The editors of Composition Forum are pleased to announce a call for papers for an upcoming special issue on Emotion in Composition. Please send proposals of 300 to 500 words by September 5, 2015 to Lance Langdon (llangdon@uci.edu). See below for a complete timeline.
Special Issue CFP: Emotion in Composition
Guest editor: Lance Langdon (llangdon@uci.edu)
By 2016, it will have been nearly twenty years since the publication of Lynn Worsham’s “Going Postal,” which traced student anger to its institutional sources, and almost a decade since Laura Micciche’s Doing Emotion, which urged emotional performance as a cognitive endeavor. It is the ambition of this special issue to reorient our field’s conversation regarding emotions once again, finding pathways through two decades’ worth of emotional investigation, charting new directions, and coming to grips with the action of emotions today—whether on campus, in local communities, or online; in program administration or in the teaching and learning of writing.
In the last twenty years the field of Composition has examined how emotion influences writers’ cognition and revision, constitutes classrooms as communities, and saturates program administration. We have asserted the centrality of emotion to critical thinking and critical literacy, to student interest and retention, and to the construction of student writers, WPAs, and instructors as gendered, raced, and classed subjects. We have valued the emotional labor of these same subjects, the work that gets done through emotional performance. And we have interrogated empathy and compassion in diverse classrooms and communities and in evolving publics.
Yet as the last decade’s blossoming of scholarship regarding affect has matured, what signs are there of a second spring? It might be argued that inquiry into emotion has spent itself and can provide no further insight, that we have hit a methodological wall in our reading of classroom interactions as symptomatic of cultural trends and in our investigation of moments of explosion. We have plumbed what positive emotions can do for student writers in opening to the world and established a framework around that stance. We have detailed and formed action plans through which to handle uncomfortable discussions of white privilege and able-‐ism, of racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia.
Yet work remains to be done in each of the above areas. We’ve yet to account for the ebbs and flows of interest and disinterest, annoyance and curiosity, that carry the daily teaching and learning language. We’ve insufficiently explored what frustration, mania and depression contribute to writing lives. We might even more fully attend to love’s labor to produce an equitable world.
These topics, coupled with those below, by no means exhaust what a fuller grappling with emotion contributes to the teaching and learning of writing. This issue calls upon researchers, teachers, and administrators to sift through the last twenty years of emotional inquiry in imagining what we’ll need to know and do in the next twenty—complicating, reframing, and extending previous engagements with emotion. It also solicits those opening up entirely new avenues of inquiry through theories previously unexplored in composition, topics unaddressed, and methodologies yet to be applied.
Prospective authors might propose to discuss (but should not feel limited to):
- Classroom implications of terminological distinctions (e.g. emotion/pathos/passion/feeling/affect, empathy/sympathy/compassion)
- Boredom and engagement in FYC
- Theories of affect in conversation with composition
- Motivation and writing
- Grit and retention
- Emotional communication in tutorials and/or conferences
- Use and abuse of “emotional literacy” and “emotional intelligence”
- Institutional emotions (e.g. WPA disappointment, TA or job market anxiety)
- Emotional labor of students, WPAs and writing instructors
- Habits of Mind in the Framework for Success
- Pedagogy concerning pathos in public rhetoric (e.g. politics of resentment, hope)
- Affect and metacognition
- Instructors’ proper or ideal emotions
- Performance and embodiment as reading and writing methods
- Emotional construction of gender, sexual orientation, class, and racial identity
- Feminist pedagogy
- Emotion and second-‐language writing
- Applications or contestation of neuroscience in composition
- Multimodal emotional communication (e.g. emoji)
- Ethics and rhetorics of empathy, in classrooms or in classroom-‐community contexts
The editor also seeks 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. The emotional labor of writing program administration is of particular interest, as is emotional communication within an institution’s budgetary and historical constraints. However, the section will field a wide range of approaches to the action of emotion within writing programs.
For more information on submitting articles or Program Profiles, visit http://compositionforum.com/submissions.php.
Timeline
July 5, 2015 – CFP released
September 5, 2015 – Deadline for proposals (300-‐500 words)
September 15, 2015 – Notification of acceptances
January 15, 2016 – Deadline for completed MSS
March 15, 2016 – Review complete, revisions requested
May 30, 2016 – Final versions of MSS due
June-‐July 2016 – Editing, manuscript preparation, etc.
August 2016 – Special issue released
Please contact Lance Langdon (llangdon@uci.edu) with inquiries.