Course Description:

This course comes at a crossroads in conversations about race, ethnicity and culture. The election of a bi-racial president, partially raised in the world's most populous Muslim country,  and who self-identifies as black, has opened a new front in contemplations of identity politics, and/or the transcendence thereof.

By mid-century, the United States will be majority minority, bringing the personal and cultural narratives of a much wider population into sharper focus.  The dynamics of once dominant groups will also undergo permanent alteration. 

The world has been made smaller by technology, and the jostle for narrative space is a constant. We are awash in the self-referential: culture specific, race specific, gender specific, orientation specific, geographically specific stories, and the ones that resonate are the ones that go deep enough to be universal.

This course will help students find the rewarding (and sometimes wrenching) universal places through specific portals. It eschews platitudes and surface explorations in favor of truth, nuance and grit. It seeks to cut through the noise of identity politics to get to the humanity of shared emotion and experience.

The ability to find, and render, the center of perspectives that may be outside your realm of experience and comfort  will be one of your biggest assets as a journalist. This course will help set you on that path.

Each class period will be devoted to examining how journalists can turn the specific personal narrative into a deeper commentary that explores issues of diversity, connection, fear and alienation. It will encourage students to mine their personal journeys, develop listening and discernment skills to probe the stories of others, and find points of universal agreement and connection in a society that easily splits along fault lines. Through writing exercises, class discussions, the work-shopping of specific pieces, and guest speakers, students will be encouraged toward frank and honest discussion that fosters cultural dexterity and a greater ability to move as journalists through an ever more disparate populace.