The Post/er Project asks you to 1) advocate for a social issue you care about and 2) make purposeful decisions about combining text and image in a post or poster. This project asks you to deeply engage terms you’ve been thinking about for most of the semester, with a particular focus on exigence and audience. You will produce a post or poster about a cause that is meaningful to you that will be accessible to an audience that you know deeply. You will think about your audience’s identities and literacies. For example, this project encourages you to include additional languages for linguistically diverse communities. You are the rhetor, so you will have to think carefully about who you are in relationship to the issue you choose to address. Among other details you will discover, one of your constraints will be persuading an audience working within the spatial confines of a single post/er.

Along with your final post/er, you will compose a reflective essay where you describe how you chose your specific audience and narrowed your exigence to have a targeted purpose for your project. You should integrate a recent assigned source (Cushman, Grant-Davie, or Hu).

This final project will be structured by giving you time to brainstorm about a social issue that matters to you, compose text and images in a single post/er, review that post/er with your peers, and reflect on the process as per the timeline below. Based on feedback from your last assignment, I’ve decided that this will be an individually-authored assignment.

Assignment Criteria

In her article “Rhetorician as Agent of Social Change,” Ellen Cushman encourages us to think about how activism can and should involve “day-to-day interactions” that “lead to social change” (12). Think of your post/er as one such day-to-day interaction. Your final post/er will:

• be either a poster, intended for hanging in a common space, or a social media post, intended for digital circulation.
• include data or research about your issue or concern.
• combine text and image to convey a message with the intention of initiating some sort of change.

Some things to consider:

• How can you use an image to convey an emotion?
• How can you use a single word or only a few words as large graphic text?
• Can including a QR code help you make decisions about how to use space and offload some text from the post/er itself?

Along with your final post/er, you will compose a Reflective Essay that:

• contains unified paragraphs.
• details the exigence of your post/er.
• explains your positionality as the rhetor of your post/er. What is your relationship to your topic, issue, or concern? Why does it matter to you?
• describes your relationship to your post/er’s audience. What is your relationship to your audience?
• integrates Cushman’s, Hu’s, or Grant-Davie’s texts in some way.
• includes a Works Cited list.

We will decide together whether you should circulate your final project beyond this class. For now, you will deliver your post/er and reflective essay as a new page to your course site BY FRI. DEC 15.

Timeline

11/21: Introduce the Poster Project, read activist posters together, & begin thinking about a problem or issue that matters to you. Compose blog post 7 before next class.

11/28: Blog Post 7, Brainstorming the Poster Project, DUE TODAY. Continue in-class brainstorming using Cushman’s ideas about activism in day-to-day interactions.

11/30: Arts-and crafts! In-class poster drafting!

12/5: Peer Review of Activist Posters in class. Create a revision plan that you will post as Blog Post #8.

12/7: Last class! Ask questions about your final posters and prepare for your reflective essay.

12/12: EXTRA OFFICES HOURS 10:45a-12p in Klapper 612

12/14: EXTRA OFFICES HOURS 10:45a-12p in Klapper 612

12/15: Final Poster & Reflective Essay DUE TODAY.

This assignment has been adapted from Professor Molly Ubbesen’s “The Multimodal Advocacy Project: Centering Accessible Composing Choices.”

Works Cited

Cushman, E. (1996). Rhetorician as an agent of social change. College Composition and Communication, 47(1), 7-28.

Ubbesen, M. (2023, June 28). Multimodal advocacy project: Centering accessible composing choices. Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. https://praxis.technorhetoric.net/tiki-index.php?page=PraxisWiki:_:multimodal_advocacy.