This article describes a course, Environmental Justice Movement, initiated at the College of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of New Orleans in the spring of 1995. A companion to a course in environmental planning, the course was designed to prepare planning students to engage in the environmental policy debate by exposing them to its historical, moral, and technical dimensions. By examining strategies and tactics of planning practice, they learn to apply their analytic and research skills to appropriate advocacy, mediation, and community planning roles. The course seeks to connect the environmental justice movement with social movement theory, concepts of procedural justice, and advocacy and equity planning. It integrates propositions and concepts about the politics of planning, land use policies, and practices with political philosophy, populist beliefs and what Perry (1994) calls "the street-level Rawlsian approach."
This paper offers an alternative explanation to the rationalist perspective of black suicides in the United States. It assumes a deconstructionist approach, offering the proposition that the social construction of reality in the black community is such that suicide among blacks occurs at a far greater number than their quantitative measures reveal.The postmodern turn is far more interpretive in placing the reality of black suicide in context than the modernist language of Durkheim and others. The postmodern turn suggests that there is more to black sui-
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