September 11, 2017
Dear CCCC Friends and Colleagues,
Thank you for your patience as we have discussed the 2018 CCCC Convention. As an organization, we are deeply committed to creating conditions where we can learn from and support each other. In these troubling times, we feel especially passionate about supporting our most vulnerable members—members of color, undocumented members, LGBTQ members, members who are adjunct faculty, and others. We recognize that as an organization, we must act—and we will continue to act—on these commitments.
The Executive Committee has deliberated intensely about CCCC 2018. We held four discussions—three conversations via Zoom video conferencing and an extended online meeting—about the convention, the NAACP’s travel advisory, and the issues that we outlined in the update from CCCC on Kansas City. As we indicated in that statement, these discussions were intensive and challenging. They focused on this Convention, but also on CCCC as an organization and the larger issues and fissures that we are immediately starting to address.
Ultimately, the EC voted to hold the 2018 CCCC Convention in Kansas City and to create a task force to prioritize and incorporate recommendations from the Joint Caucus Statement and additional suggestions from members. In making a decision about the Convention, we have chosen to go to Kansas City and use our commitment to justice, our opposition to inequity and injustice, our passion, and our financial resources to make our presence and those commitments known.
This will not be “conferencing as usual.” We will transform the Convention beginning immediately, with the creation of the task force, and we will devote considerable financial resources from the CCCC Contingency Fund to create a safe, welcoming, and committed space where we can engage together in the work of languaging and transforming. As we work to enact recommendations for CCCC 2018, our priorities will be safety and access for members and supporting the local community. Additionally, we plan to invest in sustainable changes to the Convention that are long overdue. We hope that those who do attend will come, not only to present their research and network with colleagues, but also to lend their voices and abilities to engage in civic action with communities in our host city.
The task force that will implement recommendations from the Joint Caucus Statement and other members will be led by Convention Chair Asao B. Inoue. It will work closely with the Kansas City NAACP, the Convention’s local site committee, and, if possible, the office of Kansas City mayor Sly James and other local Kansas City organizations dedicated to equity and justice.
Asao will provide frequent updates on the task force’s work and what you can expect at the Convention in Kansas City on his blog. As an early update, we can tell you that the convention space is immediately adjacent to the main hotel. Since we are contractually renting the convention center, we can work to make that space safe and comfortable for attendees. We also will work with the local committee to create a list of welcoming restaurants and businesses around the convention site. Finally, you can expect to receive notifications about presentations, workshops, and roundtables within the next four to five weeks (our target is by Oct. 16).
We thank everyone for their compassion and voices, their help and words. We realize that each one of us is trying to do what is right and most helpful, and that none of us have a perfect view of any situation. We feel confident that CCCC will move forward stronger, more committed to our core mission, and more able to meet tomorrow’s challenges.
The CCCC Executive Committee
(Note: this is a large PDF file and may take several minutes to open)
Steven Fraiberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. His research focuses on multilingual literacy practices in classrooms, communities, and workplaces. He has published in CCC, Kairos, Computers and Composition, Israel Studies Review, and Technical Communication Quarterly. His forthcoming book (coauthored with Xiaoye You and Xiqiao Wang) published by Utah State University Press is titled Inventing the World Grant University: Chinese International Students’ Mobilities, Literacies, and Identities.
Kathleen Blake Yancey is Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. She has served in several elected leadership positions: as president of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE); chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC); president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA); and president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA). Immediate past editor of College Composition and Communication, she co-founded the journal Assessing Writing and coedited it for seven years: she also co-founded and co-directs the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research; and she is the lead investigator for the Transfer of Transfer Project, a cross-institutional research study of the efficacy of the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) writing curriculum.
Stephen J. McElroy is director of the Reading-Writing Center and Digital Studio at Florida State University. He has pursued his broad interest in visual rhetoric, multimodal design, and digital composing—in terms of both theory and practice as well as both past and present—recently in the Computers and Composition article “Assemblage by Design: The Postcards of Curt Teich & Company,” which examines the design and production of picture postcards in the early twentieth century, focusing specifically on cards produced by Teich & Company and depicting scenes of Key West, Florida. Examining microhistories of design and production through the lens of assemblage, he argues, helps us better attend to and better theorize our current composing practices.
