Accessible Writing: Disability, Language, and Media
WRCT 218
Spring 2025
| Section:
01
|
| Crosslisting:
SOC 274, CSPL 218, STS 218, COL 208 |
| Course Cluster and Certificates: Community-Engaged Learning, Service Learning, Disability Studies |
Journalists (and indeed most writers who want a wide readership) must take the messy, complicated situations and systems the world presents us with -- an economic downturn, a yearslong war, a rapper's career, a new field of science -- and explain them in terms that are faithful to the facts of the situation, rendered in language that remains understandable to a reader who may not have considered the subject before. Writers from Aristotle to the editors of Wesleyan's new website (where all text is now required to be written at a seventh-grade reading level) have worked to apprehend the mechanisms that make a text understandable. But there is one group of thinkers that is perhaps more invested in the problem of "accessibility" than any other: people with disabilities. We tend to think of disability access -- such as captions on a film, or image descriptions for the blind -- in terms of legal compliance: you'd better make your project accessible or you'll get sued. But in recent years, a range of disabled artists, thinkers, and activists have expanded the field of accessibility beyond compliance into the realm of imagination and interpretation. This course adopts these emerging practices as creative-writing prompts, exploring them with a view toward sharpening our own practice as writers (and journalists, screenwriters, artists, and poets). Course materials will include work by writers engaged in the problem of literary accessibility (Strunk & White, Dr. Seuss, Garielle Lutz), disability-studies scholars (Mara Mills, Mel Y. Chen), activists (Alice Wong, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha), artists (Christine Sun Kim, Finnegan Shannon, Joseph Grigley), poets (Jjjjjerome Ellis, Latif Askia Ba), and institutions (ProPublica, the New York Times, Harvard's Digital Accessibility initiative). The course will encourage students to pull their writing out of the classroom, with an emphasis on publication, from newspapers and magazines to collaborative projects with Wesleyan's College of Film and Moving Image, Digital Design Commons, Davidson Art Center, and elsewhere. |
|
| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA WRCT |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
|
Fulfills a Requirement for: None |
|
Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74% |
| SECTION 01 |
| Instructor(s): Leland,Andrew Times: ....R.. 01:20PM-04:10PM; Location: 116MTV102; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 12 | | SR major: 0 | JR major: 0 | | |
| Seats Available: 0 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 3 | JR non-major: 3 | SO: 3 | FR: 3 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 8 | 1st Ranked: 4 | 2nd Ranked: 3 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 1 | Unranked: 0 |
|
|