Sustainability

Examining dynamics of space and race, this course examines rhetorics of segregation and desegregation as cultural, legal, and embodied practices. Seminar meetings will explore the development of segregation as a racialized phenomenon, contemplating how economic, educational, institutional, and political contexts inflect rhetorical practices of race-making and place-making. Tracing the development of (de)segregation discourses from the nineteenth century to the present, the course will consider topics including colonial practices of city-splitting, public clashes over (de)segregation in public facilities, and marginalized persons' complex relationship to desegregation as a model of social reform. Meetings will center on key rhetorical flashpoints, asking students to develop critical interpretations of primary texts informed by conceptual perspectives on settler colonialism, racial scripts, racial liberalism, critical pedagogy, affect theory, border rhetorics, whiteness studies, spatial geographies, and other frameworks. By applying critical attention to rhetorics deployed to warrant, obfuscate, or resist practices of (de)segregation, the course aims to cultivate students' wider sensitivities to, and practices of writing about, imbrications of race, space, and rhetoric.