Computers and Writing Conference Call for Papers 2023

Context

The work of compositionists already exists in a “hybrid” space: at the intersection of humanities and social sciences, engaged directly in classrooms but also in learning spaces beyond, blending traditional textual practices with multiple media. As we strive towards social and linguistic justice in our field, we need to explode assumptions about what kinds of practices “belong,” and where a hybridized approach opens up greater possibilities for inclusion in higher education.

While these ideas have always been embedded in our field, this is a watershed moment. Recent years have seen many students and instructors alike adopting—and adapting to—a wide array of unfamiliar technologies and practices, with varying degrees of confidence and success. Further, new and distributed practices of collaborating, working, and learning emerged across academic and society at large. As we emerge from those experiences, we have an opportunity to consider how we blend the new with the old, how we use technologies to form hybrid literacy practices that span boundaries and blur modalities. Even more importantly, we can take this moment to ask “To what end?” What are our ultimate goals as a field, and how do those goals shape our pedagogies, our designs, our research questions, and our methods of inquiry?

This theme is meant to allow for overlapping—or even “hybrid”—conversations within and among attendees who bring different perspectives on what it means to create “hybrid” environments for writing and learning. The conference itself will, in fact, be a hybrid experience, intentionally designed to bridge online and on-site experiences. In engaging with a hybridized experience ourselves, we’ll explore an expansive range of questions about the goals and purposes of hybridity. Who does hybridity benefit? And what do we strive to accomplish by engaging in explicitly hybrid ways both within and beyond the classroom?

The conference will be held June 22 through 25, 2023 hosted by the University of California, Davis.

Questions, Themes, Issues

Our call for proposals asks participants to consider hybrid practices through the lenses of engagement and equity. Through the lens of engagement, we might view hybrid practices of learning, participation, play, and citizenship, while the lens of equity helps us attend to questions of access, diversity, inclusiveness, and power. The resulting conference conversation will address the following questions:

• How does our work make visible, make space for, welcome, and advance the learning and engagement of under-served and under-represented groups?
• How are we challenging assumptions behind normative composing practices, not just in terms of how novel practices are configured or hybridized, but in terms of their actors and audiences?
• How does play fit into the concepts of hybridity and engagement? What roles do gaming, social media, or news platforms (e.g., Discord, Roll20, WhatsApp, TikTok, Reddit, and others) have to play as we develop connections across physical and digital spaces?
• What are the current challenges of doing this work (technological, pedagogical, institutional, political, etc), and how can hybridity function as a means to further our equity and engagement ends?
• How do we practice hybrid instructional modalities intentionally to advance pedagogy that promotes student access and equity?
• How does disability justice and disability advocacy intersect with a future of hybrid teaching and learning?
• How do alternative approaches to assessment, such as upgrading and variations on contract grading, hybridize mechanisms for giving students feedback on their writing? How do these approaches support or conflict with the work of WPAs and other writing program leaders?
• How does the notion of “hybridity” complicate our understanding of classroom presence and instructional modality? To what extent does the notion of hybridity obfuscate, rather than clarify, the work we do to bridge on-campus and online interactions between and among our students?
• How do multilingual and translanguaging practices hybridize our conceptions of compositional practice? How do we create inclusive spaces for language diversity in digital composition work?

Proposals to present will be reviewed both by invited peer reviewers from the Computers and Writing community as well as an internal review team.

Dates

• Proposal Submission Deadline: November 21, 2022
  • If you would like advance coaching on your proposal, please submit your draft to CandWconference@gmail.com by October 14, 2022.
• Acceptance Notifications: January 23, 2023
• Early Registration Deadline: April 3, 2023

Submit Your Proposal