From book burning to academic regulation, censorship is a historic phenomenon with modern reverberations. With controversy around censorship and freedom of speech on DePaul’s own campus in 2016 following the protest of a conservative speaker, it is pertinent to consider our own place in the conversation of regulated expression. This upcoming Spring Quarter, online asynchronous WRD 281 Writing Censorship aims to prompt and answer important questions about how censorship functions.
Read on to hear from WRD 281’s own Professor Erin MacKenna-Sandhir and learn more about what WRD 281 Writing Censorship will entail.
1. What are your goals for the course and what can students hope to learn?
Given that the course carries credit in the Arts & Literature Domain and seeks to investigate censorship from a rhetorical perspective, I hope that students in WRD 281 will develop their capacity to:
- Understand how the conditions under which a work is produced influence both its form and content.
- Demonstrate an awareness of how literary devices such as allegory and allusion can enable writers to convey an intention that would otherwise be sublimated.
- Utilize evolving forms of expression to resist conditions of socio-normative, ideological, and juridical censorship.
- Apply theoretical frameworks on free speech and censorship to the analysis of historical and current arguments for regulating expression.
More generally speaking, students will have the opportunity to think beyond conventional framing of censorship as a form of juridical power and study its subtle, discursive modalities of power including social norms, implicit threats of exclusion, internalized fear of pathology, and limitations on what is legible within dominant discourse.
2. What kinds of discussions can students expect in the course? (i.e., current events, historical events, or play it by ear)
Primarily, discussions will center around readings and students’ own writing including a focus on the creative process and practices employed to circumvent limits on expression—to that end, we will examine what affords and constrains our production of texts ranging from the everyday to the academic. Based on students’ interests, we will discuss a limited set of current events, but these will be situated in both historical and evolving ideas about speech as a form of expression and conduct. Students can expect to analyze historical and current events through theoretical frameworks established and studied throughout the quarter.
3. What sparked your interest in teaching this subject?
For me, it’s impossible to occupy space within a university setting and not contend with questions of censorship and free speech. During my twenty years at DePaul, I’ve experienced countless campus-based debates about the manner in which to regulate speech. These experiences have shown me that speech operates as a mechanism for each generation to reinvent the university and to participate in the narrativization of institutional mission. One particular event happened in 2016 when a student group at DePaul invited Milo Yiannopolous—a public provocateur—to campus, inciting student protests and a response from then University President Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider. In his letter to our community, written from a mission trip to Normandy, the president evoked the college-aged American soldiers memorialized in rows of white crosses for their willingness to sacrifice everything for a better world. He juxtaposed these soldiers with the protesters on college campuses seeking to challenge speech that they viewed as an enactment of violence. The image of the white crosses dotting the cemetery and student protesters as two symbols of the power of youth to reshape the world by force or by persuasion has always stayed with me. I try to listen closely to the chorus of speech that students invent in their interaction with the institution.
4. How is the course structured?
The course is structured around a combination of historical and current theoretical works on censorship and their application to creative examples of art that resists restrictions on social, political, and creative expression. Given the course’s asynchronous modality, our pacing will be maintained by a predictable, recurring cycle of engagement with weekly materials (readings, podcasts, and videos) followed by online, asynchronous discussion, and short informal responses that scaffold the midterm and final papers.
The course will be divided into four 2–3-week units thematically arranged around the following guiding subtopics:
- Rhetoric of Free Speech & Censorship Discourse
- Speech, Social Location, & Subject Formation
- Creative Resistance & Expression as Social Action
- Inscribing Identity, Erasing Identity: Frameworks for Regulating Speech
5. What major projects will be assigned to students?
This course requires a series of short, informal writing activities that ask students to respond to ideas in the weekly materials (i.e., readings, podcasts, videos) and two major projects: a midterm essay and a final project.
For the midterm project, students will express a position under socio-normative or ideological conditions of censorship by relying on creative elements such as allegory, analogy, and allusion to achieve the fullest possible expression within the given rhetorical situation. We will prepare for this assignment by studying examples in literature like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and examples in art like the incarcerated men at Guantanamo Bay carving flowers into the Styrofoam cups they were given for water and gifting them to other detainees (DPAM/Ginsburg and Hughes, Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, & Reparations, 2022.).
For the final project, students will research a specific conflict that stakeholders have tried to adjudicate through free speech discourse and analyze the various positions by applying one or more of the theoretical frameworks studied throughout the quarter. In the final section of this paper, students will establish a values-based framework for regulating free expression tailored to the particular conflict’s context (e.g., an institution of higher ed or an online platform) and make predictions about how their proposed framework would constrain particular kinds of speech while affording others. Students will be encouraged to submit their ideas/frameworks to the audience responsible for making those decisions (e.g., university administrators or board members), though doing so is optional.
6. Who should take this course and why?
I hope the course will appeal to students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and majors with diverse perspectives, intellectual curiosity, and critical skepticism. A primary takeaway that the course offers students is a vocabulary and a set of theoretical frameworks for thinking about some of the most pressing issues we face in regard to whether, when, and how to regulate speech. The more we can approximate a lively public square as a site for adjudicating democratic values, the better. All are very welcome!
7. Any final thoughts you want to leave potential students with?
I’ll just share that this is my first time teaching this course, and I’m open to students’ ideas for how to best run the class and engage with the materials as we move through the quarter. In sum, I hope to build a democratic community based on a shared spirit of collaboration and mutual aid.
Join the dialogue and learn about censorship and forms of resistance in WRD 281 Writing Censorship this Spring Quarter, and take a look at additional course offerings here.