[Air-L] Call for Proposals: Computers and Composition special issue on Digital Technologies, Bodies, and Embodiments

[Phil Bratta]

Dear all,

It's my pleasure to invite you to submit a proposal to a special issue
in *Computers
and Composition* (
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/computers-and-composition) focused on
Digital Technologies, Bodies, and Embodiments. I have attached the CFP as
well as provided it below.

Thanks!

Phil Bratta



*Context*

In the last five years or so, rhetoric and composition scholarship has
offered work that brings digital media and bodies to the forefront to shape
pedagogical praxis, illuminate cultural practices, and extend composition
studies (into writing studies). Yet, much of this scholarship remains
focused on the *rhetorical* construction of embodiment, as indicated by
several recent journal special issues: Perspectives and Definitions of
Digital Rhetoric (*Enculturation *23 2016), Wearable Rhetorics: Bodies,
Cities, Collectives (*Rhetoric Society Quarterly *46.3 2016), Embodied and
Affective Rhetorics (*Present Tense *6.1 2016), Embodied Sound (*Kairos*
21.1 2016), and Sexing Colorlines: Black Sexualities, Popular Culture, and
Cultural Production (*Poroi* 7.2 2011). The advent and, now, ubiquity of
digital media and digital writing practices demands a rethinking of the
relationships between rhetoric, bodies, embodiments, and writing (as
broadly construed): how writing embodies and composes a writer; how writing
embodies and composes others; and, inversely, how bodies and embodiments
compose hegemonic regimes of—or sites of resistance to—contemporary writing
modalities, both in and outside the writing classroom.



This special issue will examine questions of digital media, bodies, and
embodiments with specific attention to writing studies itself: how writing
composes embodiments and how embodiments compose writing within and through
digital technologies and institutions. We are calling for scholarship that
offers theoretical, methodological, and/or pedagogical work that
contributes to the latest research on, about, with, and between
(dis)connections of digital technologies, bodies, embodiments, and writing
in digital-cultural contexts, texts, and events. Following *Computers and
Composition*’s emphasis on the use of computers and digital technologies in
teaching and the writing classroom, writing program administration, and
writing research, we are particularly interested in submissions that apply
theoretical methods to the practical dimension of the field. To this end,
our special issue of *Computers and Composition* seeks to continue and
extend some of the ideas in the journal’s past and forthcoming special
issues, such as Jonathan Alexander and Will Banks’ “Sexualities,
Technologies, and the Teaching of Writing” (2004) and Jason Tham, Megan
McGrath, Ann Hill Duin, and Joe Moses’ forthcoming “Wearable Technology,
Ubiquitous Computing, and Immersive Experience: Implications for Writing
Studies.”



For this special issue, we distinguish “the body” and “embodiment” as
different conceptual terms—a move laid out by N. Katherine Hayles and Anne
Frances Wysocki. The body, according to Hayles, is abstract and normalized;
embodiment, in contrast, is an instantiated materiality, a corporeality
that cannot be separated from its medium and context (196). We might
conclude that the body is general and embodiment is particular. Likewise,
Wysocki asserts that embodiment “calls us to attend to what we just simply
do, day to day, moving about, communicating with others, using objects that
we simply use in order to make things happen” (3). Of course, embodiment
and the body are always woven together in lived experiences and social
contexts. The key is not to create a binary relationship between the two or
privilege one over the other; rather, the two need to be conceptualized
together as they are inextricably intertwined.



Suggestions for topics that contributors may wish to engage with include,
but are not limited to: rhetoric, composition, and writing; histories of
composition, writing, and digital technologies; critical pedagogies,
teaching praxes, and classroom practices; theoretical legacies (in praxis):
feminism, post-colonial theory, decolonial theory, queer theory, critical
race theory, poststructuralism, cultural rhetorics theory, etc.; digital
humanities, digital media, and digital studies; art, creative-critical
work/scholarship, and genre studies; disability studies; visual culture and
rhetorics; new media and game studies; social justice, activism, and
community outreach; space, place, and land; subjectivity, identity, agency,
and difference; professional and technical communication and writing,
UX/XA, and design; and computational rhetorics and analytics.



Some possible questions authors may wish to engage (but are not required):



1.  How do we account for the indistinguishable materiality between bodies,
embodiments, and digital technologies, and how does writing negotiate this
tension?

2.  How do we consider the relations of bodies and embodiments to
non-digital and digital places, technologies, and others? Likewise, how
does the shift from non-digital to digital writing further complicate such
relations?

3.  What affordances and constraints do non-digital and digital writing
technologies create for the bodies and embodiments of teachers and students
in the classroom?

4.  How do subjectivities and identities (race, gender, class, sexual
orientation, nationality, dis/ability, age, and/or creed) factor into the
use, accessibility, and practice of digital technologies and writing both
in and outside the classroom?

5. How do writing program administrators create writing programs that tend
to the complexities of embodiment, especially as digitally mediated?

6. How does the relationship between embodiment, identity, and ubiquitous
computing challenge “traditional” conceptions of writing assessment?

7.  What technologies, bodies, embodiments, and writing practices emerge,
oppress, subvert, and augment if we consider ideas of space, place, and
land?

8. What constitutes the meaning/content of a body and embodiment and the
grammar/syntax of a body and embodiment, and how do we arrive at such?

9.  How might art and artists illuminate dominant assumptions of embodied
technologies, and how might writing studies take on such aesthetic methods?



*Timeline*

Proposals due: October 31, 2017

Decision to authors on preliminary inclusion: December 31, 2017

Initial drafts of 6,000-7,000 words to guest editors: June 30,
2018

Article revisions due to guest editors: December 31, 2018

Publication of special issue: September 2019



*Submission and Contact Details*

Individuals or co-authors should submit a 300-500 word proposal that gives
an overview of the piece, including impetus and focus, and contribution to
the field(s). Proposals should be submitted as .doc or .docx files to
ssndvall at memphis.edu and philbratta at gmail.com. The subject line of the
email submission should read “Special Issue Proposal: Digital Technologies,
Bodies, and Embodiments.” For more information or queries, email Scott
Sundvall and Phil Bratta: ssndvall at memphis.edu and philbratta at gmail.com

-- 
Ph.D Candidate
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures
Michigan State University
Bessey Hall room 267
East Lansing, MI 48824
philbratta at gmail.com
http://www.philbratta.com/