Please find information about Spring Quarter 2024 themes below. Make sure to enroll in Composition courses as soon as your enrollment window opens!
| Name | Course | Theme | Description | Textbooks |
| Writing 40 | ||||
| Eason, Kat | WR 40 | Food for Thought | Food-themed essays and reviews, with assignments focused on (de)constructing argument, with a side (see what I did there?) of multimodality. | We'll use the AGWR and assorted PDFs that will be available in Perusall. |
| Geraci, Jennifer | WR 40 | How do writers tell impossible stories? | Over the course of the quarter, we will be considering the question “How do writers tell impossible stories?” We will not be able to definitively answer this question — in fact, there is no definitive answer. Rather, reading and analyzing model texts and discussing techniques that writers choose will help us come up with diverse ways to grapple with this difficult question. And you, too, will think about ways that you would like to tell impossible stories. To help us think about the various ways that writers tell impossible stories, our class will focus primarily on personal narratives by contemporary writers who focus on their experiences; often the experiences that the authors write about are stories of people, places, and events that are challenging to share. The language, style, and even the formatting of the texts we will read this quarter are all chosen to illustrate stories that are hard -- or even impossible -- to articulate. The authors we will read this quarter use innovative modes of storytelling in order to shape ideas about language acquisition, mental health, ghosts, identity, racial identity, and places. We will consider how various authors redefine and invent ways to tell personal stories. The authors’ personal — often politically-minded — approaches to storytelling show readers how individual experiences can contribute to a more collective understanding of our culture and of ourselves. |
Anteater's Guide and all PDFs provided by instructor |
| Haas, Lynda | WR 40 | Disney film and the social construction of gender | Students read several essays regarding social construction and gender and then apply them to a selection of Disney films | no |
| Oh, Sandy | WR 40 | How do we know what we know? Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange | In the words of anthropologist Franz Boas, we will also be understanding how to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” This particular burden is not only relevant to anthropological inquiry but effective writing more generally. It is our job as writers to tell stories of the particular--things that seem bizarre and unreal---in order to generate audience empathy, sympathy, and support. Likewise, the things we take for granted--the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the mundane things we say to one another---often warrant another inspection. Perhaps we can come to understand these things in a different light? Perhaps that innocent seeming, throwaway remark in the supermarket with a stranger, tells us more than meets the eye about the social norms, values, and politics of a particular individual? By focusing on the minutiae included in texts, we will deepen our understanding of how authors bring us into their worlds in a way where it matters to us. In turn, you will also be able to include small “meaningless” details that become the bread and butter of your writing and ability to effectively communicate to your audience. | AGWR (mandatory) |
| Writing 45 | ||||
| Brauer Rogers, Emily | WR 45 | Science Fiction | This class reads short science fiction stories to explore the meaning of what makes us human as well as looks at how technology plays a role in our humanity. | Stories from Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, NK Jemisin, Ken Liu, and Ted Chiang |
| Cibula, Peter | WR 45 | Medievalism at the Movies (Romance theme) | This class will look at the way medieval romance (and in particular, the "memes" that make up its generic conventions) has been adapted to modern cinema. The romances we will read are permeated with the gender ideology of the period, and how each text figures the role of men and women will be our primary concern. This interest in gender roles will also be apparent as we examine the work of "translation" - both from medieval to modern and text to screen - as we also consider how genre more generally is adaptable and malleable. Scott and Lowrey as directors take up the "memes" of medieval culture and re-arrange them for our present moment; reading their films alongside source material will allow us to better understand how the rhetorical choices that the original authors and their contemporary translators make are also arguments about what masculinity and femininity entail. | TBD |
| Hanson-Kegerreis, Sarah | WR 45 | Science Fiction | This section of WR 45, Defining the Human in Science Fiction, will explore science fiction (SF) as a genre dedicated to ‘what if?’ propositions that examine the nature of humanity and human society. We'll analyze a variety of sci-fi short stories, including works by Octavia Butler, Ken Liu, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Ted Chiang. The second part of the class will continue to examine SF as a genre about defining humanity but will shift to include multi-modal works of ‘popular’ SF, such as film and TV. We'll look at critical commentaries on the genre, including different kinds of podcasts, that explore questions about who creates and who consumes SF and how the genre reflects shifting social contexts. | Aside from The Anteater's Guide, all materials will be provided via Canvas |
| King, Becky | WR 45 | Chivalric Romance | In this course, we will explore the genre of Chivalric romance, a medieval sub-genre of romance that focuses on the adventures of noble men and women seeking honor and love. Although its origins lie far in the past, the genre’s explorations of relationships, violence, and social expectations continue to influence how we talk and think about these concepts today. We will be exploring how these romances communicated with their original readers, as well as how they and their many adaptations continue to affect us in the modern world. | The Lais of Marie de France |
| Perez, Victoria | WR 45 | Memoir | This writing course explores the art of memoir, with a focus on social, political, and cultural dimensions of identity, language, and ethnicity. Students will craft personal narratives that illuminate the intersections of individual experiences with broader societal contexts. | All readings will be provided as files on Canvas |
| Seward, Spencer | WR 45 | The Family in Horror | This course will examine depictions of the family in the horror genre, with a particular focus on familial relationships (domestic partners, parents-children, siblings, etc.), social structures and expectations, sexuality, and gender identity. In particular, we’ll focus on the horror genre’s exploration of family in 20th and 21st century short stories and films. The course will focus on the “modern family” (think 1950s and beyond), often with a focus on suburban settings, and the course will explore our themes of family, gender, social structures, and sexuality within the specific context of the 20th and 21st century America. | No core textbook, a mixture of short stories and films, all PDFs |
| Smith-Newman, Julian | 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, 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. | There is no core textbook for this class. All texts will be available as PDFs on our Canvas page. |
| Speer, Margaret | WR 45 | Medical Horror | "Medical Horror" 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. | AGWR required; all other reading provided as PDFs. |
| Way, Jackie | WR 45 | Rhetoric of Apocalypse | AGWR; all other readings will be available via Canvas/Perusall | |
| Writing 50 | ||||
| Barbera, Sheryl | WR 50 | Fairy Tales | ||
| Bense, Brendan | WR 50 | science fiction | same as previous | N/A |
| Brouwer, Mo | WR 50 | Fairy Tales--reading 17th, 18th, 19th century European fairy tales alongside 20th and 21st century British and American retellings and film adaptations. | AGWR, pdfs | |
| Buczinsky, Zak | WR 50 | Exploring the Shadow | Everyone has dark thoughts. Whether it be middle America’s obsession with True Crime TV, horror movie fanatics, the thrill of Walter White’s transformation into Heisenberg, or simply the impulse to slow down and stare at a crash on the 405, the dark side of human nature has fascinated people for generations. This theme of WR 50, Exploring the Shadow, will not only ask why people are fascinated with the dark side of human nature, but more importantly, why understanding our darker impulses is an important and perhaps even a heroic pursuit. By exploring primarily horror stories in which antagonists represent humanity’s darkest impulses, this class will explore what psychologist Carl Jung coined “the shadow self,” the unseen darkness in every human being, which, in order to understand oneself fully, must be fearlessly faced down. | Just the AGWR. All other texts provided. |
| Campo Bowen, Kathryn | WR 50 | Memoir | ||
| Catherine Winiarski | WR 50 | American nature writing | In our time of environmental crises (like pollution, species extinction, climate change, and environmental injustice), do we need to assess and even re-imagine our relationship to the natural environment, in order to take meaningful action? This course examines the genre of nature writing in American settings; we will read and analyze immigrant, indigenous, rural, and urban perspectives on nature and the human relationship to nature. This examination of the rhetoric of nature writing will lead to a project in which students design and compose multi-media rhetoric in this genre, reflecting on their own relationship to the natural environment and addressing relevant contexts and an audience that matter to them. | The Anteater's Guide to Writing and Rhetoric (only this textbook to purchase); readings from J. Drew Lanham, Enrique Salmon, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Jenny Price provided in PDF form. |
| Dearborn, Emily | WR 50 | Travel Writing | Our section of WR50 will focus on the genre of travel literature. While you may be familiar with certain travel narratives already, you are not expected to know anything about it prior to the start of class. Our weekly reading and writing assignments will provide you with comprehensive knowledge of travel writing conventions, as well as their rhetorical significance. Over the next ten weeks, we will read a variety of travel narratives, as well as academic essays about travel writing. The major writing assignments ask you to analyze travel writing, its conventions and rhetorical situations, and ultimately, to apply your knowledge by writing your own travel-related text. | Travel Writing, Carl Thompson |
| Delany-Ullman, Lorene | WR 50 | Memoir: A Slice of Life - The Rhetoric of Home, Family, and Self with a focus on identity, language, and ethnicity | Laura L. Lovett, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, writes: "The iconic American ideal of 'the family' permeates our national zeitgeist [spirit] for at least a century. Perhaps today's 'family values' are a last-ditch effort to hold back the new forms of families: same-sex marriages, civil unions, collections of people unrelated by blood but joined by affinity, all who see themselves as a family." The central questions we will address as we read and write: What does the concept of home mean to you? How do we define "family" and "home"? How do we define the "self"? How has the idea of the American family and home impacted us politically, socially, and culturally? How does the rhetoricLinks to an external site. of "family" and "home" impact the self and the social, political, cultural, and economic world around us? |
Claire Vaye Watkins "Some Houses (Various Stages of Dissovle)"'; Bich Minh Nguyen "Pringles"; Marcello Hernandez Castillo "[Movement as a Trix Cereal Commercial]" |
| Ellis, Tagert | 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 |
| Eng, William | WR 50 | The Origins of Escaping Oppressors in Memoir and Personal Narrative: The Presence of the Slave Narrative in Modern POC and Immigrant Narratives. | Using the established tropes and conventions of the Slave Narrative we draw a throughline to the past in how modern American Memoir and Personal Narrative about escaping oppression are written similarly, almost in the the same canon as what appears to be an origin genre. | Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass |
| Gullaba Jr., Alberto | WR 50 | Naturalism, Moral Satire, and Inner-City Fiction | An examination of the different ways genre can help us make sense of poverty. | Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. |
| Harrison Vernon, Alexandra | WR 50 | The Rhetoric of Fairy Tales | We will explore what fairy tales are, how they work, and why they are so durably meaningful across different cultures. | AGWR only |
| Hiscock, Vincent | WR 50 | The Road | While the 'road genre' has ancient roots and a rhetoric built over many hundreds of years, the genre starts to look like a major one of its own in the US in the mid-20th century. Extreme, even desperate feelings of social alienation beget and accompany questions about the nation, about the national community. The road genre explores US regions, especially the US West—its interstitial spaces. Racial, gendered, classed, and regional differences, divisions, and unlikely contacts (sometimes ecstatic, sometimes fearful) feature, and cliches and types from popular culture proliferate; the road genre tends to respond to a new awareness of US minorities, America as composed of a multiplicity of bodies, of peoples, including micro-peoples of sub-cultures, local scenes, political groups. Road genre protagonists dream of and seek to commit to a life with an open end, a matter that often relates to sexuality, including queer life and experience and other sexual expressions deviating from an accepted 'norm.' 'Living life with an open end' further sometimes involves experimentation with drugs and psychedelia or other, including spiritual means, to altered consciousness. All of these matters produce works crossed by forces—of alluring darkness, of nature, of 'liberated' kinds of behavior or experimental communities that can then face the opposing force of police or reactionary, vigilante violence, and of social relations between groups subject to very different economic conditions—that often threaten to push the work into a state of paranoia. That life on the model or in the spirit of the road rarely proves sustainable inflects the genre with a certain poignancy and/or with a sense of juvenile or mystifying nostalgia. Examples of the road genre not only thematize but seek formal means to convey 'speed' and 'blur.' Aesthetic choices convey social attitudes and postures, which we can see as conveying latent social-aesthetic theories, and the road genre almost always provides a venue for, as well as the challenge to produce, a personal, 'anti-academic,' but virtuosic, prose style. Formal looseness and composition through disconnected episodes are not only road genre conventions but supply formal problems that each artist, in their work, must solve for, must seek to equilibrate. In this class, we will analyze photographs, a novel, films, and poems for the individual choices, especially formal choices, they exhibit, in order to think through the way artist’s choices negotiate shifting social-historical meanings of their times. All the while, we will be living into a writing process that will transform our abilities to craft logically coherent, well developed essays, among other kinds of writing, and to pen lexically coherent, polished sentences. The aims of the course are to enable you to: 1) critically read for genre and closely analyze reasons for specific generic decisions; 2) write purposefully for specific audiences and, as a result of careful generic analyses, gain the capacity to write in those genres oneself. | Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (1952), ISBN-10: 0486800296 and/or ISBN-13: 9780486800295. |
| Huang, Isis | WR 50 | Fairy Tales | We will explore which genre conventions modern fairy tale writers subvert and for what purpose. | The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar (Norton Critical Edition) |
| Kiklowicz, Doug | WR 50 | Confessional Writing | Texts that reveal personal and sensitive stories (or sensitive viewpoints) which put the narrator in a vulnerable place in respect to their audience, usually by opening themselves up to embarrassment, moral judgement, legal prosecution, or any number of other potential repercussions. It's the job of a successful confessor to re-contextualize this sensitive material in a way that encourages a reexamination of it, and thus earning the readers trust, respect and empathy. | PDFs/websites |
| Lillmars, Bryce | WR 50 | Food, Writing and You | The first half of the quarter we will focus on foodoir (food memoirs!) with the second half of the quarter covering other subgenres of food writing | An array of readings provided through Perusall |
| McClure, Greg | WR 50 | Superheroes | The course conducts an examination of the superhero genre and the kinds of stories that are told through superhero conventions. | |
| McCune, Louise | WR 50 | Detective Fiction | PDFs provided on Canvas | |
| Morrell, Iris | WR 50 | Writing About Illness | "Writing About Illness" studies autobiographical writing from disabled people across contexts. By reading about mentally ill women in Victorian times, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and COVID-19, we try to understand how people write about their own bodies, and how our own bodies are governed by global structures of power. | "The Yellow Wallpaper," zines from the AIDS epidemic, music videos, disabled activist writing |
| Mukherjee, Annanya | WR 50 | Crime Fiction | I will try to stick to the course proposal by Madeleine Read in the google drive | I am using the short stories and articles from the original course proposal, so there is no major course textbook. |
| Obodiac, Erin | WR 50 | Robots and Science Fiction | R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots); Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep | |
| Read, Madeleine | WR 50 | Tragedy | Why do genres change with time? We will consider this question via a particular genre, tragedy, and hope that the answers we uncover will tell us something about writing, audience, intent, history, and ourselves. | No core textbook, but we will be reading versions of Antigone by Sophocles and various contemporary playwrights. Texts will be provided. |
| Shank, Dominique | WR 50 | Suburban Gothic | ||
| Sharif, Saiham | WR 50 | The Rhetoric of Fairy Tales | We'll examine the rhetoric of fair tales as one means of better understanding the stories we tell ourselves. | Maria Tatar's 2nd Anthology of The Collected Fairy Tales |
| Short, Gretchen | WR 50 | Science fiction -- Adapting to the Alien | We will read three sci-fi stories about how the idea of aliens is used to explore human nature and human society. | The AGWR and short stories by Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and James Tiptree, Jr. |
| Wells, Emily | WR 50 | Virginia Woolf's Orlando (satire) | 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. | Virginia Woolf's Orlando |
| Zhuang, Jie | WR 50 | Fairy Tale | the rhetoric of fairy tales | The Classic Fairy Tales, by Maria Tatar (Second Norton critical edition) |
| Writing 60 | ||||
| Alexandra Geurts | WR 60 | Medical Humanities | addressing contemporary and relevant topics within the medical field from a social justice slant; students will write papers focusing on a pressing problem within healthcare of their choosing | AGWR + The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks |
| Atamdede, Aysel | WR 60 | Education Reform | This course will have you investigating education, from grade school to university, and discussing the importance of access to history, context, and resources. We will examine the current atmosphere and rhetoric surrounding the debates on what should be allowed in curriculums, who should be able to decide what is taught, and how access to (or lack of access) proper resources can impact students. Through our readings and discussions, you will reflect on your own experiences up until now and how they've shaped your academic journey, and through your research projects you will explore means and techniques to address areas of concern you may come across. | Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch |
| Atkin, Kendra | WR 60 | Environmental Justice. | This course thematic focuses on two intersecting sites of inquiry: social justice, and environmentalism. Or "Environmental Justice." We will ask how these two broad social movements are related to one another, discovering how environmental issues disproportionately impact some people more than others on both national and global levels. We will also ask what environmental injustices may exist in our own communities, how social injustice may be at the root of our environmental crisis, and who has a voice in this conversation. | |
| Charlene Keeler | WR 60 | Animals, Ethics, and Ecology | Students will focus on a problem involving animals and/or human-animal interactions and the effects on biodiversity. | No - a series of readings from a variety of genres |
| Chavez, Daniela | WR 60 | Education as the Practice of Freedom | This course will investigate the meaning and practice of education. While institutional education will indeed play a big part in our inquiry, our priority is in articulating what education means and has meant to us: the students and teacher in this course. To that extent, our investigation is personal. We will consider how our own educational experience has shaped our sense of place in the world and what it means to us to live fulfilling lives. But we will also look at that experience in the contexts of other experiences: those we will encounter in our readings and research. All of the readings and topics consider how education has been and continues to be used as a mechanism of coercion, conformity, and negligence. Some of these experiences you may identify with; others you may not. Our purpose is twofold: to understand what negative education looks like and how it works; and to understand what an education rooted in curiosity looks like and how it works. Finally, in placing so much emphasis on the individual experience and its effects, we can better position ourselves to make demands on the institutions that shape us. | only the AGWR |
| Chieng, Chieh | WR 60 | Animal Ethics | The course will engage in a discussion of the various scientific, legal, sociocultural, and economic issues surrounding animal welfare and conservation, for the purpose of developing research-driven arguments. | Readings will be supplied via Canvas. |
| Comerci, John | WR 60 | Deaths of Despair: Declining American Life Expectancy | This course considers what sorts of systemic failures drive increasing morbidity and mortality in the world's richest nation | N / A |
| Craig, Christiane | WR 60 | Technology & The Future | Together, we’ll consider the political, social and ethical implications of new technologies, in particular artificial intelligence and biotechnology—thinking critically about their short- and long-term impact on the future of humanity. | n/a |
| Daher, Pedro | WR 60 | labor & the economy | This section of WR 60 will consider 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 our discussion will focus 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's Temp: The Real Story of What Happened to Your Salary |
| Danner, Keith | WR 60 | Climate Change | Problems, contexts, and solutions s in the area of climate change and other environmental issues. | Anteater's Guide to Writing and Rhetoric; articles supplied by instructor and found on Canvas. |
| Dean, Matt | WR 60 | Free Speech | This course investigates the relationship between free speech, personal autonomy, and human well-being. We first examine John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech absolutism. Next, we examine recent criticisms of Mill’s position, including skeptical analyses of the concept of a “marketplace of ideas” in which all people are equally free to assert and challenge received opinion. Does Mill’s argument make sense in a historical moment marked by structural injustice, disinformation, and online echo chambers? Significant portions of class time will be dedicated to foundational research and writing skills. | No core text. Readings will be uploaded to Canvas. |
| Dubey, Jaya | WR 60 | Climate Justice & Sustainability | Focus on global south, environmental racism, ecoapartheid, indigenous people. | NA |
| Fang, Lucy | WR 60 | "Safe Spaces," Critical Geographies | What makes a safe space? Public and student programming, education, and activist conversations have often revolved around the difficulties in holding accessible space that protects, shelters, and allows for vulnerability. These are also pressing questions for disciplines such as geography, urban planning, education, and public health, to name a few. A space can be as small as one’s bedroom, the medical examination room, or the workplace, and as big as a city neighborhood, the nation, or even the internet. Yet, some spaces are more accessible and “safer” than others. Through this theme, we will consider the political, infrastructural, and social organizations of certain spaces in order to evaluate their complicity to a sense of safe or unsafe experiences for marginalized communities. | |
| Goldman, Matthew | WR 60 | Mass Incarceration in America | The course will ask students to examine the negative impacts of the American incarceration system from its inception to today. | American Prison by Shane Bauer alongside Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis |
| Graul, Kelin | WR 60 | Education and Critical Pedagogy | The theme in this course explores education in relation to power structures, systemic oppression, and empowerment. | Readings will be provided as PDFs on Canvas. |
| Grimes, Lily | WR 60 | Animal Ethics | This section of Writing 60 will be considering the ethics of animal husbandry and consumption. We will examine the cultural frameworks from within which we make decisions about animal treatment, including an investigation into how much we know about animal consciousness/sentience, thinking deeply about the issues of personal autonomy and freedom in connection to animal consumption and the farming industry, as well as looking at the way that animals interact with us as beloved pets and family members, often providing humans with invaluable emotional services (think ESAs, service animals, animal therapy, etc). This is not an exhaustive list, and due to the colossal nature of the theme “animal ethics,” this course theme offers you some flexibility to focus on an aspect of this topic that aligns with your personal interests, and you are encouraged to pursue these topics over the course of the quarter. Ranging from personal morality and health, societal responsibility and ethics, environmental concerns and conservation of the future, the flourishing of not only humanity, but our planet’s co-habitors, the scope of WR60 is personal, societal, and global. | reading list provided |
| Haas, Lynda | WR 60 | Animal Science | Students choose an animal from the class CANIDAE or the class AVES and identify recent scientific research studies about their animal. | no |
| Haley Suh | WR 60 | Body Politics and Infectious Diseases | AGWR | |
| Heurta Osborn, Marc | WR 60 | immigration | students can choose any research topic as long as it relates to a currently unfolding immigration issue. not restricted to US immigration. | none! |
| Hoenicke Flores, Sarah | WR 60 | Medical Humanities | Better by Atul Gawande and the AGWR | |
| Hyatt, Jacob | WR 60 | Education | This course will examine the American education system--its successes and failures--with a particular emphasis on the political, socioeconomic, and cultural factors that have shaped it. Students will encounter an array of primary and secondary texts, particularly from the twentieth century, in an attempt to better understand the nuances of American education. The ultimate goal of this course will be to use the texts as a foundation not only to have a better understanding of the system in which they have, to varying degrees, participated but also to use the acquisition of this knowledge to practice effective research and argumentation techniques. | Aside from the 9th edition of The Anteater's Guide to Writing and Rhetoric, students will also use Noliwe Rooks's Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education. |
| Jacob Reimer | WR 60 | Work (before labor) | This is ostensibly the course on “labor” but one that considers the relationship between work—anthropological—and labor—the social relation of work—in order to widen the scope of how and what students may consider as a “problem” within the labor of the 21st century. | Graeber, Bullshit Jobs |
| Jaime Sandoval | WR 60 | Labor & The Economy | This course serves as an exploration of social problems relating to labor and the economy. A strong emphasis on the role of unions and collective bargaining as means of improving employee welfare. | Temp by Louis Hyman |
| Kilolo, Munyao | WR 60 | Technology | The theme of this course is technology, with a particular focus on technology and the future of Language. We will examine the dynamic interplay between technology and language and how this continues to reshape our world. | Ruha Benjamin. Race After Technology. Wiley, 2019. |
| Kongshaug, Erik | WR 60 | Public Education and the Pedagogy of Liberation | Research and argument problems of public education, freedom and legacies of slavery developed from students own experiences with public education | No... pdf's from Paolo Freire, Diane Ravitch, Nancy MacLean, bell hooks, Eduardo Galeano and others |
| Lee, Jungmin | WR 60 | Education as the Practice of Freedom | This course will investigate the meaning and practice of education. While institutional education will indeed play a big part in our inquiry, our priority is in articulating what education means and has meant to us. | Text will be given as pdf files. |
| Lerner, Scott | WR 60 | Climate Change | Climate change and climate justice | Selection of readings, including "Climate Change from the Streets? by Michael Méndez |
| Letelier, Javiera | WR 60 | "Global Women" | "Global Women" allows students to research topics related to gender inequalities in the context of globalization. Through their research, students will learn about patriarchy and its modern consequences on society. | Global Women. Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild |
| Liberman, Hannah | WR 60 | Reducing Harm | This course examines increasing mortality in the United States primarily owing to addiction and mental health struggles (deaths of despair). It considers how COVID-19 affected the country, and the long history of socioeconomic struggle prior to it. | Anne Case and Angus Deaton "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism" |
| Lopez, Asusena | WR 60 | Climate Change | Climate change is the defining issue of this century, and the world's future depends on the extent to which this challenge is addressed. In this course, students will learn and practice how to conduct research, assess the credibility of sources, and use various types of evidence to support informed and persuasive arguments on climate change. Once students have established a broad understanding of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions, anticipated climate changes in the upcoming centuries, and the global energy infrastructure in a historical context, students will quantify the effects of climate change on both humanity and the natural environment. This evaluation will encompass impacts on health, air quality, biodiversity, food security, migration of humans and animals, and the proliferation of infectious diseases. During their research, students will investigate the rhetorical and argumentative strategies of scholars, public intellectuals, private firms, policymakers, and social justice advocates engaged in thinking through political, social, and economic problems related to climate change. After students have examined the actors and institutions of global environmental politics and learned how laws are made and policy is implemented, they will evaluate the successes and failures of past and current climate change policy at local, national, and international levels. Finally, students will advocate for the implementation of mitigation and adaption policies and technologies that promote water conservation, ocean protection, urban green spaces, carbon regulation, carbon sequestration, renewable energies, and sustainable practices in fishing, building design, and transportation. | Course readings are provided by instructor as PDFs via Canvas. |
| Mark, Edward | WR 60 | Responses to Climate Change | Climate change is one of the seminal issues of our time. As the planet continues to warm, and our continued reliance on fossil fuels and love for red meat continued unabated, every aspect of our daily lives will be impacted. To what extent depends on who is doing the telling, and not as much on what the science conveys. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns of global temperatures increasing three, four, or maybe more than five degrees Celsius by the end of this century. Oceans will continue to become more acidic. Ice sheets will melt, releasing powerful greenhouse gasses while raising sea level a yard or more. Up to one million species will become extinct. Life as we know it will change dramatically. You have heard this before. But what does all of this mean? How will life on Earth be altered, and how will our lives be altered, by an atmosphere that humans have transformed? These questions will form the foundation of this course, which asks you to think beyond the question of whether climate change occurs, and to consider what we can do. |
No. |
| Matthews, Ricardo | WR 60 | The City in Trouble | In this course, you will research and write about topics relating to problems in the urban space. We will use as our core text, "Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City," Andrew Ross' cultural study of Phoenix, Arizona, a sprawling metropolis in the middle of a scorching desert. Can Phoenix survive its insatiable appetite for unrestrained growth? "Bird on Fire" will provide a jumping-off point and model for your own research in identifying problems in your hometown and arguing for solutions. | Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City |
| McBurnie, Patrick | WR 60 | Climate Change and Environmental Justice | Our class readings, discussion, and writing assignments will explore the link between environmentalism and social justice. | No required core text. Reading list will be provided to students. |
| Rahimi, Yassaman | WR 60 | Mass Incarceration | Black feminist scholar-activist abolition theory | Angela Davis: Are Prisons Obsolete? |
| Rowland, Mariel | WR 60 | Education | Alongside the Anteater Guide to Writing and Rhetoric, we will also be reading a number of essays concerning U.S. education and the roots of its inequities. | |
| Schulte, Julie | WR 60 | Mothers and the Rhetoric of Safety | This course will investigate the rhetoric of safety around children and parenting, particularly mothers. Safety is “rhetorical” where it is used (by the media, politicians, policymakers, and the rest of us) to shape public perception and action. We will look deeply into the roles of mothers as protectors and the social repercussions of cultural expectations and stereotypes of what good mothering means. We will turn to close analysis of media representation of children as innocents who need protecting. We will see how the rhetoric of safety plays out in race relations, poverty, the policing of crime and the ways it perpetuates xenophobia. We will consider "motherhood" as a concept of repression and scapegoating in Western discourse, and we will look at moments when present crises are explained away as mothering failures, interrogating the impact that has on policy reform, discourse, and social punishment. | no, all readings provided as PDFs or links via Canvas |
| Son, Sara | WR 60 | Climate Change & The Environment | No | |
| Streitfeld, Scott | WR 60 | History and Impacts of Mass Incarceration in the U.S. | The impacts of the last sixty years of mass imprisonment have been devastating for the U.S. Since the 1960s, the number of prisons and prisoners across the country has exploded, and the effects have been most keenly felt by minority populations, in particular, African Americans. Our section of WR 39C will draw from a collection of texts, both scholarly and non-scholarly, that have defined current efforts to end mass incarceration in the U.S. This field of study and this archive of research writing will serve as the foundation for our own broad introduction to the topic, which will then feed into students’ individual research projects. As a class, we will explore the problem of mass human confinement as one entrenched in America's 400-year legacy of racism and discrimination, as well as in the longer history of colonialism and empire-building. We will read work from historians, social scientists, and legal scholars who analyze mass incarceration in relation to questions about race, class, and the enduring legacies of colonialism. We will scrutinize these policies and practices within and without the prison walls and examine their long and short term effects on communities and individuals. Finally, we will explore the rate of decline of prison populations in recent years along with new arguments that these numbers are misleading, in part, because the concept of incarceration itself is expanding. | Our course uses a split syllabus and reading packets. Students select one of three research tracks and read a collection of scholarly and non-scholarly sources depending on which track they select. |
| Tada, Annabelle | WR 60 | Medical Ethics and Marginalized Perspectives | In this class, we examine and evaluate dilemmas within the field of biomedical ethics, with an emphasis on concepts often taken for granted, such as what it means to be 'healthy,' as well as historically overlooked perspectives. | Biomedical Ethics by Mappes and DeGrazia |
| Venegas, Yolanda | WR 60 | First Generation Students and the Promise of Higher Education | The theme in this class centers the experiences of First Generation students with an emphasis on low-income students and students from immigrant families | none |
| Viger, Noelle | WR 60 | Elections and Democracy in the United States | This course examines the structures of democracy in the United States and how it impacts modern elections. Students will be asked to think critically about the foundations of the United States and encouraged to examine the ways in which history informs out current political issues. | Anteater Guide and associated readings posted on Canvas |
| Weinberg, Dara | WR 60 | Free Speech Abuses | In what cases have the applications and implications of the First Amendment led to abuses of free speech? Whether you choose to write about reproductive rights, medical misinformation, or hate speech online, it will be your job to dig into the gray areas. What should we—citizens and advocates—do about the protected speech that we find to be problematic? | Readings will be provided via links and PDFs. No required textbook beyond the AGWR (Anteater's Guide to Writing and Rhetoric, 9th ed., on Perusall) |
| Winiarski, Catherine | WR 60 | Climate Justice | This course examines multiple perspectives on the problem of climate change, including economic, cultural, and social justice perspectives. It invites students to examine the impacts of climate change in particular places and communities that matter to them, investigate contexts influencing the problem, and advocate for effective, practical, and just solutions. | No core textbook; articles by Robert Bullard, Michael Mendez, Margaret Hiza Redsteer, and David Wallace-Wells. |
| Yacono, Candice | WR 60 | Medical Humanities | We will explore current problems in the medical humanities using The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as our core text | The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Henrietta Skloot; AGWR |