Offered as JNX 350 and WRT 350. This course provides students an opportunity to produce an extended reported project while exploring and critiquing contemporary forces shaping the media landscape. Required for senior journalism concentrators and open to all juniors and seniors, this course allows students to synthesize their previous journalistic experience. Students investigate contemporary journalism and methods and how these themes might influence their rhetorical, practical and ethical choices for their work in progress. This course serves as the Journalism concentration capstone.

Offered as WRT 136 and ENG 136. In this intellectually rigorous writing class, students learn how to craft compelling "true stories" using the journalist’s tools. They research, report, write, revise, source and share their work—and, through interviewing subjects firsthand, understand how other people see the world. The course considers multiple styles and mediums of journalism, including digital storytelling. Prerequisite: One WI course. Enrollment limited to 16.

Offered as ENG 135ws and WRT 135ws. Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste: Everything humans know is reached through their senses. Humans share a world filtered through a million sensibilities - finding the words to convey what is heard, seen, smelled, tasted and felt is one of the most fundamental skills a writer can develop. In this class, students hone their descriptive powers to go beyond the obvious and uncover language that delights and surprises.

Offered as ENG 135pt and WRT 135pt. Writing and reading assignments in this creative nonfiction course draw from the linked themes of place and travel. Students need not be a seasoned traveler to join the course; they can write about any place at all, including home. The class also uses the Smith campus and Northampton to create travel narratives and works with images and creative walking exercises ("performance writing"). Students should be prepared to write frequently in class and out, read well, participate in class discussion and be ready to explore the world with new eyes.

The power of language is evident everywhere in our lives. This course examines language and power in three areas: politics, media, and art. In this course, students write a variety of essays on these topics, read both academic and popular pieces, and visit the Smith College Museum of Art. Students hone the writing skills developed in a previous WI course, focusing on refining and developing personal style and voice; exploring other genres, especially those involving public discourse; and expanding upon and improving rhetorical and organizational skills.

This class explores the contemporary “remix culture” to ask pressing questions about creativity, originality and identity. Students explore the remix as a necessary tool for cultural transformation and look at their own experience of race, gender, sexual orientation, class and ability as an opportunity to reimagine and transform old ideas. Students make a case for the remix as a place for critical updates to the culture and discuss the possibilities of how remixing contributes to a richer production of cultural ideas.

As instruments of white supremacy, police and prisons disproportionately target Black and Brown people. The abolition movement, which gained more mainstream support after the 2020 George Floyd protests, demands to defund and ultimately abolish prisons and police, instead investing in communities to eliminate the conditions that lead to violence. But abolition is primarily about building, not just dismantling. It offers a vision of a liberated world in which everyone can thrive and justice does not equal punishment.