Writing and Identity

Explores how discourse (spoken and written) constructs, maintains, marginalizes, and contests our various and intersecting identities such as race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, regionality, and social class. Using interdisciplinary theories and methods and drawing upon linguistic anthropology, semiotics, sociology, education, and rhetoric, students explore the social processes of systemic identity formation. Students reflect upon, and write about, the social forces at work constructing their own identities and the identities of their various social and cultural communities.