Welcome! Hi! My name is Andréa, I use she/her pronouns, and I’m genuinely excited to be with you for this semester.

This course will be a model for what is possible when care and love for students is centered instead of the directives from a non-living (usually harmful) academic entity. This Writing for the Sciences course will explore topics within the field of engineering that center Black, Disabled, and queer voices. We will challenge the concept of neutrality in science, read from a graphic textbook, and practice writing through blog responses. If you’re enrolled, you get an A. Grades are surveillance systems set up to police students with no proof of positively impacting learning outcomes (article attached if you want to challenge other professors’ policies).

We are listed as an online course, so we will be meeting asynchronously for the rest of the semester. This means that each week I will post a module, and the hope is that you’re able to engage with the module (comment, send me a message, read the section I offer) within a week’s time.

On the homepage of the course site, I try to explain how this course will run, so poke around and most questions about what will be asked of you this semester, should be revealed. If you have other questions, please send me a Slack DM, I respond there the fastest.

A little more about me: I’m Autistic, a professor and a PhD student at the Graduate Center, have two little little kids, and work a full time job in the coffee industry to pay the bills. I’m an abolitionist and I’m very excited to see how you all rebuild this world into something beautiful.

For this first week, tell me about yourself. Who are you? How did you end up at CCNY? Do you need me to help you start an uprising in any of your other classes? It can even be a 30 second video if you want, I’d love to see you face. You can send this to me as a DM on Slack.

Lastly, please read these first three sections (links: one, two, three) of Science Under the Scope. It’s a graphic text, so it should take about 15 mins to read. And answer this question in the comments section of this post: when were you taught that science was objective? and after reading these first sections, what do you think?