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Asynchronous Welcome!
What we’re about to do here is radical, and I’m always fearful that the City will find out and pull the plug. This semester we’re going against the institution.
This course will be a model for what is possible when care and love for students is centered instead of the directives from a non-living (usually harmful) academic entity. This Writing for Engineering course will explore topics within the field of engineering that center Black, Disabled, and queer voices. We will challenge the concept of neutrality in science, read from a graphic textbook, and practice writing through blog responses. If you’re enrolled, you get an A. Grades are surveillance systems set up to police students with no proof of positively impacting learning outcomes (article attached if you want to challenge other professors’ policies).
We are listed as a hybrid course, but we will be meeting asynchronously for the rest of the semester. It is violent for the administration to ask us to risk our bodies on transit and in classrooms just so they can make a bottom line. They ignored the change.org 25k + petition from students asking for online courses to be reinstated. We owe them nothing. We are more important than directives from the ivory tower. The ivory tower exists because it extracts money and resources from us so let’s flip this power dynamic on its head. The institution needs us, we don’t need the institution.
On the homepage of the course site, I tried to explain how this course will run, so poke around and most questions about what will be asked of you this semester, should be revealed. If you have other questions, please send me a Slack DM, I respond there the fastest.
A little more about me: I’m Disabled, a professor and a PhD student at the Graduate Center, have two little little kids, and work a full time job in the coffee industry to pay the bills. I’m an abolitionist and I’m very excited to see how you all rebuild this world into something beautiful.
For this first week, tell me about yourself. Who are you? How did you end up at CCNY? Do you need me to help you start an uprising in any of your other classes? It can even be a 30 second video if you want, I’d love to see you face. You can send this to me as a DM on Slack.
Lastly, please read these first three sections (links: one, two, three) of Science Under the Scope. It’s a graphic text, so it should take about 15 mins to read. And answer this question in the comments section of this post: when were you taught that science was objective and after reading this first section, what do you think?
