This year’s National Day on Writing focused on writing for social and racial justice. Photo by Siobhan Richards.
The Harrington School of Communication and Media, alongside many University of Rhode Island student organizations, will celebrate National Day on Writing (NDOW) this week, focusing on the theme of writing for social and racial justice.
From Nov. 2-6, students are encouraged to accept their invitations of writing for change and engage in conversations surrounding identity, inclusivity, Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) safety, racism, injustice in an inequitable society and more.
Genoa Shepley, senior lecturer and assistant director of First-Year Writing, said the department of writing and rhetoric has always been committed to racial and social justice, but is doing even more to transmit the idea of a more racially just world through academics and student initiatives this year.
“We really want the organizations to drive this; we want them to be able to represent themselves in their own terms,” Shepley said. “We want to raise awareness about some of these issues and promote these organizations that are doing such a wonderful job on this [primarily white institution] campus and who are trying to make it a home for BIPOC.”
The organizations participating in URI’s NDOW celebrations are the Multicultural Unity and Student Involvement Council, Cape Verdean Student Association, Ether(bound), National Society of Black Engineers, Uhuru Sasa, The Womxn Project, Powerful Independent Notoriously Knowledgeable Women, The Good Five-Cent Cigar, Student Alliance Welfare of Africa, Latin American Student Association, The Black Student Union and Brothers on a New Direction.
Each organization has a different focus and writing invitation such as Black lives lost to police violence, food insecurity, educational inequality, voting access and reproductive justice. Each also has different ways to get involved on their respective writing invitations on the URI National Day on Writing 2020 official webpage.
Assistant professor and Director of First-Year Writing Dr. Stephanie West-Puckett said the more than a decade old, nationally recognized holiday is meant to celebrate the important role that writing plays in our everyday lives.
“We really want to bring attention to all the ways we use writing in the world,” West-Puckett said. “We wanted to give multiple opportunities and options [to students] for engaging at a level that they’re comfortable with, but that is really driven by our student organizations. We want to help them amplify their voices and engage campus-wide participation.”
She said aside from NDOW and the new rollout of course curriculum surrounding important aspects of racial justice and different social justice movements, various departments on campus, such as writing and rheotoric, are working together to craft anti-racist statements and incorporate them into their syllabi.
“Our focus has really been on cultural rhetorics, so not rhetoric as defined by Aristotle and the white Western tradition, but the ways that different groups make meaning every day and practice rhetoric in their cultural communities,” West-Puckett said.
URI’s NDOW is meant to recognize the power of writing and the power of those fighting towards a more just and equitable world.
URI students can submit any form of writing from protest signs, spoken-word poetry and letters to local news outlets as well. Participants in NDOW will have the chance to be entered in daily drawings to win $200 Amazon gift cards and are also encouraged to share their work on social media using the hashtag #NDOW20URI to have more opportunities to win.