SPEC 10
Relating Your Research: Making STEM Work Meaningful to Multiple Audiences Winter 2024

This is not the current course catalog

Interested in continuing in academia, working in a research lab, or operating within a highly technical field after Williams? Such roles require people to make their work meaningful to a multitude of audiences: from non-profit and government organizations, to the public, to wealthy individuals looking to change the world. This course focuses on how the field of rhetoric conceives of those audiences and how you can approach them. Through this course, students will identify a topic of interest, investigate potential audiences to appeal to, and develop proposals tailored to those audiences. We will meet for six hours each week, during which we will discuss theoretical approaches to audiences alongside real-world examples within STEM, develop practices for investigating audiences of your work, and workshop different ways of approaching audiences. Work outside of class will involve reading journal articles and book chapters for class discussion, three short writing assignments identifying the topic and analyzing the audiences of your project, and a culminating statement of purpose or project proposal that targets those audiences.