Assignment Blog post on solitary confinement and epistemic positioning

Assignment: Blog post on solitary confinement and epistemic positioning (excerpted from WR101 “Land of the Free” Fall 2015) Matt Whitt, Duke University This assignment asks students to think about how we acquire, assess, and convey knowledge about solitary confinement Solitary, like prison more generally, is an imagined experience for many students (but not for all of them), with images and connotations typically supplied by the media When students confront first-hand accounts of solitary confinement, they can be apt to discount them, because individuals who have experienced solitary have been marked as ‘criminal’ or ‘deviant’ and therefore ‘biased’ and ‘untrustworthy’ The assignment explicitly asks students to reflect on the choices that two authors (one with firsthand experience of solitary, one without) make in their writing on solitary confinement This leads implicitly and organically to a class conversation about the social, political, and epistemic position of each writer, and how different positions correspond to different forms of authority Courses that not focus on writing skills might play down some of those aspects, while playing up the broader interrogation of criminalization as a social, political, and epistemic process I used this assignment in my 12-student first-year writing seminar on freedom and punishment It is meant for a class blog, but also works as a traditional writing prompt The required texts are: A first-hand account of solitary confinement by a current or former prisoner I used a Guardian blog post, “Solitary Confinement’s Invisible Scars,” Five Omar Mualimm-ak An academic account of solitary confinement by someone who has not experienced it directly For this philosophy-focused class, I used selections from Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives by Lisa Guenther Blog post assignment: Week and Assessing arguments across media Due Tuesday, 10/20 For our next class, you will read two very different texts on the same topic Five Mualimm-ak’s opinion piece, “Solitary Confinement’s Invisible Scars,” was published in a blog on The Guardian website As such, it is accessible, informal, and intended to reach a wide audience Meanwhile, the selections from Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement are written for a more academic audience Working within the conventions of academic scholarship, Guenther establishes her credibility, and builds her argument, in very different ways than Mualimm-ak Nevertheless, the two texts argue for the same general conclusion: the widespread and seemingly arbitrary use of solitary confinement should be abolished In your blog post, please assess these arguments In addition to evaluating them for logical coherence, use of evidence, and persuasiveness, I want to you to pay special attention to the way that each author has acquired knowledge of solitary confinement, and how they convey that knowledge to their specific audience In your pre-writing, it may help to consider the following (optional) lines of inquiry: What different ways of knowing does each author convey? How the authors speak to their anticipated audience? How the authors manifest expertise or credibility on this topic? What claims, if any, seem incredible or doubtful to you? Why? How the authors build conversations or engage other views? Remember that a final comment on a peer’s blog post is due in Week 10 I encourage you to read and respond to your peers’ assessments of the Maulimm-ak and Guenther texts, with an eye to any differences in how you assess their arguments  ... the same general conclusion: the widespread and seemingly arbitrary use of solitary confinement should be abolished In your blog post, please assess these arguments In addition to evaluating them... piece, ? ?Solitary Confinement? ??s Invisible Scars,” was published in a blog on The Guardian website As such, it is accessible, informal, and intended to reach a wide audience Meanwhile, the selections... coherence, use of evidence, and persuasiveness, I want to you to pay special attention to the way that each author has acquired knowledge of solitary confinement, and how they convey that knowledge