Spring 2010 POROI Courses

Invention

This course is about getting your writing going and keeping it going, and helping you write in an authentic true-life way. During the first half of the semester, you will be given weekly exercises designed to spark your imagination and help you access memories. The second half of the semester is devoted to developing and sharpening ideas introduced during the first half. At the mid-semester point you will submit a proposal to the instructor in which you contract to develop some element or elements (scenes, settings, characters, story lines, and so on) based on one or more of your earlier exercises.

Conflict, Negotiation, and Planning

Planning practice is, and must be, rife with conflict, largely because people disagree with one another about what to do and how to do it. What should planners do when they find themselves immersed in such disagreements?

Many are tempted to flee or remain quiet, fearing that conflict will break out into the equivalent of war. That¹s just politics, they often say; the task of resolving those conflicts is better left to the politicians. This course presumes instead that conflict is a fundamental part of planning practice and that planners need to know how to work through those conflicts and, where possible, transform them into productive and often innovative forms of planning thought and action. Planners can do that by learning how to negotiate, how to mediate, how to build consensus, and how to plan collaboratively. The course combines theoretical readings with first-person narratives, case studies, and simulations.

Digital Rhetorics

This course will examine how the advent of digital technologies has transformed our discourses, our bodies, and our world. Using examples of electronic and internet technologies, we will explore concepts of materiality, identity, agency, diversity, creativity, community, and space.
The readings will range across contemporary rhetorical theory, cyberculture, informatics, technology studies and philosophy, and critical theory.

Analysis of Scholarly Domains

Information transfer in academic disciplines; scientific method, other means of knowledge construction, resulting literatures; reference tools used to control literature for a variety of audiences; emphasis on humanities, social sciences, or sciences.  

Current Issues in Rhetoric

"Ethics of Care"

This course traces the development of care-based ethics from feminist theory and explores how ethics of care have extended into a variety of contexts, including family and community ethics, political and economic ethics, and animal and environmental ethics. Students will write short reading responses weekly, present one or two outside readings to the class, and develop a final project exploring care-based ethics in a context of their choice.

Issues in Rhetoric and Culture

"Performance Studies/Performance Theory"

This is primarily a readings course, where students will read a range of texts from and about the field of performance studies. Topics include race, class, and gender performance; performance of sexuality; queer performance; performative writing; artistic and political performance; and theories of performativity.

Rhetorical Issues in Health Care

Crossing Borders Seminar

Settler Colonialism in Comparative Perspective: Local Relations, Global Processes

This reading seminar will consider the dynamics of settler colonialism as both a historical process operating on a global scale and a social encounter experienced in diverse local contexts. Among the themes to be considered are theories and ideologies of settler colonialism; regimes of legal, territorial and personal dispossession; social and cultural formations in settler societies; decolonization and historical memory. In addition to the collective course readings, students will complete an individual semester-long project to be determined in consultation with the instructors.

Readings in Nonfiction

The Uses of Memory

Rhetorics of the Body

The body is a shifting signifier: gendered, raced, classed, sexualized, discursively constructed, materially impacted, its dimensions and interpretations are multiple and constantly shifting. This graduate-level seminar will explore the ways in which the body is inscribed in culture via various theories of the body, from the biological to the postmodern and the virtual. In this class, we will read major theorists of corporeality, including Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Susan Bordo, Michel Foucault, Rom Harré, and others, and interrogate the ways in which the corporeal has been rhetorically constructed in scholarly texts, in popular culture, and in everyday life. Seminar requirements include regular reading, written and verbal responses to assigned texts, and a final scholarly paper.