3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

We live our lives through story. The narratives we circulate—songs, Instagram posts, podcasts, coming out stories—shape the world around us just as they shape our own lives. This course explores the politics of storytelling with a focus on Washington DC-based oral history initiatives, podcasts, and museum exhibitions. Students will examine the power of narrative to uphold and contest power structures by engaging with scholarship produced by ethnographers, historians, queer theorists, critical race theorists, and performance studies scholars. The class will venture into Washington DC to talk with museum curators about the contested politics of producing historical narratives, local activists about the utility of movement narratives, and oral historians about the vital counternarratives they surface in collaboration with local Black, LGBTQ, and indigenous communities. Combining theory and practice, students will critically examine and creatively engage with the role of storytelling in our everyday lives.