Social Justice Conference Planning for Writing Studies Frameworks, Triumphs, and Challenges

Article Sidebar

Five genderless geometric figures, colored in smooth alternating gradients of red organge, lime green, lavender, and azure blue, work together to simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct a beige Western Classical building. On the left, two of the figures hammer and chisel at a trumbling Corinthian column while two more on the right paint the building and an amorphous roof-supporting structure in similar gradient colors. Framed by the two pillars is the final figure carrying a white door with only one hinge attached in front of a colorful open doorway.
Read Article
Published: Nov 22, 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2688-9595.2022.3.1.28-44
Keywords:
social justice George Floyd #BlackLivesMatter academic conferences Breonna Taylor community engagement Ahmaud Arbery community partnerships Tony McDade research as care Sandra Bland reciprocity Manuel Ellis

Main Article Content

Antonio Byrd
Maria Novotny
Michael Pemberton
Vershawn Ashanti Young

Abstract

In this series of personal reflections, authors from the Social Justice at the Convention Committee and the Local Arrangements Committee discuss their efforts to do social justice conference planning for the Conference on College Composition and Communication from 2018 to 2021. The challenges of doing social justice programming in a shifting convention landscape have been tremendous but, the authors have found, they are not insurmountable. The authors use their experiences to offer a conceptual framework and guiding questions for enacting social justice events at academic con­ventions. The lessons the authors have learned in the process about funding, labor, sustainability, and ethics of incorporating community voices will be important and useful to readers who want to highlight such programming in national, regional, local, and online venues.

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2022): [Guest Edited Special Issue] Conferencing toward Antiracism: Reckoning with the Past, Reimagining the Present
Section
Articles
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020, March 3). CDC announces additional COVID-19 infections [Press release]. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/s-0303-Additional-COVID-19-infections.html.

Conference on College Composition and Communication. (2019). CCCC convention siting and hostile legislation: Guiding principles. https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/conv/futureconventions/sitingprinciples.

Conference on College Composition and Communication. (1974). Students’ right to their own language. College Composition and Communication, 25(3), 1–18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/356219

Cushman, E. (1996). The rhetorician as an agent of social change. College Composition and Communication, 47(1), 7–28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/358271

Flower, L. (2008). Community literacy and the rhetoric of public engagement. Southern Illinois University Press.

Gilyard, K. (1999). African American contributions to composition studies. A usable past: CCC at 50: Part 2 [Special issue]. College Composition and Communication, 50(4), 626–644. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/358484

Hook, J. N. (1979). A long way together: A personal view of NCTE’s first sixty-seven years. NCTE.

Jones, N. N., & Walton, R. (2018). Using narratives to foster critical thinking about diversity and social justice. In M. Eble & A. Haas (Eds.), Key theoretical frameworks: Teaching technical communication in the twenty-first century (pp. 241–267). Utah State University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7330/9781607327585.c010

King, J. (1991). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity, and the miseducation of teachers. The Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 133–146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2295605

Kurashige, S. (2020, June 7). ASA’s president’s statement on Black Lives Matter and the rebellion of 2020 [Press release]. https://www.theasa.net/about/news-events/announcements/asa-presidents-statement-black-lives-matter-rebellion-2020.

Lewis, J. [@rpjohnlewis]. (2018, June 27). Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. #goodtrouble. [Tweet ]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/repjohnlewis/status/1011991303599607808.

Lindquist, J. (2021). 2021 CCCC chair’s address: Writing and teaching in a time of Covid: Uncommon reflections on learning and loss. College Composition and Communication, 73(2), 184–205.

National Council of Teachers of English. (2020, June 12). ELATE statement on state-sanctioned anti-Black racism and violence: A commitment to antiracist instruction in English language arts. https://ncte.org/groups/elate/elate-antiracist-instruction/.

Opel, D., & Sackey, D. (2019). Reciprocity in community-engaged food and environmental justice scholarship. Community Literacy Journal, 14(1), 1–6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/clj.2019.0027

Riley-Mukavetz, A., & Cindy Tekobbe. (2022). “If you don’t want us there, you don’t get us”: A statement on Indigenous visibility and reconciliation. Present Tense, 9(2). https://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-9/if-you-dont-want-us-there-you-dont-get-us-a-statement-on-indigenous-visibility-and-reconciliation/.

Shah, R. (2020). Rewriting partnerships: Community perspectives on community-based learning. Utah State University Press.

Missouri NAACP. (2017, June 10). Urgent—Missouri travel advisory. http://www.monaacp.org/2017/06/10/urgent-missouri-travel-advisory/. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7330/9781607329602

Wilkerson, T. L., & Berry, R. Q. III. (2020, June 1). A statement on George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. https://www.nctm.org/News-and-Calendar/News/NCTM-News-Releases/A-Statement-on-George-Floyd,-Breonna-Taylor,-and-Ahmaud-Arbery/.