Minor in Community Engagement
The Minor in Community Engagement offers students a course of study that includes the theoretical tools and practical skills to recognize, respectfully engage, and build community, while working for change and respecting differences both on- and off-campus.
Requirements for the Minor
Sample Courses
Community Engagement Opportunities at Carleton
Minor Description and Introduction
The introduction of this minor is timely, as engaging communities is a growing theme for many institutions in Canada and beyond, from federal agencies to non-governmental organizations, municipalities to multi-national corporations, universities to grassroots organizations. There is no doubt that community engagement, when done well, has a great contribution to make to efforts to bring about positive social change. People who are skilled in its practice are highly valued across institutional and community settings.
Yet, community engagement is not a straight-forward affair, but rather involves a range of complicated and often contested negotiations through and across hierarchical social and power relations, conflicting interests, and an array of emotions and aspirations. The Department of Sociology and Anthropology, with its long-established expertise in understanding the dynamics of social change and emergent communities in Canada and globally, is well positioned to support students (of any discipline) enrolled in the minor to gain skills, knowledge, and hands-on experience in community engagement that are highly valued across institutional and community settings.
The minor consists of two core courses in Sociology and Anthropology (SOCI/ANTH 2180: Foundations in Community Engagement, and SOCI/ANTH 4171: Community Engagement Capstone) plus 1.0 credit of experiential learning courses from a wide variety of disciplines and 2.0 credits of other interdisciplinary academic coursework. These courses work together to provide students with solid methodological, theoretical, and experiential training in community engagement. Most students interested in the minor will find that some of the required courses for their program will also count toward the minor.
This minor is open to all undergraduate degree students in any program. After successful completion of the minor, students will be able to:
- Critically understand the relationship between scholarship, activism and advocacy relating to community engagement.
- Participate in the design of appropriate approaches to allyship with those experiencing oppressions other than one’s own.
- Address the functioning of racialized, gendered, and other hierarchical social and power relations in and between diverse communities, public institutions, the non-profit sector, and the private sector in concert with others to bring about positive social change.
- Critically assess the effectiveness of community engagement processes in creating engagement and social change.
Further Details
For further details on the SOCI/ANTH 2180 course or minor, please contact the instructor for SOCI 2180, Dr. Deborah Conners, the coordinator for the minor, Dr. Blair Rutherford, or visit the Undergraduate Calendar.