The conference theme, Building Engaged Infrastructure, challenges attendees to build ethical and durable community-university partnerships through teaching, research, and community writing, simultaneously challenging faculty who do community-engaged work to find support within university departments. The theme also explores how to build institutional support for departments themselves as they become more committed to community-engaged instruction and scholarship across the curriculum. Building that infrastructure of support, resources, and relationships is essential if the work is to be sustainable.

We welcome proposals from academics of all levels — faculty, graduate students, emeritas — and community members involved with engagement activities for individual papers, panels of 3-4 presenters, and workshops that will help us understand how writing functions socially to inform, to empower, and to transform and how to build infrastructure to support engaged research and pedagogy. Please feel free to contact the conference committee before proposing with any questions about presenting or ideas for workshops.

Proposals should be no longer than 500 words. A cover page should include the presenter’s name(s), professional title and affiliation, and contact information, including email. Please specify whether you are submitting an individual paper, panel, or workshop, and include the title.

Concurrent Session Proposal: A panel session consists of 3-4 speakers presenting for 75 minutes, including at least 15 minutes of Q and A. Presenters may propose a full panel or an individual paper.

Workshop Proposal: A workshop session will consist of 120 minutes of presentation and collaborative work with participants. Successful workshop proposals will include theoretical background and questions or practical tasks for the attendees that the workshop leaders might facilitate.

We invite proposals related to Building Engaged Infrastructure on the following topics:

• Writing in the community
• Public and civic rhetorics
• Community-engaged pedagogies, including service-learning
• Literacy studies
• Digital activism, such as digital storytelling and multimodal public rhetorics
• Social entrepreneurship and business/professional writing
• Community-based scholarship and research
• Race, class, gender, and diversity
• Writing and social justice
• Creative non-fiction and journalism
• Sustainability and food studies
• Community publishing
• Administrative work with and support for community-engaged writing and research

Submission deadline is December 5, 2014 February 2, 2015. You will be notified of the committee’s decision in February 2015.

http://www.communitywriting.org/page/cfp

The conference will address, for example: How can writing and rhetoric programs (and related disciplines) create innovative curricular and scholarly models around social, economic, and environmental needs?

How does writing, argument, and communication drive social change?

What kinds of theories and knowledge are generated in universities that can contribute to local, national, and global movements?

How do community leaders and academics share knowledge and expertise to build collaborative research projects and courses?

Please visit the conference website and share it with colleagues. Then get your hiking boots ready and join us in one of the most beautiful locations in the country.

http://www.communitywriting.org