Graduate Community Building Workshop

Graduate Community Building Workshop

Course Number: 
17136
Course Catalog Number: 
298, section 2
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Laila Riazi
Days: 
F
Time: 
2-3pm
Semester: 
Location: 
175 Dwinelle

Supported by a Graduate Diversity Grant, this one-unit course-- designed for and led by graduate students in Comparative Literature—aims to serve a number of purposes. Ideally, it will support conversation and community-formation across cohorts; enable graduate students to share and develop their academic work in a supportive environment; connect students with professional development resources; and facilitate discussions about the grounds on which Comparative Literature has taken shape, and what comparative work means for us today. By offering a safe space for sharing experiences inflected by race, class, gender, and other identity categories, this course aims, secondarily, to enable critical perspectives on the institutional rhetoric of diversity, locating its limits and remediating its oversights by facilitating care and collaboration across cohorts.

In practice, this course has functioned for the past two semesters as a supportive space for exchanging informal knowledge, as well as any other resources, relating in the broadest sense to the question of how we navigate graduate school. Meetings have focalized topics such as faculty-student relationships, the academic job market and “alt-ac”, the emotional and physical challenges of graduate school and its financial hardships, discrimination and bias in higher education, and the unforeseen discursive and interpersonal contexts that make up academic life. In keeping with past iterations of this course, the first week of the semester will offer an opportunity for us to collaboratively add to and edit a tentative syllabus.