Community writing teachers, students, scholars, and activists are in the unique position to study and influence how writing, images, and ideas create impact and circulate to address the issues facing our communities—climate change, population movements related to climate and political instability, systemic misogyny, racially motivated police killings, mass incarceration, expansion of corporate rights, resurgence of anti-immigrant rhetorics, educational injustices, gun violence—from both scholarly and practical perspectives. We believe that we are at a crossroads for higher education, broadly, and for Rhetoric and Writing Studies, specifically, and we must engage deeply, through every facet of our work, with the task at hand, with the ecology in which we live, and with the other members of our ecology, to whom we are profoundly connected.
For the 2017 conference, we ask that you think of this evolving entity not only as an infrastructure but as an ecology. The second Conference on Community Writing will convene around the theme of “Engaging Networks and Ecologies.” This theme alludes to academic theories, but is also grounded in daily practice and lived experience. Networks mean people having relationships: teachers with students, activists with governance, community members with students, and so on, and these can be in real or virtual environments. Ecologies mean the places we live, the health of the bodies that make up communities, and the interconnectedness of humans, non-humans, things, and places. We function within our community ecologies, however large or small in size. It is clear that impacts in parts of our ecology reverberate and can resonate in other parts. We witness this through our work in environmental communication, community literacies, service-learning, community publishing, advocacy writing, archival research, community-based research, critical literacies, activist rhetorics, and the many other kinds of work we do both inside and outside of the academy.
We also want to invoke, through our conference theme, theories of ecological writing studies, and to suggest a more deliberate synergy between these theories and those of community writing. Following the social turn in rhetoric and composition, and the subsequent attention given to postprocess theories of writing, “ecology” became an increasingly popular lens through which to understand writing, as in ecological models of writing and student positioning (Cooper; Syverson), ecocomposition (Dobrin and Weisser), rhetorical ecologies (Edbauer), and postcomposition (Dobrin). By engaging with the complex writing and rhetorical ecologies of, for example, texts, images, hashtags, or memes discussing racially motivated killings or misogynist political discourse, or of responses both on the ground and over social media to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests or the Long Island University faculty lockout, community writing scholarship and praxis has the potential to help catalyze change in communities writ small and large.
With all of these theories and implications of the concepts of networks and ecologies in mind, we ask:
- How can we apply or use ecological theories of writing as distributed, hyper-networked, circulatory, and remixed in order to strengthen our work to catalyze change in our communities?
- How do concepts of rhetorical contagion (Seas) and theories of circulation of writing, images (Gries), and ideas impact the kinds of writing we have our students produce for public audiences?
- How do these ecological theories enhance our conception of community writing, and how do they call us to rethink, throw out, or revise our conception of what community writing, however defined, is and does in the world?
- How do our assignments and our pedagogy in general shift if we conceive of writing as system or ecology, rather than an individual product directed at an individual recipient?
- How might new materialist and post-human theories impact our understanding of community writing’s scope, meaning, and potential impacts?
- How do students come to understand the complexity of post-human, ecological writing theory?
- How can we work to expand our networks and ecologies to include the voices and writings of historically and chronically marginalized members of our communities?
- How might we define “community” or “writing” given 21st-century shifts in how communities coalesce and are maintained? How would these definitions inform our praxis?
- What projects have you completed or envisioned that take advantage of digital technologies aiding community development?
- “Network” and “ecology” are both terms borrowed from other disciplines. How can other disciplinary knowledge influence the work of community writing?
We welcome proposals that address any of these questions or that interpret our theme in any number of ways. Academics of all levels, community partners, public intellectuals, activists, and students involved with engaged pedagogy, research, activism, and social change are invited to submit a proposal for an individual paper, a panel of 3 or more presenters, a roundtable discussion, an interactive workshop, or a digital “poster” that will help us understand how writing functions socially to inform, empower, and transform, as well as how we can engage networks and ecologies to support community-based research, pedagogy, and activism.
For more information visit: http://www.communitywriting.org/cfp/
Disclaimer: The LLC Program does not sponsor this event. Please consult the conference's webpage for more information.
