Challenges in Minimizing Teacher Authority While Facilitating a Student-Owned Activism Project

Students who take critical sociology courses often report feeling discouraged about their ability to change large-scale social-structural problems. To redress this perceived lack of agency and control, we modified an upper-division sociology of popular culture course to include a studentowned activism project that would entail minimal teacher direction. In this paper we describe our efforts through two iterations of the activism project and reflect on the obstacles and suc- cesses of the project