1.) As noted in the readings, organizing for social change
fundamentally occurs on a collective level, with frames, identities, issues,
resources, etc deriving from individual experience to gain collective
resonance. Given this, what is meant by the term “collective agency”? In other
words, in what ways are individual and collective agency similar and different both
in conceptualization and in practice?
2.) The CCA approach to empowerment foregrounds the
perspectives, rationales, and agency of the marginalized, which serves to challenge
or provide alternatives to dominant structures precisely through the privileging
of those who have been excluded from discursive sites and processes of
decision-making. This stands in contrast to the participatory development
approach, which relies on experts imparting to the marginalized various skills
and knowledge derived from the repertoire of the status quo to empower
communities to act within the dominant socio-political-economic system. While
these approaches epistemologically differ, in what ways do they converge in
practice? To what extent or in what aspects does the CCA approach utilize
mainstream institutions, logics, or symbols in projects of empowerment? How can
the CCA approach accommodate subaltern desires that do not necessarily stand in
fundamental opposition to the mainstream?