Writing Prompts ✍️

Annotation
Feminist Disability Justice Poetics
I Hope This Email Finds You
Just Curious
Keyholes
Loved Lines
Stumbling Blocks
Truth to Power
Why
High-Stakes Writing
1. Accessibility Audit & Guide
2. Creative Project & Rationale

Low-Stakes Writing

Since low-stakes posts will help launch class discussions, please post them directly in #classroom (and feel free to react/reply to your comrades’ posts!). Include the title of the prompt you’re responding to at the start of your post, so I know it’s your submission for the week and have context for your response. I recommend drafting your posts in a word processor, so you have a local saved copy in case of technical difficulties.

These low-stakes writing prompts put you in the driver’s seat. Instead of asking you a narrow question that might feel “leading” or like it’s “testing” your understanding or knowledge, these prompts ask you to ask and attempt to answer a question within a loose framework designed to keep you anchored in course content. You’ll develop your interest and understanding of creative writing for social justice out of the things that naturally excite, inspire, and/or confuse you most.

Each week, you’ll be given 3 prompts and asked to use 1 of them to write-to-think towards asking and answering a question. You can ask and answer any question you like, but it must be informed by the prompt framework you selected for the week and pertain to that week’s readings. These posts won’t be perfect — as a matter of fact, they shouldn’t be. I hope for low-stakes posts that are informal, casual, unrehearsed, unpolished, more concerned with precision of thought than adherence to grammar, mechanics, and academic style.

The questions you come up with in your low-stakes posts will be integrated into class lectures and discussions, so this also helps you feel more confident about vocally contributing to class, i.e. you can talk about your own question and someone else’s!

All of the low-stakes prompts and instructions are listed below. Here’s a model post as well if it helps!

Feminist Disability Justice Poetics In Atwood’s “The Page,” the lines “The page is not a pool but a skin, a skin is there to hold in and it can feel you touching it. Did you really think it would just lie there and do nothing?” felt like a revelation. I think I always knew this but didn’t have the words, so it resonated when she first called it “a skin.” Between sentences, I think the switch from a sort of matter-of-fact description (the is is doing a lot of work) to an accusatory question is meant to be quick and disorienting and make readers feel (infer?) the risk of reading and writing, which mostly is treated like a safe, boring activity. The page is a skin which means it’s also a thing with skin, full of organs like a living body, and the same way skin touches you back when you touch it, the page acts on you when you read it or write on it. There’s maybe a kind of feminist nod to the violation of gender and sexual norms with “lie there and do nothing” — the (female/gender nonconforming) body is not a passive thing for you to impose meaning onto.
Are we supposed to think that the page = bodies that resist easy understanding? And if so, are we supposed to think that inference is more dangerous for readers who approach the page like its passive, or for readers who approach the page expecting a confrontation? Or, thinking of social justice now, should the page always be a confrontation?

Your responses must include at least one question about the text you’re responding to.

Annotation

Skim the reading again. As soon as you encounter a word, phrase, or sentence that catches your attention, immediately annotate it with a guess as to why it struck you and a note about its relationship to the text’s aims and disability justice as a whole. Use these annotations to guide you in formulating a question you have about the relationship between the text’s aims and/or genre, its readers (you!), and its disability justice frameworks. Attach a photograph of one of your annotated pages with your response as well.

Feminist Disability Justice Poetics

Identify 2-5 lines (they don’t have to be consecutive) where a disability poetics or similar craft technique is working to enhance your understanding of a particular disability justice concept or theoretical framework. Formulate a question about the relationship between this kind of poetics and reliance on reader inference to get at the aims of disability justice.

I Hope This Email Finds You

Respond to the text using the format of an email reply to someone who has misunderstood the aims of the text, in which you correct their misconceptions, e.g.:

SUBJ: Re: The question that deliberately misunderstands the aims of this text MSG: A 3-5 paragraph email correcting the inquirer (you can pretend it’s whoever you like!) who has asked you this question, accurately explaining the text’s theoretical/conceptual frameworks and purpose.

Just Curious

Formulate a “starter” question about something in the text that you’re curious about — a theoretical framework, a concept, a cited reference, an anecdote, a historical trajectory, a particular disability politic or poetics — and its relationship with popular constructions of disability and the systems/institutions that uphold and perpetuate them. Ask another question that gets you closer to an answer. Keep going until you come up with a question that feels like you’ve stumbled upon a question that grabs you, even if it’s far from the original question. In answering this question, reflect on how pursuing readerly curiosity about this part of the text might develop a specific aspect of disability justice consciousness.

Keyholes

A keyhole offers a partial glimpse of a locked room — possibly, a forbidden room. Identify a passage that gave you a glimpse into something that previously felt like a locked or forbidden room. Alternatively, identify a passage that shows you quite firmly that the room will always be locked to you, and that whatever access you’re granted will always be partial, like the view through a keyhole. In either case, formulate a question concerning both why it used to feel that way, what in that passage (content, craft, or both) “unlocked” the room for you, and how this might play a role in developing a disability justice consciousness.

Loved Lines

Type out (don’t copy and paste!) 3 sentences that you loved from the text. Ask and answer a question that falls under a general inquiry into why you loved these lines (but isn’t that exact question), and that helps you elaborate on the effect of a pattern across sentences, e.g.: the precise language, rhythm, or shape of each sentence, the way its white spaces create insights, etc. Consider how this effect contributed to your understanding of the overall aims of the text (or of something else related to disability justice).

Stumbling Blocks

Identify a place where you felt confusion, and then identify the place where (if) you found your footing again. Reflect on how being confused by that part of the text specifically might help enact the disability justice argument(s) of the piece as a whole. Try to interpret both the part of the text that confused you and the part of the text that clarified things for you.

Truth to Power

Identify a place in the text where you felt the need to speak truth to power, to challenge an unjust system designed to oppress disabled people. Express this challenge by formulating 5 questions addressed to an imaginary authority figure within this unjust system. Then, choose one of these 5 questions and attempt to answer it. In answering, you may respond as yourself or use a fictional persona (if you use a fictional persona, note why this perspective best accomplishes this goal).

Why

Come up with 2 questions about 2 different disability justice concepts and 2 questions about 2 different craft techniques (e.g., descriptions, rhythm, white space, lack of white space, poetics, etc.) that induced sensations in you while you were reading. Answer 1 of each set of questions. Of the 2 you answered, address why that concept is important to disability justice movements and why that craft technique is an effective vehicle for disability justice messaging.

High-Stakes Writing

Accessibility Audit & Guide

This is a collaborative project with two parts, as described below. Each of you will individually write an Access Guide of about 1,500 words, then compile them into a single document and collaboratively write a team-authored foreword of about 800 words. If your Access Guide needs more room or involves other modalities, book a coffee chat with me early so we can talk about it.

The Accessibility Audit and Guide involves 4 scaffolded tasks:

First, you’ll select a space (physical or virtual) that you occupy regularly, e.g.:

A local space you use, such as a gym, library, dance studio
Your living space, such as your dorm room or apartment
A virtual space you frequent, such as Classes LMS, a sub-Reddit, or Discord server
Or another space

By Week 6, you’ll identify the space you choose in your #team channel with its name, a ~5 sentence description of its location, its intended purpose, the people who tend to use the space, and how they actually use it.

Second, using no more than 3 theoretical and conceptual frameworks from the course, you’ll conduct an accessibility audit by noting features that expand or limit access to the space. Using model access guides from the course, you’ll transform your notes into a multimodal access guide for people unfamiliar with the space. Be sure to think of a specific audience (e.g., new users of the space, temporary visitors, etc.). Your guide can include text, photographs, hand-drawn floorplans, etc., and can be an offline document or webtext.

Third, you’ll share and peer review your access guides in your #team channels and figure out together how and where they connect. As a team, you’ll collaboratively write an 800-word foreword that introduces the set of guides and explains what connects them.

Fourth, you’ll discuss and agree as a team on how to organize your access guides into a single compilation and arrange your “chapters” accordingly in a single document (.doc or .pdf.), with your team-authored foreword at the beginning. When the project is due on Classes, one person from your team should submit this document to Classes.

Due dates for peer review and both the ungraded and revised drafts are listed in the Calendar.

Read this individually authored model Access Guide for insight into how to approach your own accessibility audit!

Creative Project & Rationale

This is a multimodal project with two parts, as described below. Since the creative portion of the project is multimodal, its length will vary across projects; the rationale should be about 800-1,000 words. Book a coffee chat with me early so we can discuss the best way to do what you want to do.

Designing artifacts is a good way to explore, challenge, and check your understanding of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks you’ve learned about in class. The kind of artifact (text, multimodal project, object) you create will help demonstrate your ability to apply what you’ve learned. In this project, you’ll create an artifact — an “un-essay,” visual artwork, performance, podcast, website, video game, soft sculpture (i.e., textile art), etc. — that demonstrates a deep understanding of 2-3 theoretical or conceptual frameworks in the class.

You’ll then write an accompanying rationale — like an artist’s manifesto — that summarizes, analyzes, and develops the theoretical concepts you chose and explains the links between your Creative Project and our coursework. This preface should identify your goals in composing and compiling this particular manuscript and explain your choices in craft (i.e. what theories/concepts you chose to emulate in your artifact, as well as how and why) and design (i.e. arrangement in and across pieces)

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of questions you might consider addressing:

What are the theoretical or conceptual frameworks required to understand your project?
How does your project make those theoretical or conceptual frameworks manifest?
Why did you choose to create this particular epistemic artifact?
Which decisions related to writing (or designing or other composition acts) do you feel are most effective, and why?
Which decisions related to writing (or designing or other composition acts) do you feel are least effective, and why?
What issues remain that you either didn’t have time to address or that don’t fit the scope of your project?