Working groups & writing groups

Helen Fu | English & VISS
Sam Teets | English & GSS
Jessica Somers | English & GSS
Marcus Clayton | Literature and Creative Writing
Tom Renjilian | Literature and Creative Writing
Krishna Narayanamurti | Literature and Creative Writing & Religious Studies

About: The Multimodal Writing Collective is a working group that bridges feminist approaches in multi-media and mixed-methods cultural production to study how these approaches theorize situated identities. This working group fills a gap at USC by creating the institutional infrastructure to adequately support early-career artists and scholars writing at the intersections of mixed-media texts, form, and disciplinary method. To this end, the Multimodal Writing Collective creates a supportive interdisciplinary cohort of thinkers working within and around non-canonical archives, texts, and modalities, as a way to disrupt the dominant mores of normative scholarship. The main activities of this working group include monthly workshops where members can share their works-in-progress, alongside discussions of texts that ground the feedback and dialogue. In addition to these workshops, this working group also hosts at least one event per semester in which invited faculty or other guest speakers present and participate in a discussion of their own works-in-progress. Ultimately, the working group provides graduate students the means for practicing alternative modes of thinking alongside experimental texts as not merely supplements to canonically accepted texts and forms but, rather, as important pieces of scholarship on their own merit.