Call for Proposals: 2025 Conference on Community Writing: Designing Justice Across Space, Place, and Time – Feb 17

Posted by Coalition for Community Writing on December 10, 2024

The Coalition for Community Writing (CCW) invites you to imagine community writing as designing justice across space, place, and time at our sixth biennial Conference on Community Writing, October 23-25, 2025. The conference, hosted at Wayne State University in the vibrant and ever-evolving city of Detroit, Michigan, welcomes community residents, organizers, nonprofit leaders, writers, artists, journalists, digital storytellers, teachers, students, scholars and more, who all theorize, enact, and write the stories of community change. CCW focuses on community writing, capaciously defined, as a framework to explore how change happens. In the work of social change, community writing is necessary, contemplative, therapeutic, coalition-building, and action-based. In community writing, people use design in material and multimodal ways to shape curriculum, projects, policy, grant funding, archives, museums, public art and performance. It can be invisible (in terms of relationships that harvest and sustain cultural capital) and visible (in terms of specific projects, initiatives, and non-profit groups); it can be granular or encompassing in focus.

For the 2025 conference, we ask you to think about how designing justice reflects or speaks to experiences and projects in your communities locally, across the country, and across the world. And we welcome community actors from a range of workplaces, institutions, and disciplines to share these experiences at this conference. For example, how does the work of nonprofit organizations, technical writers, and teachers help us explore the design and function of community spaces, both digital and physical? How does the work of activists, creative writers, and artists contribute to our sense of place? How does the work of librarians, archivists, historians, and storytellers help us understand the nature of community and community writing over time?

Defining the ways that design and justice come together in community writing work, Aimée Knight (2022) explores “equity-based approaches to writing and designing with communities” (7, emphasis ours), as most desirable; she then provides examples of the ways that community partners and students work together to craft texts across modes that serve the knowledge-making needs of the community. The importance of writing-with is long-established in community writing scholarship (Deans, 2002); however, scholars, activists, and journalists demonstrate how, in public practice, design does not work to the benefit of all community members, who are frequently left out of design processes (e.g., Design Justice Network, 2016; Costanza-Chock, 2020; Henderson, 2022). To counter this, the Design Justice Network has created a “living document” that outlines the principles of design justice, which “rethink[s] design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face” (“Principles,” n.d.). In the work of community writing, these collaborative and creative practices may result in projects that use social media, mapping, zines, museum exhibits, street art, participatory research, and many other modes to voice and address community needs.

Deadline for proposal submissions: Monday, February 17, 2025

Learn more and submit a proposal.