Course Details

Why do we tell stories? Whose stories get told? What are the best mediums for
storytelling and why? How can stories be used to mobilize social change? How does the personal connect to the political?

These are just a few of the questions we will engage with during our time together. This class will look at storytelling and ways of knowing through personal essays and memoirs, tracing how nonfiction genres offer unique spaces to consider epistemologies of the self while simultaneously speaking to shared human experiences. We will discuss how various narratives use the self as a starting point to integrate/extrapolate into the social as a way to process, understand, and engage with the world.
Amidst reading a diverse range of personal narratives (written, visual, spoken), students will write weekly reflections that unpack their experiences of consuming and engaging these
texts, while also developing their abilities to tell their own stories across a range of genres and mediums.
Please note: this is both a reading- and writing-heavy course. We will be reading and workshopping every day of class. It is essential to our class time that you’ve done the assigned
reading before the start of each class. Most of the material we engage with will cover difficult topics.