Senior students may pursue advanced study in gender and law. Topics vary from year to year.

The application of theoretical study to practical community experience. Advanced Women and Gender Studies students have the opportunity to apply knowledge acquired in the Women and Gender Studies curriculum through a practicum placement within a community organization. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

This course foregrounds the Caribbean as a transnational space, where sexuality, gender, race and class are intimately connected and shaped by colonial legacies and contemporary circuits of globalization.

This course maps genealogies of black insurgency and transnational itineraries of intersectional theorizing, organizing, and praxis from the 20th century to our present moment. Through close study of works by and about black revolutionary migrants, exiles, intellectuals, fugitives, and so-called terrorists, participants will critique and create radical visions for emancipation. Major topics and themes may include black feminisms; queer insurgencies; transnational imaginaries and solidarities; silence and intracommunal violence; accountability and transformative justice. Through collective discussion, writing, and reflection we interrogate visions and strategies of emancipation, and imagine radical futures historically and in our own times.

This course examines how notions of sexuality travel as people move within and beyond national borders. It investigates how queer and trans migrants pursue different versions of belonging, solidarity, survival, and hope. Participants will study transnational archives (which may include popular culture, new media, film, literature, and performance) as they trace globalization's effects on racialized, queer, and trans communities. Major topics may include: queer of color critique; queer settler colonialism; transnational and global south sexualities; imperialism and militarism; neoliberalism and homonationalism; humanitarianism and sexual rights; queer and trans social movements; postcolonial intimacies.

This course introduces students to the strategies and practices of successful writing at the university and beyond. WRR103H1 challenges students to reflect on and cultivate their strengths as readers and writers as they enter the university. Students will develop their critical reading abilities and written communication skills through meaningful writing projects in diverse genres, including multimodal composition.

Students will learn the fundamentals of report writing, including how to write abstracts and conduct literature reviews as well as qualitative and quantitative research. Students also learn to communicate visually, including how to create tables, charts, and graphs with attention to purpose, audience, structure, style, skills they apply to a formal report and a poster presentation.

When contemporary critics seek to discredit dishonest politicians, they tend to refer to their discourse as “mere rhetoric.” But there is so much more to rhetoric than deception. This course examines the history of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, from its birth in Greco-Roman antiquity to its rebirth in twentieth and twenty-first century thought. In addition to tracking the history of Western ideas about persuasion, we will bring rhetorical theories to bear on vital questions about philosophy, psychology, media, and advertising.

This introductory course focuses on the process and craft of creative writing. Students will study short fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry by established writers, and learn to respond to works-in-progress by their peers. A variety of activities will help students generate, develop, and revise a portfolio of original creative work.

Students learn the theory and practice of effective and ethical communication in the workplace, including business, government, and non-profit organizations. Students apply ethical reasoning models to case studies. Students have an opportunity to work directly with a community partner, helping them to solve an industry-specific problem or concern. This experiential learning enables students to work together as a team to develop relevant solutions as they strengthen their written and verbal communication skills.

Designed for and restricted to Rotman Commerce undergraduates, the course reflects the program’s learning goals, which include critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and business and professional communication (oral and written). Students apply business communication theory and ethical reasoning models to business cases. Students have an opportunity to work directly with a community partner, helping them to solve an industry-specific problem or concern. This experiential learning enables students to work together as a team to develop relevant solutions as they strengthen their written and verbal communication skills

This course explores the pivotal role that media plays in our culture. Beginning with U of T rhetorician Marshall McLuhan’s far-reaching ideas about media environments, WRR303H1 takes students on a journey through a wide variety of ideas about media, technology, and rhetoric. Topics include the rhetorical dimensions of social media platforms, the strengths and shortcomings of online activism, the emergence of surveillance capitalism, and the operation of persuasion in dating apps.

This seminar in critical reading, analysis, and writing focuses on the nature, the evaluation, and the use and abuse of evidence in the process of formulating and supporting an argument. The case study method will be employed to assess the level of authority, credibility, and objectivity evident in public discourse, official sources, and academic inquiry.

This course examines the persuasive power of writing about visual art and texts. Students will analyze a variety of texts about visual images from several disciplines and genres: journalism, informal essays, poetry, and scholarly writing.

This course uses rhetoric, the study of persuasion, to analyze the cultural, political, and scientific importance of plants. We examine Indigenous knowledge related to plants and the environment as well as debates about plant communication, urban tree coverage and inequality, and environmental justice issues. We also explore the social and health benefits of community gardening, horticultural therapy, and forest bathing. Students reflect on their own relation to land as they deepen their knowledge and appreciation of plants and develop expertise in communicating with public audiences through multimodal writing projects (such as podcasts and video essays) and local field trips.

Since its inception, rhetoric has been concerned with persuasion and its relationship to human flourishing. This course brings rhetorical thought into important dialogue with health research, medical practices, and pharmaceutical advertising. Medicalized phenomena—like hypochondria, depression, sexual dysfunction, and death & dying—are all bound up with influence. A rhetorical perspective on health and wellness tracks this influence through networks of individuals, institutions, texts, media forms, genres, and narratives.

Courses on selected topics in Writing and Rhetoric.

Given the climate crisis, how do environmental groups use communication to advance their aims? In this community-engaged learning course, students work with environmental organizations on professional communication projects. Students learn about rhetoric and communication as they refine and reflect on their writing processes and practice writing in multiple genres. Students create a variety of multimodal communication projects such as social media and web content for community partners. Through readings, reflection, discussion, and projects involving feedback from peers, instructor, and community partners, students learn principles and strategies to inform and persuade a variety of audiences about environmental issues.

This course introduces students to professional editorial conventions at two later stages of the editorial process. Both stages require analytical skills and sentence expertise. Through stylistic editing, students learn how to improve a writer’s literary style; through copy editing, they learn how to ensure both accuracy and consistency (editorial style).

This workshop-based course teaches students about the creative writing process and the fundamentals of writing fiction specifically. Through readings of fiction in various genres, discussions, creative writing prompts and longer assignments, students learn how storytellers work with setting, character, scenes, structure, point-of-view, style and other elements. Students will learn how to take creative risks and grow through writing fiction, how to develop solid work from shaky drafts, how to be generous yet shrewd editors of their own and others’ work, and how and why to be active in a writing community.

This course introduces students to works by some of the most influential literary journalists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Classes will be devoted to individual literary-journalistic genres: the personal essay, the profile, the polemic, the memoir, literary reportage, and cultural criticism. Students will look closely at key writers who worked across these genres: George Orwell, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates. Over the semester, students will develop and write a feature-length work of literary journalism in a genre of their choice, to be refined through peer workshop and instructor feedback.

This course examines how images and objects communicate with and persuade viewers. Visual rhetoric is part of the broader academic field known as rhetorical studies. This course will introduce students to the “language” of display, exploring questions such as the following: How does physical arrangement, context, and architectural space give voice to the silent object? How are fine art and decorative art objects invested with meaning? Students will be introduced to object-based learning and material culture and learn to analyze and interpret visual grammar in international exhibitions, in auction and exhibition catalogues, in reviews of exhibits, and in museum collections. Objects will include ceramics, jewellery, interiors, architecture, and fashion in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

This course guides students in a creative writing process that is engaged with place and time. Classes are held outdoors at various locations in Toronto. Through guided writing activities, discussions, assignments and writing workshops, students learn how writing grounded in and informed by territory can expand their work, adding intimacy, immediacy, authenticity and depth. Readings and techniques are drawn from literary fiction of different genres (e.g., realism, speculative, YA, fantasy), and a range of creative nonfiction. Students are invited to explore any genre.

This course introduces professional editorial conventions at two early stages of the editorial process. Both stages require editors to think critically and creatively as they assess content, organization, and argument. Students learn how to analyze and evaluate these elements, envision possible improvements, and explain these suggestions persuasively.

The course covers various kinds of academic writing, including the essay, the long form book review, the annotated bibliography, and the undergraduate thesis. Students learn to recognize the rhetorical frames, persuasive strategies, elements of style, and uses of scholarly evidence that are features of academic writing. Readings include academic and non-academic prose from a variety of disciplines. Through reading, research, reflection, writing, and citation of sources, students learn to engage in the scholarly conversation that is foundational to all advanced academic writing. Students will develop voices as writers in dialogue with other writers, scholars, and commentators.

Independent research projects devised by students and supervised by the Writing and Rhetoric staff. Open only to students who are completing the Minor Program in Writing and Rhetoric Program. Applications should be submitted to the Program Director by June 1 for a Fall session course or by November 1 for a Spring session course. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

Independent research projects devised by students and supervised by the Writing and Rhetoric staff. Open only to students who are completing the Minor Program in Writing and Rhetoric Program. Applications should be submitted to the Program Director by June 1 for a Fall session course or by November 1 for a Spring session course. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

Independent research projects devised by students and supervised by the Writing and Rhetoric staff. Open only to students who are completing the Minor Program in Writing and Rhetoric Program. Applications should be submitted to the Program Director by June 1 for a Fall session course or by November 1 for a Spring session course. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

Seminars in special topics designed for students who are completing the Minor Program in Writing and Rhetoric.

Seminars in special topics designed for students who are completing the Minor Program in Writing and Rhetoric.