Course Description

Since ancient Greece, rhetoric, the "art of persuasion," has been concerned with making. Discussions of techne, a Greek word that loosely translates to "craft," are prominent in the works of Aristotle, Plato, and others. This course engages with the history, theory, and production of DIY (Do It Yourself), multimodal, and craft rhetorics as a way to better understand public rhetorical actions connected to social activist movements, including feminist, environmentalist, anti-capitalist, anti-war, and anti-racist movements. Students will learn to define and practice composition as a process and practice that involves more than the production of static words on a page. This project-based course requires students to closely examine the rhetorical significance of various writing tools, materials, and techniques and gain hands-on practice with multiple compositional materials, from paper to fabric, pencil to pixels. This course counts toward the Women’s and Gender Studies Minor.

Course Driving Questions & Learning Outcomes

  • What is rhetoric?

  • What is composition?

  • What is DIY? 

  • How is DIY a form of cultural rhetoric?

  • What is multimodal composition?

  • What is embodiment?

By the conclusion of this course, I will be able to 

  • Construct research-based arguments, including collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing data, as well as scholarly and public texts.

  • Apply and adapt rhetorical knowledge and principles by presenting an argument across a variety of modes, in varied situations, for varied audiences, requiring analysis and selection of effective strategies for achieving a specific purpose.

  • Understand writing, communication, and composition as iterative processes by developing practices of reflection, metacognition, and revision.

Course Materials

Selections from:

  • Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006)

  • Jonathan Alexander, Susan C. Jarratt, and Nancy Welch’s Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics (2018)

  • Gloria Anzalduá’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)

  • Adam Bank’s Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground (2005)

  • Dennis Baron’s A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution (2009)

  • Rebekah J. Buchanan’s Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (2018)

  • Kate Eichhorn’s The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order (2013)

  • Betsy Greer’s Craftivism: The Art of Craft and Activism (2014)

  • Leigh Gruwell’s Making Matters: Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics (2022)

  • Carmen Kynard’s Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies (2013)

  • Charles Lesh’s The Writing of Where: Graffiti and the Production of Writing Spaces (2022)

  • Adela C. Licona’s Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric (2012)

  • Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

  • Joe McBrinn’s Queering the Subversive Stitch: Men and the Culture of Needlework (2020)

  • Matt Ratto and Megan Boler’s DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (2014)

  • T.V. Reed’s The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (2005)

  • Jenny Rice’s Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence (2020)

  • Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch’s Feminist Rhetorical Practices (2012)

  • Benita Roth’s Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (2003)

  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2017)

  • Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics (2002)

Articles, Zines + Webtests

  • Sonia C. Arellano’s “Sexual Violences Traveling to El Norte: An Example of Quilting as Method”

  • April Baker-Bell, Bonnie J. WIlliams-Farrier, Davena Jackson, Lamar Johnson, Carmen Kynard, and Teaira McMurty’s “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!”

  • Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”

  • Nancy Fraser’s “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”

  • Michelle Kempson’s “‘My Version of Feminism’: Subjectivity, DIY, and the Feminist Zine”

  • Jason Luther’s “More Than Paper Islands: The Pandemic Circuitry of Quaranzines”

  • Alla Myzelv’s “Creating Digital Materiality: Third-Wave Feminism, Public Art, and Yarn Bombing”

  • The Riot Grrrl Collection

  • Melissa Roger’s “Making Queer Love: A Kit of Odds and Ends”

  • Nancy Small’s “Reading for the Weaver: Amplifying Agency through a Material Rhetoric Methodology”

  • Ruth Terry’s “Black People Were the Original ‘Craftivists’”

Deliverables

  • Reading Engagement

    Students collaboratively annotated our course's reading via Perusall and engaged in several Socratic Seminars.

  • Mapping Composition

    Students created a collaborative map that explores the materiality and embodied experience of writing.

    See the Map

  • Final DIY Project

    Students researched and analyzed a contemporary or historical social movement, paying attention to the rhetorical strategies the movement uses/d. They then develop, pitch, and create a final DIY Project that madeuse of BC's campus Makerspace, The Hatchery. They presented on their product and process as well as submitted a written reflection where they reflected on their embodied experience with composition and the spaces in which we write and create.

  • Metacognitive Letters

    Students wrote several metacognitive letters where they reflected on their work and learning in the class, citing tangible examples of their work.