This course is designed for graduate students in all disciplines, fields, and areas of creative practice who are interested in breaking out of the constraints of academic writing. In this course, we begin by considering the work of artists and scholars who have developed alternative modes for representing all kinds of knowledge across a range of media – for example, the Wertheims’ Crochet Coral Reef as mathematical and scientific knowledge, Battiste Good’s Winter Count, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! as history, Faith Ringgold’s French Collection as art history, Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening as philosophy, among many more. Using such examples to ground an investigation of disciplinary standards, and the limitations of academic modalities, we go on to experiment with transposing knowledge ourselves. Traditional academic writing asks students and scholars to analyze a chosen subject, review authorized or expert treatments of that subject matter, state a thesis about it, and mobilize and document evidence (insuring objectivity and accuracy) in the service of presenting a persuasive and original argument, almost always in written form. This mode of knowledge production tends to devalue or exclude subjective, somatic, affective, spiritual, poetic, indigenous ways of knowing, as well as alternative modes of presentation, from humor and satire to performance to material modeling to graphic, visual, tactile, auditory experiencing to immaterial manifestations. Students have a hand in designing the syllabus, and workshopping projects in development, as we re-think re-search and imagine what genres, modes, and media might best express your intellectual, ethical, political, critical/creative purposes.