As a student, you have probably come across something called the ‘Model United Nations (MUN).’ But how much do you really know about the institution that we call the United Nations (UN)? Do you know how it came about? Have you read its charter? As much as the UN symbolizes the last hope for international cooperation for some, it also represents an enduring legacy of global inequality and hierarchy for others. Given this ‘Rorschach’ quality to the UN, this course endeavors to focus wholly and specifically on the UN itself: the good, the bad, and the ugly. In addition to getting to know the UN inside out, students will explore the portrayal of the UN in film, thereby adopting an interdisciplinary perspective to understanding and evaluating the UN and its activities.

In this class, we will read and write essays and stories that attend to---and create greater awareness and support for---the body. Most of the writers we will study are women, BIPOC, and trans and non-binary people who share their experiences with illness and impairment, as well as its effect on their artistic and creative writing practices. This includes authors living with chronic pain, who experience mental health issues or have autoimmune-related and mysterious forms of illness---all of which are largely misunderstood by the “medical industrial complex” and amidst the increasing impact climate change has on our health. Foregrounding the course are distinctions between the medical, the social, and the production models of disability. This class further examines the structures within writing disciplines that dictate how we are to write and who has privilege within creative process systems. By identifying and describing the various physical and virtual spaces we write in, we can begin to study organizational frameworks in the teaching and reproduction of creative writing—what can be referred to as the architexture of writing, in which structural mechanisms create disability and set-off various inequities. We will discuss values around work ethic and labor/productivity, grammar and standard white English language supremacy, writing as a technological construct, pathways to publication, and access to social/institutional support and resources. We will look at expectations around creative writing output, and then challenge traditional modes that are injurious, ableist, exclusionary, and disabling. Ultimately, we will ask ourselves, What is the relationship between writing disciplines and our personal and collective health? What is the relationship between authorship and social justice? We will be introduced to liberatory writing and revision, as well as various experimental practices that accommodate embodied experience and prioritize ecosystems of care, so that we might all find greater agency in how we can approach and cultivate our strongest relationship to our own writing.

In this course, students will interrogate assumptions, structures, processes, and meanings within the concept of “manifesto”; study film manifestos from different artists, movements, and time periods in cinema; and watch films deriving from these manifestos, examining – through close reading and visual and narrative analysis – how each film puts its guiding manifesto’s theory into practice. Drawing upon this study and a series of personal creative and craft responses, students will write their own film manifestos, then put these manifestos into practice by making short films representative of their manifestos’ articulated concepts. They will then reflect upon the process of theorizing and of creating from theory an original work of art.

In this course, we will engage in creative practices that contribute to a richly lived life and study creativity as a field of inquiry. The creativity we cultivate is designed to support students in their future academic and professional endeavors and to enrich their personal lives. No artistic ability is required.