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Social Justice Writing
With Gabriela Rios
Gabriela Raquel Rìos is an assistant professor of cultural rhetorics with a joint appointment in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and the English Department. As a Chicana rhetorician, her work focuses on rebuilding and reclaiming indigenous Chicanx/a/o rhetorics. Using decolonial and anticolonial frameworks, her published work has looked at how Indigenous peoples resist ongoing colonization and critically examines how indigeneity and indigenous knowledge circulates in social movements and public discourses. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Rhetoric Review and Rhetoric Society Quarterly as well as several book collections such as Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latino/a Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy; Indigenous Pop: Contemporary Native American Music of the 20th Century​; and Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching Indigenous Rhetorics​.​ She is currently work on a book project titled Indigenous Genres of the Human: Locating the Intersections of Indigeneity and Latinidad.
Class Description
This workshop will focus on the writing of testimonios. The testimonio is a genre of social justice writing that grew out of organizing and activism across the U.S. and Latin America, and that has strong roots in Indigenous storytelling traditions. We will work on building stories from our personal experiences and learning how to connect those stories to larger narratives of solidarity. We will focus on creating and writing for our own communities.