BYOT: Bring Your Own Theory is a combined seminar and creative critical writing workshop concerned with the methods and materials we bring into being through our academic inquiry and experimentation. We are concerned with the following questions: What is the politics of gathering material for our study?  Can a process be experienced as finished work? How does embodied practice—the body in and across time & space—contaminate, contain, or collude with our research?  Where and what are our commitments to rigorous critical thinking and disciplined literary analysis? Through text, film, art, comics, music, movement, and stillness, we will discover how the methods and materials of our proposed and ongoing research offer a distinct epistemology. While the course will lean into ideas from affect theory and black performance theory, students will also be in conversation with the forms of knowing they are currently exploring. This course involves reading and analysis of selected texts with short creative critical responses and one long paper revision. This course will also include a continuous abstract writing workshop wherein students read and engage each other’s writing to understand theory-specific variations, expectations and shifts of the structure of conceptual and critical analyses, and writing styles. Students will need to upload workshop material or a writing sample a week before the Fall quarter (article, chapter, prospectus, seminar paper, etc).

*This is a graduate level course and must be approved by the instructor and registrar to enroll*

*This course will satisfy one of the courses needed for the Creative Writing (CW) Specialization. Instructor and department must provide approval if the student is an undergrad*