COURSE TEXTS AND WORKS

Texts: 

Gloria Anzaldua. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4thEdition, Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

Natchee Blu Barnd.Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism. Oregon State University Press, 2017. 

Mary Pat Brady. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Duke University Press, 2002. 

Romeo Gracia and Damian Baca (Eds.). Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions. National Council of Teachers of English, 2019. 

D. Robert DeChaine. Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier. University of Alabama Press, 2012.

Catherine Cucinella. Border Crossings: A Bedford Spotlight Reader. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2015. 

Julia Sonnevend.Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Ahdaf Soueif and Omar Robert Hamilton (Eds.). This is Not a Border: Reportage and Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature. Bloomsbury USA, 2017. 

Nina Maria Lozano.Not One More! Feminicidio on the Border(Rhetoric and Materiality). Ohio State University Press, 2019. 

Reyna Grande. The Distance Between Us. Washington Square Press, 2012. 

The rest of the course readings will be in the course Google Drive.

Attendance and participation (10%)

As fellow rhetoricians, we will be participating in rigorous reading and studying texts that are intellectually challenging and complex. Give yourselves enough time and space to explore these texts, which will help you to have an active and creative voice in our class conversations. Through your active participation, you will learn from your fellow rhetoricians while you support their learning experiences. In this sense, for us to create the most effective learning environment, we must be diligent about being active participants and attend all weekly meetings. However, I understand that life happens and there might be personal events or emergencies preventing you from attending a class meeting. In this case, I encourage you to contact me within twenty-four hours. In this way, we can make sure that you will be caught up with our progress in the course. 

While I trust your professionalism in this matter, I feel responsible for making a note about excessive absences. You should understand that not attending multiple class meetings will eventually have a negative influence on your overall performance. I am very well aware that this will not be an issue that we would need to worry about in a graduate-level seminar. However, it is my responsibility to make this note for your attention as I consider your well-being and success in this class a priority.

Weekly Border/Land Thinking Reflections (20%): 

Since one of our main goals in this class is for us to develop an embodied-critical border/land thinking, you will prepare a form of reflection over the weekly readings. These weekly reflections can be in any form that you chose: a sentence, paragraph, poem, photograph, drawing, a cultural or personal artifact, a material object of any kind, voice recording, a song, a book, or a combination of multiple elements, media/medium, and form of representation. There is no right or wrong way to approach these weekly reflections. The important thing is that you share your border/land thinking that you will be shaping throughout the semester. These weekly reflections should represent this progress for the rest of the class so that we can start exploring similarities, connections, and relations. As a result, we can come up with a unifying theme/concept that we can work with for our final collaborative class project. 

Midterm Progress Report (Due October 17, 6:00 pm I 30%):

You will submit a midterm progress report for us, as a class, to see our progress with the final project. This will allow us to determine the next steps we will need to take at this point in the semester so that we can finalize the project and send it out for publication by the end of the semester. If you chose to work individually, you will submit this midterm progress report for the same purpose and will receive feedback from me with your questions and needs. 

Final Border/Land Thinking Project (Collaborative or Individual I Due December 12, 6:00 pm I 40%): 

The weekly Border/Land Thinking Reflections play a critical part for us to determine the kind of Border/Land Thinking Project we want to work on. Ideally, this will be a collaborative class project representative of 1) your individual embodied border/land thinking and 2) the broader theme we will explore together as a class. We will submit the final product to a journal for publication (I am thinking Intermezzo). Since this is an extensive-collaborative work, we will make decisions together as co-authors. Your active participation in class and your weekly reflections will play a critical role for us to determine how we want to shape this final project. 

You also have the option to work on a project individually if you do not prefer to be part of this collaborative classwork. In this case, you still draw from your weekly reflections and our in-class conversations to explore a theme/concept for your final project. If you decide to work individually, you are still expected to work on a final project that you will submit to a journal for publication. You can meet with me during office hours and share your ideas in class to explore your options.