This course explores approaches and strategies for working with and for marginalized and oppressed communities with the shared goal of advancing their efforts toward socio-spatial justice. It introduces the roots of critical and socially engaged practices that through art, design, and planning facilitate collective knowledge production and organizing agency as tools for transformative change in social urban movements. Challenging extractive and traditional forms of information gathering, students test critical and dialogic methodologies that balance power relations within collective endeavors. These include radical listening, oral history, critical cartographies, power revealing sociograms, and plural assembly facilitation, among others. They also explore process-driven design strategies that facilitate community-led initiatives, neighborhood-based plans, policy platforms, and other efforts centered on collective struggles and visions. Through the development of decolonial, socially conscious, and political driven strategic projects for collective action, students gain awareness of the constructive tensions that arise from combining academic and embodied knowledge from practitioners and communities, respectively, while addressing differences in class, race and privilege. It offers a critical perspective on “engagement” and “participation,” terms widely used in academic, scientific and professional circles often without honoring their true meanings of cooperation, solidarity, and reciprocity. This course invites students interested in service design, socially engaged art, non-profit management, advocacy planning, tenant and housing organizing, strategic design and management, and related fields.