ENGL3002: Re-Imagining Academic Research and Writing

No matter what your major is or what your areas of interest are, chances are you have been taught how to undertake research and how to write about your findings. But have you ever scrutinized the research and writing processes you were taught? Which kinds of academic writing and academic language, for example, are considered “good” and why? Which perspectives, voices and ways of knowing risk being erased when we privilege certain kinds of academic writing and communication over others? What about the research process - in what ways might it be upholding or reproducing systems of oppression? In this course, students will grapple with these questions as they explore power and privilege in writing and research across the disciplinary discourse communities they belong to. Through critical engagement with anti-racist and decolonial pedagogical methodologies, students will examine the social conventions of the academic genres they use in their respective majors and disciplines and then challenge those accepted norms. Topics of study will include examining hierarchies of language, democratizing citation practices and decentering euro-centric epistemologies. Engaging with scholars from across the disciplines who are challenging conventional academic research and writing norms – folks like Environmental Humanities scholar Anna Tsing, Border Studies theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, and Black Feminist Geography scholar Katherine McKittrick, invites students to see what is possible and to consider what kinds of more liberatory practices they may deploy in the service of their research agendas. 

Fundamental to this course is the assertion that, as Dr. Roberta Wolfson puts it in her teachings on cultivating antiracist praxis, writing and research are processes that are embedded in dynamic social contexts. At the university level, academic writing genres such as research proposals, research papers and dissertations are embedded in hierarchical systems of power. Traditionally, these genres have been upheld as the medium through which scholarly ideas and research findings should be communicated. But what kind of gatekeeping and exclusionary practices might these genres be participating in? Which audiences do they speak to? Which voices do they actively marginalize?