calderwood seminar in public writing: urban justice and sustainability in seattle
This is a public writing course that engages the City of Seattle’s Race & Social Justice and Equity & Environment Initiatives and explores various interrelated and intersectional dynamics that underscore and perpetuate urban inequities within issues associated with those initiatives, such as housing affordability, environmental and racial justice, education, food security, and transportation. This public writing course conceives writing as a form of public action and draws on rhetoric’s longstanding civic role of preparing individuals and communities to respond nimbly, creatively, and ethically to our most urgent public problems. Rhetoric—which is foundational to all communication—is an interdisciplinary public art that facilitates cross-cultural capacities for collective problem solving and action.
In this course we examined two city government campaigns, Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI) and Equity and Environment Initiative, in order to explore how ideas and policy are translated into the public realm. Through writing articles related to these initiatives and other local social and environmental justice work, we analyzed audiences, genres and language to craft pieces that our target readers would not only be able to readily digest but also connect to their own lives in forward-looking ways.
As both a writer and a peer editor in this course, I practiced the important skills of articulating and receiving feedback. I tend to be instinctively less open to feedback when it comes to my writing in particular, and our group revision workshops helped me to confront this instinct. I began looking forward to Thursdays a great deal, when we brought our pieces together for group revision and filled the zoom room with affirmations, suggestions, and potential. I’d had some experience with studio critique in a previous Honors photography class, but only after the work was finished and the concept, techniques and product had already been fleshed out. In studio critique, we listened to feedback and responded to questions to file away for later; in workshop, we absorbed feedback and let it inspire, reshape and guide changes to our work.
In emergent strategy, complexity arises out of relatively simple interactions. adrienne maree brown tells us that interdependence, being mutually reliant on each other, is critical to center and embrace as we move towards a just future. Interdependence can be practiced through repetition of simple actions building into complex patterns, specifically the actions of allowing yourself to be seen, be wrong, accept your inner multitudes, and ask for and receive what you need. I didn’t see it then, but I think that workshops in this course were blending with emergent practice in interdependence — allowing yourself to be wrong, to set your work, your contribution, in the context of our collective brilliance. Reflecting now at a year’s distance, I see adrienne maree brown’s teachings in this course: “at least consider that the place where you are wrong might be the most fertile ground for connecting with and receiving others.”
“at least consider that the place where you are wrong might be the most fertile ground for connecting with and receiving others” — amb
