Jasmine Kar Tang Receives Campus Micro Grant

Exploring Writerly Identities through Art: A Workshop for Graduate Writers of Color

Facilitated by three women of color, this workshop provides graduate writers of color with an opportunity to use the artistic practices of puppetry, story-writing, and performance as a way to think deeply and imaginatively about their relationships to their academic writing projects, as well as reflect on the communities, histories, and identities they may bring with them in the writing process. This project is a collaboration between the UMN Center for Writing’s Student Writing Support program, the UMN Community of Scholars Program (COSP) Writing Initiative, and Monkeybear’s Harmolodic Workshop. 

During the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to work with artist Chamindika Wanduragala to create shadow puppets and to therefore be introduced to puppetry as an artistic practice. The agenda for the workshop will be a blend of art-making (taught by Wanduragala), writing, and group discussion (facilitated by Brown and Tang); participants will experience a creative approach that seeks to affirm the embodied histories and knowledges they bring to academia as scholars of color. Just as critically, this workshop is focused on building community as well: graduate writers of color do not need to navigate their graduate programs and thesis-writing in isolation. In this way, we hope this project fulfills the Micro-grant’s goal of “support[ing] equity, inclusion, and community by fostering dialogue, respect, and personal growth.” In short, art-making, writing, and group discussions have the capacity to become knowledge-producing and healing spaces for participants.