The Training, Education, and Application Committee of CSGSS is currently planning a series of events for the 2011-2012 year to promote group relations learning in non-conference contexts. Upcoming events include a small group consultation training and a reading group. For more information or to participate, contact TEA committee chair Mika Awanohara at awanoharam@csgss.org.
Authority Leadership & Social Justice Here and Now
Three day non residential group relations conference
March 30-April 1, 2012
Boston College, Brighton Campus, MA
Hard to define and daunting to confront, the imperatives of social justice continually inspire and provoke us. Recently, feelings about social injustice have prompted people all over the world to gather, seemingly spontaneously, to protest inequities and demand political change. The Arab Spring, the construction of Tent Cities in Europe, the Occupy Movement in the US, and student protests throughout the world have brought economic and structural inequality to the forefront of public discourse. These events, in conjunction with dramatic fluctuations in the world’s climate and recent advances in social technologies, have created new opportunities for shifting existing balances of power that are both exciting and frightening.
For many of us these events unfolded at a distance, allowing us to remain observers from afar and yet inviting us to examine our own relationships to social justice and the power structures of our more immediate worlds. They continue to challenge us to consider the meaning of our action and inaction within our communities. We strive to make a difference by contributing meaningfully to the social systems that involve us, but the explicit and implicit ideas about social justice that we hold can complicate our ability to decide what to do, or whether to act at all. It is particularly difficult to take action when our individual purposes, the purposes of the organizations in which we work, and the goals of the social systems in which we live are not aligned.
The challenge for us as leaders, managers, activists, students, teachers and professionals is to mobilize our passions, values and beliefs in order to take action justly, while staying attuned to the multiple social systems to which we belong. Doing our work responsibly, with a deeper understanding of how we are connected and accountable to others, requires that we acknowledge and attend to both the impact of social, political, and psychological processes on our own experience and action, and the ways our individual action or inaction affects the relationships and contexts in which we belong.
www.csgss.org/conference
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