This course provides opportunities to reflect on your writing process and develop your communication skills across different modes. You will learn about the WOVEN (written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal) approach to multimodal communication, focusing in particular on the written mode. In line with the theme of the course, we will explore how the stories we tell about family—whether in popular culture, sociology, literature, or memory—shape our sense of identity, belonging, and community.

Across the semester, you will compose, revise, and collaborate in different genres as we examine the family’s role in structuring cultural, racial, and gendered experience. You’ll begin by crafting personal narratives of family history, then analyze how writers have depicted family as a site of both care and conflict. Finally, you’ll look ahead, imagining alternative models of kinship, care, and community that resist or reimagine the family under capitalism.