The following resolutions were passed at the CCCC Annual Business Meeting held on Friday, April 5, in Spokane, WA.
Resolution 1
Whereas Jennifer Sano-Franchini gathered us to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the first CCCC Convention, which has grown significantly to represent our field’s vast diversity in terms of cultural identities, interests, subfields, approaches, and intersections;
Whereas Jennifer Sano-Franchini called us to consider “Writing Abundance” as a critical lens for refusing, rejecting, and interrogating capitalist logics and rhetorics of scarcity, surplus, and competition, as well as for imagining more just futures in our discipline, in our communities, and in the world;
Whereas Jennifer Sano-Franchini invited us to gather in Spokane, Washington, with an understanding of the region’s very own local “writing abundance,” given the Spokane Tribe’s history of Indigenous inhabitance, relocation, survivance, and perseverance, and the presence of Black, Asian, and Latinx communities in the area, all of whose communal stories subvert a monolithic whitestream narrative;
Whereas Jennifer Sano-Franchini’s scholarly interventions helped shape our discipline’s approaches to vital issues regarding antiracism, pedagogy, feminist histories, and civic literacies in such fields as digital rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, technical and professional communication, user experience, multimodality, and writing program administration; and
Whereas Jennifer Sano-Franchini has demonstrated a consistent commitment to the discipline through leadership and service not only in CCCC but also in multiple professional organizations, by serving on boards and participating in other forms of national service, and coauthoring statements on fair professional practices despite the inequitable temporal burdens such obligations place on scholars who are Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, especially women;
BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication extends our many, many thanks to Jennifer Sano-Franchini for her dedication to our profession, our organization, and our discipline.
Resolution 2
Whereas Bradley Bleck and members of the Local Arrangements Committee have made significant contributions to support new attendees and returnees and to enhance the Convention experience;
Whereas Bradley Bleck and members of the Local Arrangements Committee created a comprehensive guide in the form of an inviting website that highlighted the various sections in the Spokane area and its local history; and
Whereas they worked diligently to provide attendees with detailed information about the city’s local cuisines and area bookstores as well as rich culture of visual and performing arts and outdoor recreations, and to generally welcome attendees from across the United States and around the world;
BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication expresses our deepest appreciation to Bradley Bleck and members of the Local Arrangements Committee by applauding their energy and efforts.
Resolution 3
Whereas Patty Wilde and Melissa Nicolas coordinated development of the Accessibility Guide for the 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Convention, deepening the field’s commitment to a culture of access at all levels;
Whereas Patty Wilde and Melissa Nicolas, together with their Washington State University students (Sara Brock, Elizabeth Forsythe, Brigette Hinnant, Nazua Idris, Hayden Mochamad, Jessie Padilla, Prakash Paudel, Justine Trinh, and Genoveva Vega-Gastelum), drew on the wisdom of predecessors and experts in the field to create a guide that aims to simultaneously sponsor accessibility literacy for all participants and render the conference experience meaningfully accessible to attendees across differences;
Whereas they worked diligently to provide attendees with detailed accessibility information, including descriptions of conference spaces for visual and auditory access, access for people with mobility impairments, access for parents and lactation rooms, access for neurodivergent attendees and others who benefit from quiet spaces, access information for nonbinary and gender-nonconforming attendees; and crucial information on how to collectively co-create a loving culture of access; and
Whereas they fostered development and organized volunteer staffing of an Access Hub that, in line with best practices highlighted by disability studies scholars in the field, invited both those with identified access needs and those without into communal thinking and practice of access as a mode of loving commitment to shared possibility;
BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication expresses our deep gratitude to Patty Wilde and Melissa Nicolas, and to all who worked with them on growing and enacting a culture of access that we hope will continue to flower in conferences to come.
Resolution 4
Whereas the accumulating and interconnected crises, driven by rapid and deleterious changes in world affairs, amount to a polycrisis—a multi-headed hydra of harm and loss and damage rippling through every feature of our field’s shared work—such that the whole of polycrisis feels overwhelming and exceeds the particularity of our many sites of engagement;
Whereas we, as scholars of rhetoric, composition, writing studies, and technical communication, know that language and rhetoric contribute significantly to the dehumanization of individuals and groups and are weaponized toward such ends and toward obscuring the co-constitutive force of multiple harms;
Whereas it is everyone’s responsibility to educate themselves about the ways in which specific languages of dehumanization impact marginalized individuals and communities in a multitude of tangible and intangible ways that are tied to historical and contemporary structures, narratives, and legacies of oppression;
Whereas world affairs—from the climate crisis to the radical reorganization of work and literacy via developments in automation to military and human rights catastrophes on a staggering scale—strain the existing infrastructures of our shared world to the breaking point and intensify these dehumanizing rhetorics and social forces; and
Whereas our existing means of crisis management are inadequate to address the current polycrisis;
BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication enjoins attendees and organizational leadership at this and future conferences to pursue with the most heartful vigor frank and open discourse about the historicity, context, and unfolding harms associated with the polycrisis and to determine specific approaches to address these harms as they manifest in our organization and at our Annual Convention.
Resolution 5
Whereas numerous distinct but interrelated access challenges emerged at this year’s Convention that disproportionately impacted disabled and racialized members;
Whereas no virtual option was provided to ensure participation from disabled and other historically marginalized members unable to attend in person due to structural and Convention-specific conditions of inequality, including but not limited to funding disparities, geographic distance, passport and visa barriers, and scheduling incompatibilities;
Whereas the locations of the convention center and hotels posed multiple challenges of access, navigability, and safety for many members;
Whereas conditions of white supremacy, including the policing of racialized attendees’ movement through conference spaces, constitute a profound infringement of attendees’ right to equal access and demand timely institutional redress;
Whereas such conditions call for development of a culture of collective responsibility for immediate intervention as well as institutional remedies;
BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the organization shall develop clear plans to concretely address these distinct but related challenges of access and equity in advance of future conferences and communicate these steps transparently to members.
