Category: Uncategorized

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.

Important Dates

Proposal database opens: April 6, 2024

Proposal submission deadline: 9:00 a.m. ET on Friday, May 31, 2024
Proposal notifications: Early September 2024
Session schedule notifications: December 2024
Convention dates: April 9–12, 2025, Baltimore, MD

Questions and requests for coaches can be sent to CCCCevents@ncte.org.

“Computer Love”: Extended Play, B-sides, Remix, Collaboration, and Creativity

2025 CCCC Program Chair: Kofi J. Adisa

Where do music and writing intersect for you, dear reader?

If you are like me, music holds a significant place in your life. Whether it’s rock, R & B, country, classical, pop, rap, jazz, techno, funk, reggae, or Afrobeat, my love for music is as eclectic as my reading lists. In fact, reading and listening to music underpin many of my creative and intellectual endeavors. When I compose fiction, assignment prompts, or student evaluations, I often have some kind of music playing in the background. There’s something neurological happening as Miles Davis plays or as Dave Grohl sings. I’m listening and listening as my mind focuses on and ponders the tasks at hand.

I don’t think I’m alone.

One of my favorite songs is “Computer Love” by the funk band Zapp. The song is from the band’s 1985 album The New Zapp IV U. My late mom played it often when I was a teen. She especially liked how Roger Troutman used the “talk box,” which was a device hooked up to a keyboard or guitar that made his voice sound, well, computerized. The synthesization of his voice and the instrument did not end with him or with the talk box. Teddy Riley, an experimentalist musician in his own right (Corbett; Miller), also used it, and many artists—including Cher, T-Pain, Kanye West, and others from the late 90s and early 2000s—used Auto-Tune, an even more computerized processor to mask and alter their singing voices (Reynolds).

Though the oversaturation of Auto-Tune turned me off, those earlier Zapp songs never failed me. As I am writing this call for proposals, Zapp’s song “More Bounce to the Ounce,” off the band’s 1980 self-titled debut album, plays—computerization and all. In fact, the version I am listening to is an extended play, meaning the original 5:11 version has a longer instrumental that extends the song to 9:27. This extended mix is not new or original to dance music. B-sides of songs and albums have a long history, too much for the purposes of this writing (see Eaton; Elkhwad; Paphides; Wald) and give listeners another level or version of the music.

If we think about the nature of music, with its the syncopation, blending, and sampling of sounds, and if we extend our thinking to writing, with its incorporation of visuals, graphics, and other designs, we can remix and play with them and create a sociocultural practice within the genre (Church; Jordan and Miller; Tinsley). For example, remix writing assignments with an attention to music or integrate music into the creation stage of composing; have students create a visual and musical autoethnography or a rhetorical soundtrack for their previous or current semester; collaborate with other disciplines to develop a curriculum that samples, remixes, or bridges reading, thinking, writing, music, and technology. Countless possibilities exist in the remix.

Likewise, the B-side or 33⅓ offers another sociocultural practices. B-sides are the songs not on the original albums and are themselves cultural phenomena (Elkhwad). Kind of like Solange being the B-side to Beyoncé, the 33⅓ reveals something hidden, unique, unexpected, novel—the type of music where you wonder why it wasn’t on the original or as popular. This isn’t to say that the B-side is better or worse than the A-side of an album or, in my example, of the sisters. (Of course, both sisters have their A- and B-sides.) My point is that the B-side plays, experiments, and distinguishes itself from the usual, the norm. If we think of our classrooms as spaces to play the B-side of teaching and learning, for instance, what could that look like? In what ways can the incorporation of technology distinguish student writing or its labor from traditional approaches to research, self-expression, or argumentation? B-sides to writing pedagogy might look completely different than A-sides or traditional writing education.

Because this technological writing collaboration exists in movies, animations, and, of course, writing, our position as teacher-scholars, theorists, writers, and lifelong learners should be as cautious practitioners of this creative moment. Technologies such as generative AI (GAI) offer possibilities but also ethical dilemmas. Remixing or sampling GAI in writing assignments might create opportunities to expand digital and AI literacies for all students. Finding the B-side to Information literacy skills may sharpen students’ understanding and transfer across disciplines. Still, students will need to learn how to distinguish disparate voices coming together to make a new song (think about “That’s What Friends Are For”) from artificial ones (think “Heart on My Sleeve” [Shanfeld]). Student voices should not be supplanted by GAI or other technologies. Instead, their voices, our voices, should blend in a rhythm and style of collaboration, like with a talk box, or a computer love.

Area Clusters to Remix

The following question clusters are examples that might help you organize your proposals and create a program. The full list of area clusters is available here. To ensure fairness and equal representation, proposals are generally accepted in proportion to numbers received in the clusters. Selecting a particular cluster neither advantages nor disadvantages your proposal. Sometimes, a single proposal might fit into two or three areas, or a proposal might not fit well into any area. However, if you do not choose a category, your proposal will not be reviewed and therefore will not be accepted for the program. Please consider these categories as a heuristic and understand that in making a selection, you emphasize the primary focus of and the best reviewing audience for your proposal.

First-Year Writing as a Space to Remix

• How might first-year writing (FYW) curricula be remade so that music, technology use, and play occur organically?
• How can peer review become another kind of collaborative remix?
• What would sampling other disciplines do for FYW?

College Writing and Reading as a B-side to Literacy

• How do we flip the script on corequisite and developmental writing and reading to engage the creative side of literacy?
• How do we collaborate with a technology that assures student readers and writers?
• How would this B-side be measured? Can it be measured?
• Where do our K–12 partners fit into this extended play of music, culture, and collaboration?

The Extended Play of Inclusion and Access

• What spaces can open for LGBTQIA+ students to compose and create a holistic dataset that may be absent from current models?
• What possibilities remain hidden on the B-side of technology that can support neurotypical and neurodiverse students?
• Where can prior knowledge and learning for nontraditional students be another kind of extended play of access and opportunities?

Remixing Writing Programs 

• How can generative AI, music, and assessment work together to inform creativity in writing?
• How might writing program administrators leverage technologies to remix their institutional contexts?
• What would distinguish an undergraduate’s remix of a research project from a graduate student’s project?
• How might Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines be better served as an extended play, a remix, or a B-side collaboration with other curricula or disciplines?

A Mixtape of Language, Literacy, and Culture

• Can remixing, extending the play, and collaborating present new opportunities for World Englishes speakers, non-English speakers, or L2 readers and writers?
• How might cultural music be a source of collaboration, analysis, or literacy practice?
• Where do community and cultural literacy intersect with the remix?

The following range of topics is not exhaustive, and I hope it inspires a kind of play between composition, remix, collaboration, and creativity:

• Autoethnographic Playlist: Historical, Cultural, and Political Meaning of the Personal Soundtrack
• The Rhetorical Nature of Vinyl, Turntables, Sound, and the Typewriter
• Reading with Machines: How Neurodiverse Students Learn with AI Assistant Tools
• Translating Words, Images, and Sound
• Fly Gods, Fly Girls, and African American Vernacular English in the Age of AI
• Remix, Collaborate Black Womanism/Feminism Technology, Vernacular
• For the Love of Reading, Writing, and Machine Learning
• Displacing Authentic Voices and the Subjectivity of Algorithms
• The Composition of House, Techno, Afrobeat, and the Computer: Creating New Ways of Feeling and Thinking about the Language of Music
• Literacies Needed: Posthuman, AI, and Digital Discourses
• Queer the Turntables: Sexuality, Identity, and Extended Play, Remix, and Creativity
• Turn It Up: Language Acquisition, MTV, and Cassette Tapes

General Information about Proposals

Members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and others who are interested in the goals and activities of CCCC, are invited to submit proposals for sessions, posters, and workshops at the 2025 CCCC Annual Convention. Nonmembers are welcome to submit proposals but are urged to join the organization. CCCC is a nonprofit organization and cannot reimburse program participants for travel or hotel expenses.

Competition for a place on the program remains intense. Because of limited space availability, many good proposals will be left unaccepted. The practice of peer-reviewing proposals without names attached will continue, as will the practice of using the number of proposals received in each area cluster to determine the percentage of the program devoted to that specific area. Reviewers with special expertise in each area will advise the program chair on proposal acceptance.

Proposals must be submitted by 9 a.m. ET, Friday, May 31, 2024.

Cool Baltimore Attractions

Baltimore is home to a variety of attractions, notably the Inner Harbor and the National Aquarium. One of the other must-sees is the Sound Garden, located at 1616 Thames Street; this independent record store sells, buys, and houses “an immense and eclectic selection of music, movies, and real cool stuff,” according to its website. The 6000-plus-square-foot warehouse has vinyl, CDs, stickers, books, and so much more. Voted In Rolling Stone as the second-best record store in the US, it might be one of the best spots to find rare or vintage albums in the country.

The Book Escape is another attraction, especially for those looking for rare or vintage books. Located at 925 South Charles Street, the bookstore holds more than forty thousand titles, and shipping within the US is free.

B-side References

Church, Scott Haden. Introduction. Turntables and Tropes: A Rhetoric of Remix, by Church, Michigan State UP, 2022, pp. 1–14.

Corbett, John. Microgroove: Forays into Other Music. Duke UP, 2015.

Eaton, George. “Ming Your B-side.” New Statesman, 30 Jan. 2012.

Elkhwad, Halla. “The Function of the B-side in Modern Music Production: How a Relic of the Physical Music Format Era Became a Site of Experimentation.” 34th Street Magazine, 5 Oct. 2022, https://www.34st.com/article/2022/10/b-sides-sufjan-stevens-cd-tame-impala-gorillaz-beach-house-remix.

Jordan, Ken, and Paul D. Miller. “Freeze Frame: Audio, Aesthetics, Sampling, and Contemporary Multimedia.” In Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, edited by Paul D. Miller, pp. 97–108. MIT Press, 2008.

Miller, Paul D., editor. Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. MIT Press, 2008.

Paphides, Pete. “An Ode to the Joy and Madness of the B-side.” Vinyl Factory, 17 May 2017, https://thevinylfactory.com/features/an-ode-to-the-joy-and-madness-of-the-b-side/.

Reynolds, Simon. “How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music.” Pitchfork, 17 Sept. 2018, https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-auto-tune-revolutionized-the-sound-of-popular-music/.

Shanfeld, Ethan. “Ghostwriter’s ‘Heart on My Sleeve,’ the AI-Generated Song Mimicking Drake and the Weeknd, Submitted for Grammys.” Variety, 26 Sept. 2023, https://variety.com/2023/music/news/ai-generated-drake-the-weeknd-song-submitted-for-grammys-1235714805/.

Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism. U of Texas P, 2018.

Wald, Gayle. “‘Have a Little Talk’: Listening to the B-side of History.” Popular Music, vol. 24, no. 3, 2005, pp. 323–37. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143005000541.

Zapp. “Computer Love.” The New Zapp IV U, track 2, Spotify app, Warner Records, 1985.

—. “More Bounce to the Ounce.” Zapp, track 1, Spotify app, Warner Records, 1980.

Important Dates

Proposal database opens: April 6, 2024

Proposal submission deadline: 9:00 a.m. ET on Friday, May 31, 2024
Proposal notifications: Early September 2024
Session schedule notifications: December 2024
Convention dates: April 9–12, 2025, Baltimore, MD

Questions and requests for coaches can be sent to CCCCevents@ncte.org.

The following materials are provided for attendees of the 2024 CCCC Annual Business Meeting on Friday, April 5, 2024, 4:45–6:00 p.m. PT.

• Rules and Procedures—See Page 217–219 of the Convention Program

• 2024 CCCC Annual Business Meeting Agenda

• 2024 Report from the Executive Secretary-Treasurer

• 2024 CCCC Resolutions

For attendees joining online:

Anyone wishing to speak, to make a motion, second a motion, or propose an amendment, please use the raise hand feature in Zoom. After being recognized by the CCCC Chair, unmute your microphone and verbally state your name and the state in which you reside for identification in the minutes. When voting online, we will also use the raise hand feature. Please use the raise hand feature rather than the Zoom chat.

Committee Members

Cindy Tekobbe, Chair
Christina Cedillo
Jeremy Carnes
Alanna Frost
David Grant
Lisa King
Lydia Wilkes

Committee Charges

The Working Group for Decolonizing Writing, Rhetoric, and Communication Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Organizational Culture will dedicate itself to studying Indigenous world views, lifeways, rhetorical traditions, and teaching and learning practices. The Group will develop resources and provide educational opportunities for CCCC’s members invested in and committed to the work of decolonization in their teaching and scholarly work and within CCCC. With an inclusive membership – open to peoples of all identities and histories – this Group will endeavor to build and sustain deep, affiliative, reciprocal relationships within its membership and with all the CCCC members it serves. The Group will focus on developing outreach and education through such forms as webinars, podcast lectures, panel presentations, publications, and teaching circles. Finally, the Group will document its work, ensuring the preservation of institutional memory regarding its labour and the longevity of its impact.

TERM: Three years, after which the group may apply for standing group status (Article 6, Section 1E, CCCC Constitution)

Committee Members

Adrienne Jones Daly, Co-chair
Ashanka Kumari, Co-chair
Cedric D. Burrows
Tom Do
Suban Nur Cooley
Nora K. Rivera

Committee Charge

Responsibilities and Duties

• To select one AEIC member to serve on the EC according to procedures articulated in the Committee’s bylaws
• To name one AEIC member to serve in the annual Stage 2 Convention Proposal Review Group who
  • Makes recommendations on ways to increase equity throughout the process;
  • Makes recommendations on ways to increase diversity within the pool of presenters, chairs, and discussants.
• To submit, by the Nomination deadline, a minimum of two nominees from historically marginalized groups to the Nominating Committee for the at-large EC positions
• To identify options and resources to resolve bias incidents, including harassment, discrimination, or any violation of the CCCC Code of Ethics or standards of conduct
• To present an annual report to the Executive Committee that
  • Recommends annual program offerings that are inclusive of all members’ areas of research and teaching
  • Recommends strategies for supporting engagement of members from underrepresented groups
  • Recommends amendments to the organizational and Convention budgets that outline ways to more equitably distribute organizational resources

Membership

• Nine members, elected from the ballot assembled by the Nominating Committee
• Two co-chairs, elected from the nine members of the committee

Terms of Office

• The terms of all chairs and members will commence thirty days after the NCTE Annual Convention next following the election, except that chairs appointed to fill a vacancy (Article IX, Sections 3 and 4) will take office upon their acceptance.
• All chairs and members will serve for a two-year term.
• Chairs cannot be appointed for consecutive terms. Members can serve no more than two consecutive terms.

Meetings

• The AEIC will meet in conjunction with annual program planning, Convention meetings, and elections. Other meetings may be called at the request of the co-chairs.
• Five members of the AEIC will constitute a quorum.

In September 2023, the CCCC Officers announced that CCCC 2024 will be a reimagining of the Convention as we know it through what they referred to as a distributed, semi-synchronous hybrid model for CCCC 2024. In an effort to increase access and opportunity for CCCC members to participate in the Annual Convention and enjoy the professional rewards associated with presentation and publication in CCCC venues, we are calling for those intending to submit papers to be considered for the CCCC 2024 Convention Companion Publication to complete this form by the extended deadline of January 5, 2024. Following the Intent to Submit form’s completion, paper submissions are due by January 29, 2024. Papers may be up to 2,000 words in length (the equivalent of six pages, similar to that of a short roundtable paper).

The highest priority will be placed on publishing the papers of CCCC members whose proposals were accepted for presentation at the 2024 CCCC Annual Convention but who are unable to attend for one or a number of the following reasons:

• Health (disability, physical or mental illness, or caregiving responsibilities)
• Religious observances (Ramadan or other religious accommodations)
• Funding (graduate students, adjunct faculty, and international scholars)
• Employment precarity (graduate students, adjunct faculty and lecturers, those experiencing austerity cuts at their institutions)

The CCCC 2024 Convention Companion Publication will be made available for free to all CCCC members on the new NCTE publications platform, with print-on-demand copies of the volume available for purchase, expected in June 2024.

Who’s invited to submit a proposal?

We welcome proposal submissions from the following groups:

A. Those whose CCCC 2024 proposal was accepted, yet they are unable to attend the convention in person due to extenuating circumstances (e.g., health-related issues including immunocompromised individuals, need-based issues including funding inaccessibility and cost barriers, religious commitments, etc.).

B. Those who did not submit a CCCC 2024 proposal as a result of concerns related to being immunocompromised, funding inaccessibility or cost barriers, or having religious commitments that would make attendance difficult.

Again, please note that preference will be given to those who are unable to present at the 2024 CCCC Annual Convention because of accessibility, health related issues, or religious commitments.

How to submit

1. Complete the Intent to Submit form by the extended deadline of January 5, 2024. Submitters will be notified when the platform to submit papers is open for submissions. Note: If you did not submit a CCCC 2024 proposal as noted in item B under “Who’s invited to submit a proposal?” above, you will be asked to provide a brief abstract for your paper on the Intent to Submit form.
2. Submit your paper (no more than 2,000 words in length including any notes and references) by January 29, 2024. Additionally, papers should:
   • be in Times New Roman, 12-point font;
   • be double-spaced; and
   • saved as an MS Word file.

Please email cccc@ncte.org with questions.

Timeline

November, 2023
CFP and intent to submit form posted

Extended Deadline: January 5, 2024
Intent to submit form due

January 29, 2024
Papers due

January–February, 2024
Papers reviewed by Editorial Management Team: Antonio Byrd, Romeo Garcia, Jamila Kareem, Amy Lueck, Ligia Mihut, Timothy Oleksiak, Zhaozhe Wang, and Kim Wieser

February 26, 2024
Decisions sent

March–April, 2024
Editing and review of page proofs

June 2024
Proceedings published

April 2023

CCCC has a long history of publishing statements on social and political issues related to the teaching of writing and rhetoric. The focus of these statements has often but not exclusively been US-centric. The organization has been silent on too many international issues of injustices; examples include the earthquake response in Haiti and Turkey, war in Syria and Afghanistan, organized terrorism in Nigeria, incarceration of Uyghurs in China, and the internal wars of many other nations. CCCC has also been silent on the US’s indifference toward issues that destroy the lives of international citizens such as the allowance of human trafficking and immigration policies that continue to break families apart and deny refugees safety in American cities. Given Vladimir Putin’s continued commitment to inflicting war upon Ukraine and its citizens, this changes.

CCCC stands in solidarity with our colleagues and students in Ukraine and those displaced from Ukraine for their safety. We also stand in solidarity with our Russian colleagues and students who oppose the war crimes inflicted on Ukrainian citizens and visitors. At the time of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees reported that 83 percent of young adults between 18 and 24 in Ukraine were enrolled in higher education. Today, many universities and academic institutions have been either destroyed, shut down, or transformed into temporary housing and resource centers. Access and opportunities related to higher education in Ukraine remain threatened. The bombing of Karazin University, home to a rare collection of books central to Ukrainian history, serves as evidence of the direct threats made by Russia on behalf of Vladimir Putin to not only erode education but destroy the presence and preservation of Ukrainian culture.

As scholars and teachers of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, we are keenly aware of the power of language through textual and other means both to disseminate harmful social and political ideologies as well as challenge such ideologies. As Russia wages war against Ukraine via military violence and pillage in Ukraine, the Russian government, through state-sponsored and state-censored media networks, wages a war of propaganda in Russia to justify its violent invasion of Ukraine and vilify Ukrainian people. We are deeply troubled by the dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at Ukrainian people, the usurpation of historical trauma in Vladimir Putin’s reframing of a military invasion as an attempt to “denazify” Ukraine, and propagandistic efforts to erase both the unique history and culture of Ukrainian people and the shared history and humanity among Ukrainian and Russian people. At the same time, we are also cognizant of the historicity of anti-Russia sentiment and propaganda in the United States. While we expressly condemn the violence and censorship perpetrated by the Russian government, we recognize and are cautious of the means by which condemnations by US-based media outlets, politicians, and individuals may themselves slip into or recycle historically situated tropes, and we resist the ethnocentric imperative to make sense of the war using only US frameworks. We can hold these truths simultaneously.

We denounce the targeted attacks on Ukrainian schools, universities, and libraries. These bombing and shelling assaults continue to devastate the educational progress, mental health, and social development of Ukrainian children and adolescents and ravage the well-being of educators across the region. We acknowledge and decry the Russian military assault on museums and cultural-historical preservation sites, an assault meant to eradicate Ukrainian history and culture. We stand in solidarity with the librarians, curators, archivists, researchers, and scholars who oppose this warfare and continue their vital work in the face of tactical terror. We stand with organizations, such as the American Historical Association, who refute the Russian president’s claims of historical precedence for military campaigns against Ukraine. Conscious of the intersectional oppression facing international students from Africa in Ukraine, we additionally detest the openly racist treatment of Black African students on the Ukrainian/Polish border evacuating the war-torn country in the same ways their white European classmates and colleagues were permitted to do. These racist actions forced Black Africans escaping Ukraine for their safety to seek alternatives to evacuation that most white Europeans did not face, such as walking for hours to find border authorities that would permit their evacuation only to be turned back several times or receiving rejection from accessing transportation by train out of the country. We stand in support of and seek requests for assistance from our members and their colleagues working in the region.

We affirm those working to support the safety and ensure the academic freedom of our fellow Ukrainian students and scholars as well as Russian students and scholars actively resisting the legitimacy of this war. We recognize the work of the International Institution of Education, which, in the wake of this ongoing violence, created the IIE Emergency Student Fund for Ukraine, ensuring the financial safety for Ukrainian students cut off from critical resources to students currently studying in the US. We encourage continued support of the IIE Scholar Rescue Fund offering assistance through funds and fellowships for threatened and displaced scholars in Ukraine and Russia. These efforts—along with countless others not listed here—underscore the necessity to ensure academic freedom and access to education in war-inflicted areas, including Ukraine. We view the tactics to silence scholarly voices and prohibit educational access as tools of warfare meant to annihilate cultural knowledge and histories. As such, we call upon our members who teach about the importance of cultural knowledge and its connections to rhetoric and literacy to commit to the following actions:

• demand/petition our institutions to provide financial, mental health, and food security support to Ukrainian students and faculty both in the country and displaced from their homes;
• hold book drives and online courses;
• teach media literacy on the war and propaganda;
• hire displaced and refugee Ukrainian and Russian faculty of composition studies and other fields;
• enact letter campaigns to our representatives; and
• sponsor events and lectures that support the anti-war work of Ukrainian and other scholars in the region.

We encourage those whose access to education has been disrupted by conflict and combat to continue educational progress by supporting organizations working to ensure educational access in Ukraine. The UN Refugee Agency is one organization that offers specific actions related to educational access in Ukraine.

While the actions outlined above largely address the threats to access to higher education in Ukraine, we would be remiss not to mention the multitude of coordinated attacks on the innocent. These threats are actions aimed to demoralize Ukraine’s future. We denounce strikes on medical and mental healthcare facilities throughout Ukraine. The missile strikes and other attacks on children’s hospitals, cancer centers, ambulances, healthcare workers, and patients have impeded the capabilities of these facilities and services to care for critically and fatally wounded individuals. We recognize that unjustified attacks on the children and other innocent Ukrainians are strategic tactics by the Russians to erode hope for a free Ukraine. We affirm the need for democracies and institutions committed to academic freedom to continue providing resources and refuge as the fight for Ukraine continues.

Acknowledgments

This statement was generously drafted by the following 2023 CCCC Executive Committee members:

Mara Lee Grayson
Jamila Kareem
Maria Novotny

Listen to introductions from CCCC Executive Committee members and why they have chosen to serve CCCC in this role!

Antonio Byrd, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Chen Chen, Utah State University, Logan

Darin Jensen, Des Moines Community College, IA (TETYC Editor)

Maria Novotny, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Timothy Oleksiak, University of Massachusetts Boston

Ruth Osorio, Old Dominion University, VA

Mudiwa Pettus, Medgar Evers College, New York City

Mya Poe, Northeastern University, Boston, MA

Zhaozhe Wang, University of Toronto, Canada (Graduate Student Representative)

Let us start by expressing our gratitude to you for agreeing to review a proposal or manuscript for the Studies in Writing & Rhetoric series. Reviews and reviewers like you are a vital part of SWR’s mission to support “a broad range of projects that accurately represent the diverse identities of teachers, learners, administrators, and researchers involved in writing, rhetoric, and literate activity, addressing the cultural, social, political, and material realities that define their work.”

This page aims to provide guidance and resources such that the editorial and reviewing practices of the series not only help us identify works that maintain the quality and integrity of the series but also support the series’ commitment to identifying, resisting, and intervening in the “inequities and forces of oppression that shape the teaching of writing, rhetoric and literacy.” The CCCC Statement on Editorial Ethics, the “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors” (2021), and the article “Reviewer as Activist: Understanding Academic Review through Conocimiento” each forward a more justice-oriented approach to reviewing, and we encourage you to consult them at any point during the reviewing process.

We would like to flag a few key points from these documents. In our editorial work involving reviewers and editors, we are committed to ethically supporting authors in the review process. This means educating ourselves about the harms that can be caused through scholarly review practices (here, we might point to many of the scenarios and examples offered in the “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices” heuristic) and taking care to avoid perpetuating those harms in the course of our reviewing and responding to authors’ proposals and manuscripts.

Below are the questions we ask that you center in your reviewer response to proposals and/or manuscripts. You may respond to these questions one by one or compose a 1-2-page letter that engages these questions holistically. In your letter, without de-anonymizing yourself, we encourage you to help authors understand what kind of reader you are; this helps us and authors understand how to situate your feedback and engage it. Please use gender-neutral terms when referring to author(s), and craft your letter and comments to the author(s) in a way that supports them in realizing their goals for the project even if you are not encouraging SWR to move forward with it.

● What do you see as the major contribution of this proposal/project?
● What audiences do you see as centered in the project? In what ways does the project respond to or engage these audiences?
● How does the project (propose to) extend, intervene in, relate to, or expand on current conversations specific to the field? In other words, how does this research explore the teaching, learning, and practice of writing, rhetoric, and literacy in new and important ways?
● Is the material structurally coherent; that is, does it flow in a way that makes sense to you as a reader?
● Are there areas you would expand, condense, add, or delete altogether? Why or why not?
● Are the methods used clear, well-documented, and ethical?
● Are the data collection and analysis sound?
● Are the analysis and/or results presented in an accessible way supported by the data and/or analysis?
● How do you understand the author’s citational practice? Does the citational practice of the proposal/manuscript reflect an awareness of the place of citation within a larger set of sustained habits and assumptions around labor erasure, canon formation, and cultural impact?
● If you know of existing or forthcoming titles in the area this book covers, please make comparisons to this work.

A crucial element of the reviewing process and ensuring that authors’ work moves through the process in a timely fashion is the submission of reviews within the time frame requested. Please submit your review by the requested due date through the Editorial Manager site (log in as a Reviewer). Of course we understand that sometimes timelines need to be shifted; please reach out at any time if you need to negotiate a different timeline or have questions about the review or the review process.

Warmly,
Stephanie Kerschbaum, SWR editor
kersch@uw.edu

Taiko Aoki-Marcial, SWR associate editor
taikoa@uw.edu

September 7, 2023

We, the officers of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), write this statement to express our deep concern about the proposed elimination of 32 programs and retrenchment of faculty across West Virginia University, including in English, Communication Studies, and World Languages and Literatures. As the officers of the largest professional organization of teachers and scholars of writing, rhetoric, and composition studies in the world, we are alarmed at how these proposed cuts resemble similar austerity measures that too often disproportionately impact the most vulnerable to the benefit of the ultra-wealthy. The pattern that emerges involves the weakening of tenure protections alongside the language of “financial exigence” and “efficiencies” and “cost savings” that do not affect the highest-paid employees at the institution. Often, these decisions are made in partnership with external for-profit consulting companies and without regard for principles of shared governance.

Academic austerity is not new. These measures have been impacting higher education—especially two-year colleges and regional colleges and universities—for some time now. What’s more, academic austerity has had disproportionate effects on members of our profession, who are frequent targets of labor abuses such as “intensified workloads and the casualization of labor (exploited adjunct labor)” (Kynard 134) in contingent and precarious positions that are stripped of resources (Kalish et al.). Not surprisingly, composition and rhetoric has had a long history of scholarship analyzing and resisting labor exploitation in higher education (Bousquet; Cox et al.; Kahn et al.; Kynard; Schell and Stock; Welch and Scott). In following this tradition, we call for a recommitment to shared governance, including meaningful faculty involvement and the consultation of scholars in the humanities before making decisions to eliminate academic programs. Furthermore, we stand for fair treatment and equitable working conditions for faculty, graduate instructors, and staff alike.

Given our mission to support “the agency, power, and potential of diverse communicators inside and outside of postsecondary classrooms”; “diverse language practices”; and “ethical scholarship and communication,” we find it imperative to advocate against measures that undermine the core values pivotal to promoting equity-oriented education and scholarly engagement. CCCC urges that WVU leadership follow AAUP guidelines on shared governance and consult widely with their on-campus experts before proceeding with either proposed or alternative plans for cost-saving predicated on efficiency-based models that neither reflect knowledge and best practice in affected disciplines nor serve the needs and interests of the University’s constituents.

— The Officers of the Conference on College Composition and Communication

Further Readings

CCCC Statement on Working Conditions for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty

CCCC Principles for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing, Principle 11

Cole, Kirsti, et al. A Faculty Guidebook for Effective Shared Governance and Service in Higher Education. Routledge, 2023.

AAUP Shared Governance

AAUP Financial Crisis FAQs

References

Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York UP, 2008.

Cox, Anicca, et al. “The Indianapolis Resolution: Responding to Twenty-First-Century Exigencies/Political Economies of Composition Labor.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 68, no. 1, 2016, pp. 38–67.

Kahn, Seth, et al. Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity: Labor and Action in English Composition. WAC Clearinghouse / UP of Colorado, 2017.

Kalish, Katie, et al. “Inequitable Austerity: Pedagogies of Resilience and Resistance in Composition.” Pedagogy, vol. 19, no. 2, 2019, pp. 261–81.

Kynard, Carmen. Fakers and Takers: Disrespect, Crisis, and Inherited Whiteness in Rhetoric-Composition Studies. Composition Studies, vol. 50, no. 3, 2022, pp. 131–36.

Schell, Eileen E., and Patricia Lambert Stock, editors. Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education. National Council of Teachers of English, 2001.

Strickland, Donna. The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies. Southern Illinois UP, 2011.

Welch, Nancy, and Tony Scott, editors. Composition in the Age of Austerity. UP of Colorado, 2016.