Instructor: Cheng
TR 9:30 AM- 10:50 AM

Have you ever wondered how your past experiences, your community, and your culture have shaped you into who you are now? This course will help us investigate that!

In this class, we will explore personal lives and write personal stories in order to better understand how the world affected and affects our upbringing, our lives, and our worldviews. We will write and highlight key life moments in order to connect them to social and cultural phenomena. This will be accomplished through autoethnography, an approach to writing and research that connects personal stories to wider beliefs, practices, and experiences. In doing so, we will understand how our lived experiences are valuable and can contribute to a better understanding of the world around us.

Not only will we read autoethnographic texts and personal memoirs, we will also watch videos and documentaries in order to understand how autoethnography appears in other media. We will then produce a variety of projects based on our life stories and experiences. These projects can include personal essays, collections of poems or short stories, video projects, or even podcasts. Through this course, students will better learn how the world affects them through cultural, social, and political influences.