CFP: Special Issue of Composition Forum – “Doing Composition in the Presence of Disability”
A special issue of Composition Forum called “Doing Composition in the Presence of Disability” will be published in summer of 2018. Co-editors Elisabeth Miller, Stephanie Kerschbaum, and Annika Konrad welcome your submissions!
Please find the CFP copied below and attached in Word, PDF, and Google Doc formats.
Please be in touch early and often with any questions or thoughts you have: Disabilitycompforum@gmail.com<mailto:Disabilitycompforum@gmail.com>
Announcement of a Special Issue of Composition Forum
“Doing Composition in the Presence of Disability”
Guest editors: Annika Konrad, Elisabeth Miller, Stephanie Kerschbaum
Since the mid-1990s, the presence of disability in composition-rhetoric has been growing and becoming more influential—as reflected in the volume of disability related presentations and events occurring within our field’s major conferences, journals, and professional activism. But at the same time that we identify many new ways that we experience, notice, and move with disability in our field, we also recognize that disability studies continues to be relatively insular. As Margaret Price, a leading DS scholar, recently pointed out in “Disability Studies Methodology: Explaining Ourselves to Ourselves,” even after all these years of work, “DS is still too often considered a ‘special’ field, one with curiosity value but little to add to other disciplines or theories” (2012, 168).
Thus, this special issue seeks to showcase disability within the scene(s) of composition, highlighting its scenes as multifaceted and as involving careful attention to identities, materiality, embodiment, audience/rhetorical considerations, genre. Within these scenes, we also acknowledge the many ways that disability shapes the myriad roles we occupy as composition professionals: teachers, scholars, community activists, advisors, and program administrators.
For this special issue, the three co-editors invite essays and multimodal contributions that explore what happens when we make disability a central consideration in composition studies research, theory, pedagogy, and program administration. When disability–always in intersection with other forms of identity and embodiment, including race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class–is centered in various scenes of composition, how does the scene shift, change, or invite new ways of moving (Dolmage)? In responding to this question, the articles and contributions for this special issue should show how such attention to disability enables particular kinds of noticing and makes possible new ways of moving for composition scholars, teachers, researchers, administrators, and the students and faculty we work alongside.
This special issue comes at a key moment for composition as a field to consider and reflect on the presence of disability in the various scenes and sites of composition studies, its presence in our field over the last twenty years and its current presence (and absence) within disciplinary sites of research, teaching, and program administration. Given the growth that has occurred over the last two decades of disability scholarship in composition-rhetoric, this is a propitious moment to take stock of the work that has been done and to look ahead to new ways of doing composition with disability.
We especially seek articles that:
* Explore or demonstrate innovative methodological perspectives, affordances, and techniques related to doing composition research and teaching in the presence of disability
* Consider access in sites of research, teaching, scholarship, and programming in composition studies
* Engage disability intersectionally, along matrices of identifications and rhetorics of difference that circulate, proliferate, shape, and influence composition teaching, research, scholarship, activism, and administration.
* Foreground disability as more than a category of analysis, but as a kind of meaning-making that affects research, teaching, or program administration.
* Productively explore or critique forms of embodiment that matter to composition teaching, research, and administration
* Ask questions about composition that place access at the center of research, teaching, and program administration
* Attend to Disability Studies as a field that has theoretical and practical relevance to all kinds of teaching and research in composition and rhetoric
* Examine patterns, practices, presences, and absences over the last twenty years of disability studies work in composition and rhetoric studies
We are also seeking up to three Program Profiles, which address various aspects of writing programs, including first‐year composition, WAC/WID, student support programs, teacher training, the undergraduate major, professional writing, writing centers, or postgraduate writing. Programs that attend to the presence of disability are of interest for our issue–particularly those that strive to center access for writing teachers and student writers.
Technical Guidelines
We invite abstracts and proposals for multimodal submissions that creatively explore the affordances of Composition Forum’s open-access online forum. Authors might envision multimodal appendices that offer readers multiple ways of accessing article content or materials, or experiment with sound, images, videos, and other content significant to the argument/article. All multimedia components must be designed with accessibility in mind and we invite prospective authors and designers to be in touch with us as you develop your work and plans for submission. For more, see http://compositionforum.com/accessibility.php
Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts for articles and program profiles are due by October 31, 2016. Proposed article abstracts should be 1000-1200 words and include description of methodology, data, argument, and contributions. For Program Profiles, abstracts should be 500 words. We also invite abstracts/proposals for multimodal submissions.
Send all queries, submissions, and correspondence to the guest editors at DisabilityCompForum@gmail.com<mailto:DisabilityCompForum@gmail.com> For details on submission guidelines and article specifications, see http://compositionforum.com/submissions.php
Timeline
31 October 2016: deadline for abstracts and queries
21 November 2016: proposal acceptances/full manuscript invitations issued
31 March 2017: Deadline for full manuscripts / review process begins
31 October 2017: Final manuscripts due
November 2017-January 2018: editing and manuscript preparation
Summer 2018: Special issue released
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qBcuxJWEzNn0rh25WWOg3ZdQi9a15zm6wFagjc6r8ms/edit?usp=sharing
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