Courses

Want to Transgress? 

Current ENWR Courses that support connections between writers across boundaries and borders.

ENWR 1520-01: Where We Live: Writing about Housing Equity

Why do we live where we do? How does housing impact our access to education, food, medical care, and other resources? What can the local built environment tell us about access to housing? Why are some people homeless? What is affordable housing and why is there so little of it? By volunteering at The Haven and using different types of writing, including journal entries, forum posts, peer reviews, and formal papers, we will explore topics like homelessness, affordable housing, privilege, food insecurity, the eviction crisis, systems of power, and community engagement.

ENWR 1520-02: You are What You Eat…or Are You?: Writing about Food Equity

This course offer first-year students the chance to fulfill their first-year writing requirement through a community engagement experience. Questions guiding the course include: Why do we eat what we eat? Do poor people eat more fast food than wealthy people? Why do men like to eat steak more than women? Why are Cheetos cheaper than cherries? Do you have to be skinny to be hungry? By volunteering at The Haven, Loaves and Fishes, PB&J Fund or PVCC Community Garden and using different types of writing, including journal entries, forum posts, peer reviews, and formal papers, we will explore topics like hunger stereotypes, privilege, food insecurity, food production, and community engagement. 

Instructor: Kate Stephenson

ENWR 2510- 013 and 014 Writing Charlottesville

What does it mean to “write” a place? to write Charlottesville? How is Charlottesville written? There are many ways a place is written: through history, cartography, journalism, Wikipedia articles, ad campaigns, and city ordinances. There are also less institutionally-sanctioned ways that a place is written: through activism, public art, graffiti, oral histories, and conversations. This section of ENWR 2510 will focus on this interrelation between writing and space. We will explore questions like: Who gets to write Charlottesville? How does a place come to have meaning and what is the role of writing in that process? What role do you play in shaping the many overlapping communities with which you engage directly and indirectly?  

In this class, you will explore the questions above (and others!) through original research projects of your own design. You will select topics and learn to apply what you learn about writing and rhetoric toward issues that resonate with you as an inhabitant of, and participant in, this place called “Charlottesville.” We’ll read texts that allow us to develop a vocabulary for talking about how readers and writers produce, inhabit, and challenge spaces through writing and rhetorical action. In all, this course asks you to partake in a situated study of space and writing, and through a developed research agenda, participate in this rhetorical production of space. 

Instructor: Kevin Smith

ENWR1510-08 and 14: Writing about Feminism, Diversity, and Community Engagement

In a world of social distancing, flattening curves, and racial protests, do you wish that you could reach out and help others within the safety of your own home? How would you even know where to begin? During these uncertain times, many people have chosen to perform service work with the vulnerable and to write about social justice for women, minorities, and others. You will explore the answers to these questions in a profound and surprisingly local way by reading and writing about British and American women authors and sharing your knowledge with the Charlottesville community. These feminist works are the perfect place to search for answers because women writers have experienced injustice, oppression, and bigotry over the past three centuries. You will write about, reflect on, and perform community engagement through a feminist lens, especially since both movements serve historically disadvantaged populations.

As you read these women authors’ works, you will discover powerful compositional moves and feminist rhetorical strategies that you can use to inspire others to take action and improve our world. You will further consider how their written reflections can foster values such as love, understanding, and compassion and cultivate your deeper self-awareness through contemplative writing. Together, we will use feminist rhetoric, reflective writing, and service work to engage in praxis, or the application of feminist theory to reality. As a class, we will work on our collective project with UVA’s volunteer center, Madison House, to plan out creative arts boxes for students in Charlottesville schools. Our Praxis Project will support their learning about BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) women, feminist activism, and women’s literature and inspire students to empower themselves through writing.

Instructor: Indu Ohri

ENWR 1510-017: DIY

D.I.Y., as it’s known today, has existed for nearly a century. Taking hold in the post-war American suburbs, D.I.Y. making has shifted dramatically through time—birthing the iconoclastic punk era, pinterest, GoFundMe healthcare, Tik Tok videos, soundcloud rap, and more. What do these materials, scenes, makers, and movements have in common? Rhetorically rich and culturally fraught, studying D.I.Y. will get us thinking about how ideas are crafted and cooked into the language of things. Through writing, reading, and discussion, we will carefully tease these ideas out to see what we really make of them. We’ll practice what we study as artists and writers, and we’ll also chat with visiting D.I.Y. artists, musicians, and writers. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll learn from D.I.Y. communities how to build supportive, inclusive, and non-judgmental creative spaces in which we can collaborate and share our work with one another.

Instructor: Michelle Gottschlich

ENWR 1510-022 Social Justice, Critical Race Theory, and Argumentation

Imagine this: it’s Thanksgiving (or Hanukkah, or any social gathering with people who might not share your ideas). It’s perfectly pleasant (or not) and then – GASP! – someone brings up that topic. The one that always leads to an argument. And it does, and you argue but, afterwards, you are disappointed with how it turned out; perhaps you forgot to say something (or said too much). In this class we will endeavor to not be disappointed. To do so we will learn how to argue but, more importantly, how to think. Our writing will be a vehicle to our thinking. But how does writing relate to social justice? How can we use our writing to enact or advocate for social justice in our community? Since social justice is such a broad concept, in this course we will learn about it through the frame of critical race theory (CRT) and discover how activists, scholars, artists and more engage with racial justice, exploring issues like systemic racism, privilege, and intersectionality. This course will give you opportunities to think and write about the social justice issues you care about so that, when it ends, you are empowered to fight for the causes you believe in and never feel unprepared to discuss the topics that matter to you.

Instructor: Eyal Handelsman Katz

ENWR 1510-059 Writing Home

According to the conventional breakdown of modern American society, “home” is domestic space—interior, private, personal. Yet as the ongoing pandemic has demonstrated, these values are anything but stable: home is also a space that is inseparable from public, political life. In this course, we’ll practice academic writing and creative, collaborative forms of composition by writing about all of the messy, ambivalent meanings of home. As a Writing and Community Engagement section of ENWR1510, we will consider how the ideals, values, and limitations of home shape larger local communities. An array of literary, cinematic, and scholarly texts will provide us with occasions for writing; we will look to documentary film, in particular, as a genre that invites us to rethink the boundaries of home and to question the relations of power that structure conventional senses of “being at home.”

Instructor: Sarah O’Brien

ENWR 1510-038 Writing Toward Climate Action

This course is aimed at developing your ability to engage in written and spoken discourse both in academic contexts and in the broader, civic and social contexts of a university community, local communities, nation(s), and even global communities. It will ask you to use writing to discover how insight, precision, and nuance function across rhetorical contexts. It will incite occasions of writing and speaking as opportunities to initiate and sustain critical inquiry — in other words, as loci for exploration of uncertainties as opposed to sites of static performance of the already-known. Above all, this course will place your writing at its center, giving you the chance to focus on when, why, and how you already are a consequential writer surrounded by other consequential writers, profoundly embedded in language and therefore flush with opportunities for expression and inquiry. This semester, our inquiry will focus on action we can and must take to mitigate the suffering that will accompany imminent climate disaster. We will begin by studying the discourses of disbelief, skepticism, misinformation, and inaction promulgated by those with vested interests in maintaining fossil fuel economies in America and around the world. We will complement that study with an exploration of forms and genres of witness, testimony, and appeal. Finally, we will take action through informed dialogue and outreach, including phone and text banking, as well as more systematically-oriented action like protest and appeals to those in power for specific, institutional changes. Course texts will include Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich (2019) and The Story of More by Hope Jahren (2020), as well as the podcasts Mothers of Invention and Drilled. 

Instructor: Hannah Loeb

ENWR 2510- 05

Instructor: Stephen Parks

ENWR 2520-07 Home Movies

Of the many changes wrought by the pandemic, perhaps none will prove as enduring as the upending of our sense of being “at home.” We will consider the shifting dimensions of domestic space in the time of COVID-19 and the preceding century by watching, making, and writing about different kinds of “home movies”: amateur movies that document family life, fiction films that envision home in striking ways, and reality television and documentary film. Exploring these genres will give us occasion to think and write about the values of documenting family and everyday life, the pleasures and comforts of home-viewing practices, and film’s power to (re-)shape social structures and practices. By working with a community partner on a collective filmmaking and/or screening project, we will also expand our understanding of home to encompass not just the four-walled container of the nuclear family but also more diffuse physical and/or virtual communities.

Instructor: Sarah O’Brien

ENWR 3620 Writing and Tutoring Across Cultures

In this course, we’ll look at a variety of texts from academic arguments, narratives, and pedagogies, to consider what it means to write, communicate, and learn across cultures.  Topics will include contrastive rhetorics, world Englishes, rhetorical listening, and tutoring multilingual writers.  A service learning component, in partnership with Madison House, will require students to volunteer with the LAMA (Latinx and Migrant Aid), ESOL (English for speakers of other languages), or C4K (Computers for Kids) programs.  We will discuss pedagogies and practical, strengths-based strategies in working with multi-lingual learners on their writing; tutor members of the Charlottesville community; and create writing projects that convey learning from these experiences.  While the course will specifically prepare students to tutor multilingual writers, these skills are adaptable and applicable across disciplines and discourses. Basically, students will learn how to use dialogic engagement to support Collaboration and conversation across cultures. Self-designed final writing projects will give students from various majors—education, public policy, commerce, social sciences, and STEM—the opportunity to combine their specific discourse knowledge with our course content.  Additionally, students who successfully complete the course are invited to apply to work on the UVa writing center.

Instructor: Kate Kostelnik