3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

We live in an age of crisis. Social, political, and environmental disruptions both in the United States and around the world are the new normal. How do we – as individuals, citizens, and scholars – come to understand these issues? And how should we write about them? This course is designed to help students improve as writers, readers, and editors for a world where powerful young voices are more necessary than ever. The substantive focus of the course will be on the dynamics of interlinked contemporary political crises and on the responses available to individuals to address them. We will read a variety of scholarly, journalistic, and literary sources to inform our discussion and inspire our writing. However, this course is designed not as a standard seminar, but as a writing workshop. Students will write and critique a variety of pieces of different lengths and styles – including a political memoir, an op-ed, a long-form critical essay, and a piece of speculative fiction - spending the majority of in-class time on peer review, presentations, and writing exercises, which they will compile into a writing portfolio. Reading will include works by Alexander Chee, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mary Annaise Heglar, Hunter S. Thompson, James Baldwin, Dave Zirin, Elizbeth Rush, Charlotte Shane, and Teju Cole, among many others.