected by the anti-apartheid movement.
The summer portion of the program will be funded entirely by DukeEngage. In addition to developing their own projects in South Africa, students will participate in daily workshops led by Duke faculty in collaboration with South African academics and activists. Visits to public memory sites and weekly fieldtrips will also be included in the summer experience.
As part of the larger HPPSC project, DEMOSC—which was introduced in July—will contribute to the HPPSC’s goals to eventually include several ongoing areas of research and study, including policy and Eastern Europe, and policy and gender. The program will continue its focus on South Africa for the next few years before it shifts to other regions of the world, Seidman said.
“For undergraduates, we hope they get a larger sense for the legacy of those choices and decisions being played out today,” she said.
