The Difficult Conversations Social Justice Book Club is a series of three conversations organized around a single book each semester. The conversations are led by undergraduate and graduate consultants on the UWC’s Language and Cultural Diversity Across Campus Committee. The conversations are open to all IUPUI undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff. The program’s purpose is to bring IUPUI community members together to discuss complex issues relating to social justice, writing, literacy, and education.
Each event takes place via Zoom and lasts approximately one hour, typically in the late afternoon or evening. The book selection and dates for each of the three conversations are made available early each semester. Conversations begin with an overview of the main ideas and arguments of relevant book chapters. Facilitators then pose discussion questions and facilitate a semi-structured conversation about the chapters and their relevance to our campus, teaching, and learning.
Fall 2021: TBA. Please check back in August to see our book selection. We anticipate that it will focus on disability justice. The text will be open access or available through IUPUI’s University Library.
Spring 2021: Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future
Fall 2020: April Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy
*Spring 2020: Power Structures and Marginalized Groups of Writers
*Fall 2019: Gatekeeping and Cancel Culture; Personality and Writing; History of Politics in the Writing Center
*Spring 2019: Gender Binaries in Writing; Multilingual Writers and Avoiding Appropriation; Kindness and Why it Matters
*Fall 2018: Disclosing Mental Illness
*Prior to Fall 2020, the Difficult Conversations Series focused on article-length texts.
