SDG Detail

ER&M 401 Writer/Rioter: Public Writing in the 21st Century

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Project description

In his collection Lunch with A Bigot: The Writer in the World, Amitava Kumar asks �What divides the writer from the rioter?� This class is concerned with unpacking the various ways writers participate in the 21st century world as disturbers of the peace. This century has seen great advances in technology, health, alternative energies, new forms of communication, but also vast consolidations of power, mass incarceration, climate change, poverty, homelessness, wars, state surveillance, and sexual violence. Our current historical moment increasingly asks us to craft broader and deeper connections between personal, local, national, and international issues. This course explores cultural criticism on a range of issues that examine the intersections of history, politics, media, and various crises in the 21st century by writers from a variety of backgrounds: journalists, academics, activists, artists, scientists, and politicians. We analyze how these writers use their professional expertise to craft work for the public arena, and what it means to create a history of the present. The course�s four sections cover various responses to some of the issues most publicly contested across college campuses nationwide, and here at Yale: racial unrest, sexual assault, climate change, poverty, incarceration, fascism, and gun violence.