Kat Eason WR 40 Food Fight About Food Fight

Everyone has to eat...and everyone has opinions about what they eat. Students will devour different genres of food-oriented nonfiction, both text and multimodal, from a wide group of authors, learn to identify arguments and argument strategies, and ultimately produce their own original argument imitating one (or a mix of several) model texts.		 None
Rick Sims WR 40 Opinion Writing - “How Will I Use My Voice to Influence Others?” Students will write 3 opinion essays: a Praise for a topic of their choice, a Defense of a topic of their choice, and a Critique of a topic of their choice. Barbara Holland’s Endangered Pleasures
Barbara Holland’s Wasn’t the Grass Greener?
Sandy Oh WR 40 Living In Between Spaces
 		 Identity markers can be powerful concepts and categories through which we organize our lives and understand ourselves. Athlete, musician, chef, eldest daughter, single mother, woman, cat dad, nonbinary, Gen Z, Asian, Jewish, Southerner, multilingual, disabled….the list is endless. As much as we may find meaning in these categories, we may each hold our own definitions and understandings of what these words mean to us. Furthermore, we may feel that much of life is lived in between definitions.
The readings we will explore together this quarter are filled with examples of becoming and living in between spaces and time. Especially regarding the memoir assignment, I encourage students to think about in what ways their identities and lives are messy, constantly evolving, while being a source of meaning through which we understand ourselves.
I encourage you to continuously reflect on such questions. Your final capstone essay question requires you to provide a cogent response to this question: What does it mean to live in the between?		 All materials are provided at no additional cost to students.

"Crying in H Mart" by Michelle Zauner
"Every Good Boy Does Fine" by Jeremy Denk
"Letter to the student who asked me how I managed to do it" by José Antonio Rodríguez
"Kimchi Blues" by Grace Cho
"Bad English" by Cathy Park Hong
Kat Lewin WR 45 Fairy Tales This section of WR 45 looks at fairy tales as stories that shape the way people understand the world. Reading both classic tales and contemporary retellings, we’ll ask how these narratives reinforce familiar ideas about social structures—and how writers reshape those stories to question them. Through rhetorical analysis, we’ll treat the fairy tale not just as a traditional genre, but as a flexible form that can challenge social structures, cultivate hope, and transform society. Readings will be provided
Loren Eason WR 45 3D Glasses for the Future: Science Fiction and Speculative Journalism We will be reading a few science fiction short stories and some articles about the purposes that science fiction can serve in shaping how we see our present world. We'll be digging into the stories to see how the writers build bridges between the world we live in and the effects of our current decisions on the world we are building for ourselves. And finally, we will take what we've learned and use it to write our own short articles about All material besides the course textbook will be free, and easily located in the course link to Perusall.
Julian Smith-Newman WR 45 Autoethnography In this section of Writing 45, we will be reading and experimenting with a type of “life-writing” known as autoethnography. Autoethnography bears many similarities to—and is often practically indistinguishable from—other varieties of creative non-fiction, such as memoir and the personal essay. Like these genres, autoethnography allows writers to explore the many dimensions of their own “lived experience”: the complicated web of thoughts, feelings, memories, encounters, identities, dreams, relationships, stories, and events that shape our sense of who we are. But whereas memoir and personal essays typically focus on the writer’s experience for its own sake, autoethnography seeks to understand how even a writer’s most intimate experiences—their experience of grief, say, or their experience of pleasure, depression, racism, sexism, shame, or joy—cannot be separated from the cultural, political, economic, historical, and social forces at work in the world around them. For autoethnographers, personal experience is never just personal. Rather, it is inextricably connected to the larger cultural, political, economic, historical, and social systems and structures amidst which we live.

During the first half of our course, we will read a number of different autoethnographies by a number of different authors. These autoethnographies will vary widely in both their subject matter and form. In all of them, however, the writers struggle to make sense of their lives by examining how their personal experiences are shaped by and infused with cultural expectations, values, practices, beliefs, and identities. Thus, as we read these autoethnographies, our goal will be to grasp how this kind of writing—i.e., writing that connects the personal with the cultural, social, economic, and political—deepens and expands our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

In the second half of the quarter, we will take our study of autoethnography and use it to compose our own autoethnographic texts. Autoethnography shows us that there is much to learn from describing, narrating, and interrogating our own experiences, especially when we contextualize these experiences by examining their relationship to the larger structures and forces that surround us. My hope is that, by experimenting with autoethnographic writing, you will gain new tools to explore your experiences and your social, cultural, political, and economic context. And I hope further that this process increases your sense of both personal and political agency. By helping us understand the larger forces at work in our lives, autoethnography helps us see how we might begin to shape those forces in turn. In this way, writing autoethnography can be a kind of political act, since it can give us a sharper sense of who we are and how we might intervene in the world to make it a better, more liberated place.		 All material is available on Canvas!
Douglas Kiklowicz WR 50 Confessional writing Writing that reveals things about a sensitive topic the writer has a personal connection to in order to demonstrate a point. A collection of separate essays, stories and book chapters distributed as photocopies and pdfs.
Rachel Rose WR 50 Fairy Tales This course will be reading and analyzing fairy tales throughout history and across cultures. "The Classic Fairy Tales" Maria Tatar ed. 2nd Norton Critical Ed.
Becky King WR 50 Chivalric Romance This course explores chivalric romance, a medieval genre that focuses on the adventures of noble men and women as they seek love and honor. We will be considering how chivalric romance stories communicated with their original audiences, as well as how the genre continues to affect how we think and communicate about love, violence, gender roles, and social expectations in the modern world. The Lais of Marie de France
Patrick McBurnie-Nicolay WR 50 Manifestos In this course, we will focus on the manifesto as a genre by exploring its histories, definitions, and rhetorics. Associated with politics, art, literature, pedagogy, film, and new technologies, the manifesto involves the taking of an engaged position that is tied to the moment of its enunciation. The manifesto's individual or collective authors seek to provoke radical change through critique and the modeling of new ways of being though language and images. Included on the syllabus will be a variety of manifestos from the 18th to 20th centuries.
Emily Wells WR 50 Woolf's Orlando (satire/fantasy) Our class will examine Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography as our primary text to understand how genre functions and allows Woolf to transcend the limitations of her era. In our course, we will examine the ways Woolf satirizes the style of a classic biography giving her audience a story that is fantastical rather than historical and factual. We will discuss how Woolf contributes to revolutionizing the fantasy genre and thus expands the possibilities of identity and relationship to time.

Orlando’s immortality and gender transformation challenge conventional notions of identity and gender roles and the novel is considered Woolf’s great love letter to the writer Vita Sackville-West, in a time when lesbian affairs were taboo and socially and culturally punished. We will read Woolf closely to identify the ways her stylistic choices aid in her exploration of the fluidity of gender and desire. Through our discussions, we will formulate claims about how Woolf's use of genre facilitates her message and how rhetorical choices allow her to traverse publishers’ censorship and public critique. Throughout the ten weeks, we will come to decide how subversion of genre conventions can provide new futures and better realities for marginalized persons and provide greater possibilities for identity and self.		 Orlando: A Norton Critical Edition by Virginia Woolf ( ISBN-10: 1324044365 ; ISBN-13: ‏‎978-1324044369). Must be a physical copy of this edition.
Gretchen Short WR 50 The Alien in Sci-Fi The course will focus on science fiction as a genre which uses the figure of the alien or unknown to explore human adaptability in the face of change. All the texts center on characters forced to re-evaluate the stories they tell about themselves and their world in the face of disruptive alien beings. Short stories by N.K. Jemisin, Octavia Butler, and James Tiptree, Jr.
Jack Fixa WR 50 Speculative Fiction Speculative works invite us to imagine possible futures. Throughout the quarter, we’ll think through how different writers and interlocutors are grappling with some of the seminal topics of our time — AI, climate change, gene editing. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.
Tagert Ellis WR 50 Immortality Projects This course theme invites students to study ideas of human legacy and collective memory, considering how we're remembered after we die, and the ways that humans are attempting keep themselves (or at least their memories) alive for much longer. We also study attempts to communicate across enormous distances of time and space. This description sounds really boring but the course is actually pretty sick. For example, you will learn about a mad scientist who lived in a giant castle and tried to implant monkey parts in people to make them live longer. By the end of the course students will have written poetry that is put on a stone tablet in a salt mine in Austria-- an archive ominously referred to as "MOM." None of these other courses can say that. That salt thing puts them to shame. This description is over. N/A Readings provided as PDFs
Na'amit Sturm Nagel WR 50 Fairy Tales It is the typical Fairy Tale course shell used in the composition department Tatar's "The Classic Fairy Tales
Chenglin Lee WR 50 Immigration Literature Literature from the perspective of immigrants and how immigration journeys shape their writing and culture. The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
Margaret Speer WR 50 Medical Horror "Medical Horror" (WR50) explores a specific subgenre of horror represented across a variety of media, and having to do with bodies, medicine. While some texts will be sci-fi or futuristic dystopia, medical realities of the past and present are sometimes scarier and grosser than fiction. All texts provided
Robert Wood WR 50 Science Fiction This course is intended to introduce you to academic writing through a critical examination of science fiction. The genre allows for a critical examination of our world through representations of alien worlds, imagined futures or even alternative presents and pasts. Those worlds can contain drastically different kinds of institutions and cultural assumptions. They can imagine new forms of gender and species, new forms of science, and drastically different forms of humanity itself. Through those imagined alternatives, there is always a connection to the world of the author and the audience, sometimes explicitly commenting and critiquing that world and sometimes only incidentally commenting on that world. In either case, we can look at these stories symptomatically, examining the ways they both challenge and resist common assumptions of their and our present.

In order to do so, we need to understand the rhetorical framework of such texts, that is, who is the audience of the text, and what assumptions do they hold? What is the purpose of the text? That is, what message is either being explicitly or implicitly expressed by the text? How do the generic structures of the text communicate the message of the text to the audience? Other questions are embedded in those questions. How does the story engage in worldbuilding? How does it create characters in those worlds? How does it try to engage the audience with that material? How does it use language to accomplish this? By examining those structures and writing about them, you will develop the skills needed for writing at the university, learning how to form arguments in the form of thesis statements, and to structure those arguments in a clear and concise style.

The writing assignments will consider a variety of science fictional texts along with a variety of critical approaches to those texts and films. A series of critical readings will intersect those readings and offer a series of approaches to both analyze and write about these narratives.		 This is not a science fiction textbook
Hannah Bacchus WR 50 Fairy Tales In this section of WR 50, we will explore what fairy tales are, how they work, and why they are so durably meaningful across different cultures. Fairy tales (or “wonder tales”) make up an ubiquitous genre—every society on earth tells fairy tales to adults and children alike. Unlike myths, fairy tales do not narrate the creation and ending of the world, nor the capricious deeds of the gods; and unlike legends, they do not focus on culture heroes like Robin Hood or the Monkey King. Instead they are stories of strange marvels that distill our primal fears and desires into hope that virtue can triumph over evil and that clever people can achieve the good life. Fairy tales center on anonymous character types who endure extraordinary ordeals reflecting the realities of life in specific times and places. They are versatile stories that play with us, creep us out, and enlighten us all at once. Our exploration of the fairy tale genre will center on a few of the most popular tale types: Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Bluebeard. Each week, we’ll read different versions of the same tale originating not just from Europe, but also Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Through our comparisons of these different versions of the tales, and of the tale types themselves, we will examine how different groups of people living in different cultural and historical contexts approach a set of related themes, motifs, and conventions: true love, the pleasures and dangers of emergent sexuality, righteous violence, curiosity and obedience, benevolent and wicked parents, and family life. In the second half of the course, we’ll look at Disney’s adaptations and remakes of fairy tales, and consider what it means for corporations to assume ownership over what was formerly common (shared, public) intellectual property. Along the way, we will also read classic fairy tale/folklore scholarship, view fairy tale art from the Golden Age of Illustration, and watch fairy tale films and other media. Anteater's Guide to Writing, 10th ed. (available on Perusall)
The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar (Norton Critical Edition)
Sarah Goeppner WR 50 Autoethnography In this section of Writing 50, we will be reading and experimenting with a type of “life-writing” known as autoethnography. Autoethnography bears many similarities to—and is often practically indistinguishable from—other varieties of creative non-fiction, such as memoir and the personal essay. Like these genres, autoethnography allows writers to explore the many dimensions of their own “lived experience”: the complicated web of thoughts, feelings, conflicts, struggles, memories, encounters, identities, dreams, relationships, stories, and events that shape our sense of who we are. But whereas memoir and personal essays typically focus on the writer’s experience for its own sake, autoethnography seeks to understand how even a writer’s most intimate experiences—their experience of grief, say, or their experience of pleasure, depression, racism, sexism, shame, or joy—cannot be separated from the cultural, political, economic, historical, and social forces at work in the world around them. For autoethnographers, personal experience is never just personal. Rather, it is inextricably connected to the larger cultural, political, economic, historical, and social systems and structures amidst which we live. Course readings are provided as pdfs.
Michael Andreasen WR 50 Memoir We will be reading selections from memoirs, personal essays, and creative nonfiction pieces PDFs of course materials will be provided
Zak Buczinsky WR 50 Horror Writing 50: Horror examines how the horror genre is shaped. Students will analyze works by Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Harlan Ellison, asking not only what makes a story frightening but how fear exposes our own internal anxieties and dark sides. The course treats horror as a serious literary mode that exposes cultural anxieties, ethical dilemmas, and questions of the self. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House
Chelsea Lee WR 50 Fairy Tales In this section of WR 50, we will explore what fairy tales are, how they work, and why they are so durably meaningful across different cultures and time periods. The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar, (Norton Critical Edition)
Caitlin Ruppert WR 60 Animal ethics Our theme for this course is animal ethics. We will be reading texts about how much (if at all) we should consider animals. How should we treat animals? Why? Should certain animals be considered more than other animals? To what extent should we consider an animal’s life, feelings, or ability to feel pain? Our core texts will be The Anteater’s Guide to Writing and Rhetoric (AGWR) and philosophical texts concerning animal ethics. As you read the philosophical materials, you may agree with the authors or you may vehemently disagree. Either way, your critical engagement with the materials and with others will be most significant. Our hope is that these texts will challenge you to deepen your arguments and claims through discussions and constructive feedback. Our goal is to help you communicate your perspective in a clear, concise, and persuasive manner. I will provide reading
Kelana Johnson WR 60 Climate Justice his course focuses on how and why we (citizens, governments, policymakers) do or do not respond to climate change, and is thus by no means a comprehensive guide to thinking about or understanding the topic as a whole. It’s important to keep in mind that WR 60 is a composition course, and as such does not aim to survey even this narrowed topic in the comprehensive manner one might expect in a sociology, criminology, history, or Chicanx/Latinx studies class.
 		 No
Melissa Stevens WR 60 Disability Access This course explores how people with disabilities are accommodated, excluded, celebrated, and politicized across various contexts. Disability is not only about limitation; it is also about creativity, community, resistance, and the radical work of imagining more inclusive futures. In that spirit, this course invites participants to grow as writers, researchers, and advocates. No additional textbooks are required
Martin Vela WR 60 City of InmatesC A biref history of Carceral Expansion in Los Angeles City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 (Justice, Power, and Politics)
Iris Morrell WR 60 Mass Incarceration Are prisons obsolete? In this class we will study the prison industrial complex and consider Black feminist and abolitionist approaches to the problem of mass incarceration. We will pay particular attention to the prison economy in California and how research can identify systematic problems related to incarceration in Southern California. Are Prisons Obsolete? By Angela Davis
Lauren Quinn WR 60 Problems in Contemporary Beauty In this course, we will examine tensions and challenges in contemporary beauty. First, we will ground ourselves in the historical roots of Eurocentric beauty standards as a means to access wealth, power, and prestige. Using that foundation, we will research and analyze how these influences manifest today, from social media’s impact on body image to the health effects of cosmetic toxins; from the environmental impact of fast fashion to the increasing politicization of traditional gender constructs; from the financial cost of beauty regimes to the ways in which cosmetic surgeries and enhancements are homogenizing appearance. Assigned readings
Yunlong Cao WR 60 Animal Mind and Ethics This quarter, we will explore questions of animal ethics and human-animal relationships through a philosophical lens. Our readings will examine fundamental questions about animal minds, moral status, and political rights, drawing from contemporary philosophy and animal studies. We will investigate how different ethical frameworks approach questions about our obligations to animals, from issues of sentience and consciousness to practical concerns about pet-keeping, experimentation, and political community. This theme provides rich opportunities for research and advocacy work, as you'll engage with ongoing debates that have real-world implications for law, policy, and everyday ethical choices. No, other readings will be uploaded as PDF.
Dara Weinberg WR 60 What's Wrong With AI: Generative AI on Trial Powerful and world-changing inventions--cars, planes, social media, the Internet, and now the large language models powering generative AI--can be either used as tools to benefit people or weapons to hurt us.

This course does not doubt that generative AI is here to stay, and neither does it question the utility (the usefulness, the value) of generative AI to our world. Rather, it asks us to be intelligent, informed, and skeptical users of AI products. In order to make our informed use of these technologies possible, we must fully understand the negative side effects of these technologies, in detail and with precision.

To this end, in this course, you will not focus on AI's benefits and possibilities, which are many. Rather, you will be tasked with examining what is problematic about it. With a narrowly focused prosecutorial mindset, you will look for evidence of AI's failings, flaws, foibles, and faults--and then, in the 2nd half of the course, discuss mitigating those issues.		 PDFS and articles will be provided electronically.
Kelin Sophia Tham WR 60 Education and Critical Pedagogy This course explores education in relation to power structures, systemic oppression, and liberation and empowerment. Other texts will be provided as PDFs.
Lynda Haas WR 60 Animal Science We identify and analyze current scientific research in animal science. No
Jaya Dubey WR 60 Climate Justice & Sustainability The fight for climate action in the face of corporate and multination climate denial and inaction with special focus on the Global South. Articles and book chapters
Sheryl Barbera WR 60 Student Loan Debt The explosive growth of student loan debt in recent years has generated a growing body of research and policy advocacy concerned with responding to the looming crisis. The magnitude of the issue is suggested by the role that student loan debt came to play in the platforms of candidates in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the 2020 primaries: both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders elevated plans to respond to the student loan debt crisis. In this class, we attempt to develop a broad, historically informed perspective on the recent debates about how to respond to growing student loan debt by situating currently proposed solutions in relation to the postwar origins of the American student loan system and the waves of programs and policy changes that have followed. N/A; various supplemental readings
Marc Huerta Osborn WR 60 Immigration This course pursues an institutional critique of immigration enforcement, asking how and why it has changed, in what ways it has negatively impacted communities, and who has stood to benefit. Students can pursue a range of research projects related to problems in immigration courts and due process violations, the mass incarceration of immigrants and the connections between immigration and criminal law enforcement, and harms suffered by asylum seekers, immigrant laborers, undocumented youths, and other groups affected by an expanded set of laws dictating as criminal the everyday activities of undocumented migrants. N/A; all readings available as PDFs on Canvas
Chimee Adioha WR 60 Housing & Urban Justice For this course, which is centered on the theme of Housing and Urban Justice, we will examine how housing has been presented and debated in U.S. contexts. We will also explore how media outlets, policymakers, activists, and community members frame questions around housing accessibility, affordability, and inequality. Because our class will be mostly discussion based, we will track how topics such as gentrification, homelessness, and the privatization of public spaces have appeared in public conversations and even popular culture. We will look at news articles/essays, social media campaigns, and scholarly texts- focusing on the rhetorical strategies that have been utilized to shape public understanding of housing and its connection to broader struggles for urban justice and equality. Yes
Martha Tesfalidet WR 60 Mass Incarceration This course examines mass incarceration in the United States as a structural and historical system rather than an isolated issue of crime and punishment. Students analyze how policing, sentencing, and prison policies intersect with race, class, poverty, and public policy, while engaging research, data, and multimedia texts to evaluate arguments about justice, safety, and reform. The course emphasizes critical inquiry into how mass incarceration shapes communities, economic opportunity, and democratic life. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2012)
James Vitiello WR 60 Mass Incarceration & Social Justice We look at varying perspectives on the historical, political, and ethical critiques grappling with mass incarceration Materials provided via pdf
Egor Sofronov WR 60 Why War? Is war inevitable? Why is it that the most principled proponents of peace were skeptical that wars can be done away with? "Why war?" asked some famous pacifists in the period between the two world wars. While an unreachable ideal of perpetual peace cannot be removed, their realism however veered into absolute pessimism. In our age, the establishment of peace seems more elusive the farther we move into this century, even after harrowing escalations of the previous. Has warfare ever ceased, if for a moment? On what conditions can one hold a distinction between war and peace as valid?
The course asks to consider the mass-scale destructive force in its social dimensions, beyond the distinctions into spheres combat and civilian, or directions international and interior. What do tremblings and spoils of violent struggle mean for human society? How can public advocacy proceed when the civic arena risks civil infighting: if speech is met with militarized enforcement, and if groups are marked as security threats, and if unleashing the negation of life is at the heart of politics and power? We will consider this annihilating power in its rightful centrality, attending to its meanings more obvious and less self-evident.
Possible research topics include imbrications of war with the following. Government policies in affairs of war and peace, and in civilian spheres. Economy. The non-human: in the environment and in the technologically autonomized. Pacification. Arms race. Military spending and arms manufacturing, trade, traffic. Counter-insurgency and national security apparatus. Terror. Mass destruction. Extermination, humanitarianism, prevention, and preemption. Perpetration and justice. Transparency and accountability. Geopolitical competition and war by procuration. Necessity and justification of armed struggle; causes that make it desirable and normal, and better still, sanctified, glorious, great. The future of this constant norm, or the dynamics of its change…		 mostly AGWR
Carolin Huang WR 60 Rhetoric on the Mother This course will examine a range of social, political, and economic issues through the figure of the mother. The substratal position of the mother in relation to society opens up questions on work, violence, ethics, and particularly, the structure of our social order. Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty
Chen Gu WR 60 mass incarceration Our section of WR 60 focuses on the pressing issues surrounding mass incarceration in the U.S., including the school-to-prison pipeline, policing, bail systems, and the prison industrial complex. We will read Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? as a core text, supplemented by various excerpts from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Tony Messenger’s Profit and Punishment to examine the intersections of class, race and gender in prison and jail systems. In addition to a range of research and data-driven material, we will also focus on first person memoirs and interviews from incarcerated people, highlighting the ethos of lived experience and gaining a fuller picture of individuals, families, and communities impacted by mass incarceration. Through building a skillset of pinpointing specific harms in the carceral landscape, thoughtful evidence integration, and nuanced analyses, we will create the foundation for a deep understanding of advocacy that can lead us toward a more equitable society. Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
Chris Varela WR 60 The "Ends" of Education: Writing through Campus Communities We will use a lens of "community" to investigate issues in and around higher education in the US. Articles and essays will be provided in Canvas.
John Comerci WR 60 Deaths of Despair: Declining American Life Expectancy The starting point for my course is the landmark "Deaths of Despair" paper by Case and Deaton, which claims that in the 1990s, white, non-college-educated males drove the first decrease in life expectancy since WWII; at the same time, we read a paper called
"Indigenous Data Genocide" that "communicates" with the Case and Deaton paper by pointing out how the methodology ignored several minority populations.		 I consider "Deaths of Despair" and "Indigenous Data Genocide" to be the core texts; from there, we read a variety of different papers and primary sources (e.g., personal stories from the Alcoholics Anonymous "Big Book"). Early in the term, I organize students into groups based on which topic they've chosen for the CP (there is flexibility, as long as their "problem" points to morbidity / mortality) -- and that distribution may influence which texts I assign (e.g., if a large number of students tackle the opioid crisis, as was the case this year, I may assign a paper on drug policy in the U.S. and its failures)
Nathaniel Pigott WR 60 U.S.-China Relations in a Global Age Over the past two decades, the relationship between the United States and China has become significantly more interconnected and significantly more strained. This apparent paradox stems from China’s undeniable ascendency, which has led to the two countries becoming increasingly integrated economically even as their governments appear to be ever more polarized politically. Both governments face a number of issues that require cooperation, but such efforts are often stymied by competition and disputes over ideological, economic, and geopolitical aims. We have a stake in the relationship between these two great powers, which will have enormous implications for both domestic and international politics for the foreseeable future.

The importance of these issues requires us to have an informed and well-articulated stance on the future of our foreign policy and a principled approach to both the promise of compromise and the possibility of conflict. Students will have the opportunity to pursue a number of possible research topics on the potential for either conflict or cooperation between the United States and China. For example, students may explore the possibility of cooperation on issues such as climate change, technological and AI regulation, or electric vehicle production. On the other hand, students can also choose to investigate potential flashpoints for conflict, including disputes over Hong Kong and Taiwan, issues of censorship and espionage as in the recent Tiktok controversy, trade and tariff wars, or the recent efforts of the U.S. government to limit Chinese students studying abroad. Students will examine a variety of sources from government officials, political scientists, economists, and historians to contextualize these issues and, more importantly, to take a stance on an ideal foreign policy approach – whether to cooperate or compete, compromise or assert ourselves – and articulate why this approach will benefit our domestic and international landscape.		 The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy
Chasia Jeffries WR 60 Criminalizing California What makes something or someone “criminal”? In our section of Writing 60, examining how certain individuals, communities, and bodies have been marked as 'criminal,' and the impact that criminality has on these populations and society at large. Through the lens of California's criminal justice system, we will focus on how power operates through criminalization to strengthen social hierarchies and define the boundaries of normal and acceptable behavior. The wide range of current events and communities impacted by criminalization, along with the diversity of approaches taken in our readings, should empower you to explore an issue of importance as you develop your research and writing skills over the quarter. All additional readings will be made available via Canvas
Isabel Mesko WR 60 criminalization of immigration the course gives an overview of the history of the criminalization of immigration in the us with a focus on some socal regional recent history with regard to ice activity academic articles and articles describing the history of crimmigration, us-mexico border realities, radicalization of ice, private detention center realities.
John Nieman WR 60 Mass Incarceration In this course, we will take a look at mass incarceration and the myriad social structures that create this labyrinthine system. We will consider how legislation, policy, and the psychology of social groups impact political discourse and shape the rule of law. Students can research topics connected to mass incarceration which might include how suspension/expulsion in k-12 creates a pipeline to incarceration, or how police brutality impacts our communities. These are just two of many possible topics students can pursue to understand how mass incarceration operates from a political, social, and cultural perspective. No (readings are provided via link or PDF)
Stephanie Shu WR 60 Disability Justice This course topic, Disability Justice, interrogates the social construction of disability, asking questions such as: How did the concept of a “normal” body come to exist? And how did the “disabled” body become its opposite? What would it look like to live in a world that no longer deems disability as “undesirable” or “bad”? We will challenge ourselves to think of disability not as a concrete category, but rather as the result of a society that actively disables those who are deemed “abnormal.” In doing so, we will explore how ableism is intertwined with other dominant power structures that shape our everyday lives. As researchers, we will build information literacy skills by considering different types of scholarship on disability across a number of written genres. As advocates, we’ll explore potential solutions to address ableist features of our society. Together, we’ll consider the liberatory and coalitional possibilities of disability justice, and dream up a better collective future. Selected readings:

Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London and New York, Verso, 1995, pp. 23–49.

Campbell, Fiona Kumari. “Proving Disability.” Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 121–140.

Samuels, Ellen. Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. New York and London, New York University Press, 2014, pp. 121–140.

Shew, Ashley. “Scripts and Crips” and “The Neurodivergent Resistance.” Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. W. W. Norton & Company, 2023, pp. 25–32, pp. 52–75.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023.
Agnik Bhattacharya WR 60 WR 60-Climate Justice in the United States of America Writing 60 is the second course in UC Irvine’s Lower Division Writing sequence and builds directly on the foundational work of Writing 50. While WR 50 introduces students to critical reading and rhetorical analysis, WR 60 extends these skills by emphasizing independent research, genre awareness, argumentation, and information literacy. In this course, students learn to identify, evaluate, and strategically employ a range of source types, from scholarly arguments to public-facing texts, as they craft nuanced and well- supported claims for academic audiences.



This section of WR 60 centers on the theme of Climate Justice in the United States, a framework that emerges from the environmental justice movement expanded understanding of “environment” to include not only distant wilderness areas but also the neighborhoods, cities, and lived spaces where people experience the everyday effects of environmental change. Climate justice highlights the inequities that climate change creates and intensifies, drawing attention to the intersections of race, class, geography, policy, and power.



Throughout the quarter, we will analyze scholarship, public writing, policy documents, and activist texts to understand how various communities identify, experience, and communicate the consequences of climate change. We will pay particular attention to frontline communities—those disproportionately burdened by climate-related hazards—		 Estes, Our History Is Our Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London: Verso, 2019.

Apart from this, I will also be uploading some video files and articles from various newspapers, which will be discussed during the quarter.
Yipu Su WR 60 Modern Slavery WR60 with Modern Slavery discusses the theoretical framework and historical context for understanding modern slavery, examines cases of modern slavery, and conducts research projects related to this theme. All the other materials will be available via Canvas.
Eliana De La Torre WR 60 Criminalization of Immigration Scholars from across the university, working in disciplines including sociology, criminology, and law, have argued that changes in immigration enforcement over the past few decades constitute a turn toward overcriminalization. Historically considered a civil rather than criminal issue to be administered by the federal government, immigration enforcement has increasingly come under the often irregular purview of criminal law enforcement at both the state and local levels. This trend, coupled with the increasingly active ICE and CBP agencies, has led to skyrocketing rates of immigration-related arrests, incarceration, and deportation. In the era of Trump, you may be entering this course thinking that the current state of immigration enforcement began in 2016. The readings in this course tell a different story, one that examines how migration has been recast as illegal, borders weaponized, legal rights curtailed, and incarceration expanded continuously since at least the Clinton administration in the 1990s. This course pursues an institutional critique of immigration enforcement, asking how and why it has changed, in what ways it has negatively impacted communities, and who has stood to benefit. Students can pursue a range of research projects related to problems in immigration courts and due process violations, the mass incarceration of immigrants and the connections between immigration and criminal law enforcement, and harms suffered by asylum seekers, immigrant laborers, undocumented youths, and other groups affected by an expanded set of laws dictating as criminal the everyday activities of undocumented migrants. Readings will be provided
Isabelle Williams WR 60 Race and Technology Using Benjamin's text, this course examines the role of technology plays, and has played, in forming race and racial issues. Benjamin's text Race After Technology and assigned canvas readings
Michael Corbin WR 60 Labor and the Economy - "Temp" This course considers the way people work in the 21st century, the kinds of jobs they do (or don’t do) as well as the wages, benefits, and levels of job security they receive (or don’t receive) for their labor. Much of the discussion focuses on the rise of “gig work” and the “gig economy,” which is to say, the increasing prevalence of work that is temporary, precarious, subcontracted, contingent, casualized. For some experts and scholars, the growth of this kind of work—which, according to one study, represents 94 percent of net new jobs created in the U.S. between 2005-2015 (Katz)—is a good thing, since it gives workers greater “flexibility” and “autonomy” in their lives. For many others, however, this transformation of work represents a dangerous trend, since it leads to a loss of the security and stability on which many workers—though, as we will see, by no means all workers—could formerly depend. Louis Hyman, Temp: The Real Story of What Happened to Your Salary, Benefits, & Job Security. New York: Penguin, 2019. (ISBN 9780735224087)
Konysha Wade WR 60 "Education as a Practice of Freedom" "The theme of this course will be “Education as a Practice of Freedom,” and the topics we engage will include: race and technology (racism in technological software), digital rhetoric, the digital divide, and the consequences of having and not having access to technology; engaged pedagogy - (in)clusive pedagogy that improves the educational experiences of marginalized students; language and the formation of identity - linguistic (in)justice; and Black Feminist Thought - insider/outsider dichotomies in education. We will also cover slavery and labor as key to the origin and development of U.S. education. We will engage material that reveals the ways in which education is liberatory, considering it as is fundamentally about bringing folks into consciousness; a consciousness that causes them to think critically about themselves, others, and the world. Through the interdisciplinary material we engage, we will cover what produces this need for freedom, while exploring various possibilities of what freedom looks like and how those possibilities are practiced and obtained through education." AGWR is our core text; all other materials (book chapters and articles) will be provided via Canvas. A few authors include: Du Bois, Freire, hooks, Baldwin, Anzaldua. We will also read contemporary case studies and scholarship on the topics mentioned above.
Scott Lerner WR 60 Engaging the First Amendment This course explores ongoing and vital debates about the First Amendment. All texts will be provided by the instructor.
Gema Ludisaca WR 60 Immigration This course examines how U.S. immigration enforcement has come to treat immigration as a criminal matter, blurring the line between civil regulation and criminal punishment. Over several decades, this turn has been driven by policies that increasingly define immigration as illegal, intensify border security, narrow legal protections, and expand the use of detention and incarceration. Students will pursue research projects on topics such as the recent expansion of immigration detention, changing practices in immigration courts, new state and federal laws that treat the everyday activities of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers as criminal, and the shifting forms of cooperation and conflict between local and federal enforcement. Core text: Robert Hartmann McNamara, The Criminalization of Immigration. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. ISBN 9798765126240. Additional Readings will be provided by instructor.
Brie Smiley WR 60 Mass Incarceration With its focus on mass incarceration, this course explores the history and contemporary state of policing and prison industrial complex. Moreover, we will discuss and analyze how injustice developed and sustains within this American system while it continues to victimize its poor, racialized, and vulnerable populations. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander helps us consider how America’s modern dependence on mass incarceration coexists with a contemporary representation of colorblindness and a post-race society. While The New Jim Crow acts as one our core texts for this course, we’ll be reading excerpts from other texts engaged in topics surrounding surveillance, policing, social movements like Black Lives Matter, and class struggle. This course encourages you to think about ways race and bias play a role in maintaining America’s new racial caste system, particularly as it relates to our criminal justice system. The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander (in pdf form)
Charlie Espinosa WR 60 Environmental Justice This is an adapted version of the Climate Justice in the US. The only differences are I have added more international emphasis by 1) integrating readings and exercises on global mineral supply chains and 2) allowing students to write their CP/AP on international environmental justice topics. Méndez's Climate Change from the streets + various journalistic and NGO content
Lora Mathis WR 60 Climate Justice This course looks at climate issues, with a main focus on the contemporary United States.

Climate justice addresses the inequities created and intensified by climate change and calls attention to the intersection of social, racial, economic, and environmental factors. This quarter, we will evaluate the causes and responses to the wide-reaching and devastating repercussions of climate change, focusing in particular on frontline communities in the United States. We will look at issues from a variety of scales, including local, regional, and global. n particular, we will consider the extent that the lived experiences of affected communities are given authority in both identifying climate problems and deciding how to address them.		 We will look at the introductory chapter of Michael Mendez's Climate Change from the Streets. All other materials (readings, videos, podcast episodes) will be provided.
Kathryn Schubert WR 60 Gender & Labor What is "work," and how is it related to gender? In this section of WR60, we'll ask how different forms of labor get coded as "masculine" or "feminine," and how that shapes the way we think about everything from our careers to our bodies. We'll read, think, and write about work of all kinds—from domestic labor, to sex work, to "self-care"—while thinking through solutions to a wide range of social, political, economic, and cultural problems rooted in the relationship between gender and labor. Along the way, we'll explore the movements and ideologies that have shaped the way we think about work in relation to gender, race, and class, from the radical "Wages for Housework" movement of the 1970s to the "tradwife" content we see on social media today. Core text: Barbara Ehrenreich & Arlie Russell Hochschild, "Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy" (Macmillan, 2004)
Josthin Amado WR 60 The Carceral State: Rhetoric, Research and Reform This class explores mass incarceration as a historical and ongoing system of racialized control. Using
Kelly Lytle Hernández’s City of Inmates and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, students will trace
the evolution of the carceral state from colonial Los Angeles to today’s “colorblind” era of criminal
justice. We will consider how policing, imprisonment, and immigration detention have served as tools of
conquest and exclusion, as well as how communities have resisted through abolitionist, reformist, and
storytelling efforts. Students will connect national debates about the War on Drugs and prison policy to
local histories and archives. Through writing and research, students will examine how systems of control
are justified rhetorically, how data and narrative shape public opinion, and how advocacy writing can
imagine alternatives.		 Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los
Angeles, 1771–1965. (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
Michael Yosef Jimenez WR 60 Climate Justice in the United States The concept of climate justice grew out of the environmental justice movement, which redefined “environment” by moving away from traditional conceptions of a far-off wilderness to include populated areas and urban surroundings. Climate justice addresses the inequities created and intensified by climate change and calls attention to the intersection of social, racial, economic, and environmental factors. This quarter, we will evaluate the causes and responses to the wide-reaching and devastating repercussions of climate change, focusing in particular on frontline communities in the United States. From the very start of the term, we will consider the range of information used to diagnose and call attention to climate injustice. In particular, we will consider the extent that the lived experiences of affected communities are given authority in both identifying climate problems and deciding how to address them. In examining potential solutions to climate injustices on multiple scales of action, we will consider not only the effectiveness and feasibility of the available plans but also the extent that those plans address immediate, local injustices and include the perspectives and "embodied knowledge" of the communities most vulnerable to the problem. There are no required books/materials for this class.