2016 Watson Conference Call for Papers

2016 Watson Conference Call for Papers

Call for Papers: “Mobility Work in Composition: Translation, Migration, Transformation.”

For the Eleventh Biennial Thomas Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, to be held at the University of Louisville 20-22 October 2016, we invite proposals for presentations exploring the relevance of diverse notions of mobilities for the work of rhetoric and composition (as a discipline, form of labor, and profession): how mobility is and might be worked—theorized, activated, researched, experienced, imagined—in our teaching, scholarship, and program administration, with what effects, for whom and on whom.

Participants might pursue such questions as:

* How might we usefully distinguish among the kinds of mobility experienced and exercised by differently positioned actors in our field?

* In what ways might mobility get taken up in practices and rhetorics of activism in engagements across divides of institution, discipline, program, location, and language?

*  How might theories of mobility in knowledge, meaning, and identity contribute to our approaches to translation, transfer, and genre and such matters as form, medium, text, and stance?

* How might we better conceive of and engage the movement of knowledge across boundaries of disciplines, programs, institutions, and routes of production, circulation, reception, execution?

* How might the problematics of knowledge mobilization contribute to or help us better grasp composition’s perduring history of poor working conditions and low disciplinary status?

* How does mobility challenge dominant conceptions of and commitments to identities of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, race, class, language, ability, nationality, profession, and place?  In what ways might we conceive of and pursue, or resist and challenge, mobilizations of identity in and through our composing, teaching, administration, and research practices?

* How do or might digital and other technologies shape and afford forms of mobility in composition, of what kind, for whom, and to what effect?

The deadline for submitting proposals is March 1, 2016, with responses to be sent by May 1, 2016.

More information on the conference is available at watsonconference.com<http://watsonconference.com/>.

Please direct questions to Bruce Horner at watson@louisville.edu<mailto:watson@louisville.edu>.