Dear colleagues,

Please see below CFP for an edited collection with the Modern Language Association (MLA) book series. Questions welcome,

Bruce Horner and Christiane Donahue

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Call for Essay Proposals: Teaching and Studying Transnational Composition

Edited by Christiane Donahue and Bruce Horner

Contributions are sought for the edited scholarly collection Teaching and Studying Transnational Composition. Chapters will explore responses by composition* scholars, teachers, and writing program administrators to the transnational, here understood as the working-across of today’s borders (real or perceived), in all directions and in social, economic, political, and communicative systems that reconfigure regularly. The transnational influences and is influenced by education; it can be seen in practical choices such as colleges’ and universities’ efforts around the world to attain recognizably “international” status and character by recruiting international students and faculty members and in these same institutions’ formulation of curricula appropriate for an international demographic, but it also drives engagements in the increasingly transnational character of knowledge production and communication and demands an openness to the unfamiliar.

The collection’s specific focus is on the “trans”—the transformative working across these efforts—and on “composition”—the attention to scholarship about and theories of teaching and learning literate acts. The section’s chapters will emphasize diverse scholarship from multiple contexts studying postsecondary writing around the globe, in various languages and settings, from different theoretical and methodological horizons, always exposing transnational issues and impacts.

*Composition, here, includes the study and teaching of the production of academic forms of literate communication at all postsecondary levels, graduate and undergraduate, both in courses with such concerns as their subject matter and in courses including attention to the production of such forms in their work (i.e., writing in the disciplines, content and language integrated learning, or similar curricula), as well as in professional and informal sites and settings for attention to the production of academic forms of literate communication.

We invite contributions that address themselves to one of the following three sections of the collection:

Transnationality in Composition Scholarship

What are the roots for transnational composition in issues as wide-ranging as the challenges and affordances of linguistic and cultural diversity, transnational understandings of literacies, higher education’s rising investment in or recruitment of students beyond national geographical borders, or composition’s commitment to equality and voice? What has its scholarship been in the past two decades, and what is its relationship with other domains attending to transnational questions—comparative literature, for example, or translingual approaches to writing?

Transnational Teaching of Composition

What practices in countries and contexts around the world have gone unrecognized in the US? These might include writing genres and practices outside the United States, the impact of global communication technologies on composition, cross-language writing, knowledge transfer between languages, perceptions of plagiarism in these different contexts, translation and paraphrase, and the impact of different disciplinary frameworks that surface in transnational discussions on writing instruction. What US practices can be reimagined in a new transnational context, and why should they be reimagined in particular ways? What do these practices afford, and what cautions might be sounded? Discussion of such issues will lead us to consider why transnational composition approaches matter to language faculty members, writing faculty members in countries, contexts, and languages around the world, and writing faculty members in the United States and in US institutions abroad.

The Work of Transnational Writing Program Administration

How can we situate writing program administration transnationally and explore the kinds of assumptions that have been made about administrative work in a global context: work by US administrators in increasingly globalized networks and work by administrators in other national or cross-national contexts? The influence of transnational composition has the potential to recharge faculty development and to deeply inform curriculum design in a global world; what do administrators, including writing center directors, research institutes directors, and chairs of departments need to know and consider? How might they best offer their faculty members material for new approaches and designs?

Chapters should present clear expositions of the authors’ experiences and arguments regarding transnational composition scholarship, teaching, or writing program administration.

Timeline

31 December 2018: Deadline for submitting a 250-word abstract of your chapter and a cover letter explaining the section to which you expect to contribute

30 January 2019: Responses to abstract proposals

30 July 2019: Chapter drafts due (6,000 words maximum)

1 September 2019: Responses to chapter drafts

15 October 2019: Revised chapters due

30 October 2019: Full manuscript submission to MLA

Submissions and questions should be directed by 31 December 2018 to the editors, Christiane Donahue ([log in to unmask]) and Bruce Horner ([log in to unmask]).