prompt a journal of academic writing assignments Volume 6, Issue 1 (2022), pages 73–83. DOI: 10.31719/pjaw.v6i1.86 Submitted June 9, 2020; accepted October 24, 2021 ; published January 31, 2022. © 2022 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Writing as Memory Work Teaching the Civic Deliberations over Monument Removals Jill Swiencicki 1 and Barbara J. Lowe 2 1 St. John Fisher College (jswiencicki@sjfc.edu) 2 St. John Fisher College (blowe@sjfc.edu) Abstract Social justice goals are usually sought in civic or community settings in which stakeholders represent competing frameworks about what is just, good, and true. Modeling for students a way to identify these competing frameworks, and then intervene in deliberations to achieve just ends, is the focus of our assignment sequence. We examine civic deliberations over removing racist public symbols in this assignment for first-year students enrolled in linked rhetoric and philosophy courses. We read broadly in theories of public memory and civic identity, examine in depth one community’s deliberation, and reflect on public symbols in our home communities. The final joint assignment asks students to identify the principles that should guide deliberations about contested public symbols. We found that the assemblage of ideas that the students select from these pre-drafting activities shapes what they think is possible in the work of social justice; in other words, their own standpoint enables and limits what they see in the assemblage of ideas, sometimes limiting the arc of social justice insights and solutions, and sometimes unleashing it. For this reason, reflective writing is a necessary entwined process, one that can develop better awareness of how students’ epistemic norms shape their ability to imagine social justice ends. To most fully realize social justice knowledge, students must not stay bound within the contours of particular deliberations or inward reflection. Instead, assignments must enlarge the context, asking students to make bigger inquiries into history, context, and relations of domination. Course Context: A Monumental Moment St. John Fisher, our small, liberal arts college, requires that first-year students fulfill their writing requirement across two linked courses that examine a single topic from different disciplinary perspectives. In this learning community, our 100-level rhetoric and philosophy courses examine how communities deliberate over a social justice problem: how they identify a problem to confront, the language and practices they use to confront it, the values and beliefs that undergird their aims, and the ways they respond to alternative and opposing stakeholders. We encourage students to use writing to discover social justice pathways through the thicket of the deliberative process. Indeed, much of social justice work occurs in a deliberative space of diverse interests, investments, and identifications. In the heterogeneous spaces of the school board, the town meeting, or the legislative session, participants hold different and competing orientations. As solutions to problems are proposed, those proposals inevitably disrupt and even threaten the identities, realities, and attachments of some stakeholders. Such is the ideologically diverse reality in which social justice aims are acknowledged and implemented. We first conceived of this assignment in 2018 when we watched communities contest their racist public monuments in the wake of the murders in Charleston in 2015 and Charlottesville in 2017. We taught the assignment again in a less deliberative, more activist context of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. In both iterations, our students were in overwhelming solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives (BLM). This surprised us, as our students are 73