[ATTW-L] CFP: Special issue of Written Communication on "Methodological Challenges and Innovations in Community, Government, and Workplace Writing Research"

[Clay Spinuzzi]

Hi, all. If you're thinking deeply about methodology in nonacademic writing
research, please consider this cfp!

--
CFP: Special Issue on Methodological Challenges and Innovations in
Community,
Government, and Workplace Writing Research
What it means to work and participate in a community (where, how long, and
in what type of organizational structure) continue to change. Along with
the dissolution of borders (e.g., migration), reactionary measures to
rebuild those borders (e.g., restrictive migration policies), and
increasingly ubiquitous LLMs, reading and writing practices fragment and
re-coalesce, automate, appear and disappear across workplaces, government,
and community contexts. As these changes have significant implications for
the study of writing and the people impacted by these changes, this Special
Issue of Written Communication will specifically focus on the
methodological implications of these changes and whether our current
methodologies are ‘up to’
the task of addressing them. How do research methods endure and evolve
under continually changing literacy practices in workplaces, government
agencies, and communities? What existing methods might need innovation?
What new methods might illuminate new data on writing and sites of writing,
or that allow writing researchers to ask new or different kinds of
questions? For example, in researching
local community writing, how should our methods accommodate responsible
studies of community organizing and writing to (and during) the occupation
of public spaces, writing to organize resistance to mass deportations, and
action research within deeply divided communities? How can our methods
recognize and secure data sovereignty, particularly in communities that
have existed in place for decades, centuries or since time immemorial? How
did ‘personal’ or ‘private’ writing during quarantine (for connection, for
healing, for mental health, or for personal or archival recovery) affect
writing practices post-quarantine? How do these changes alter writing
researchers’ relationships to the sites where we study writing and the
people with whom we work? Does the acceleration of research programs
preclude or change relationship-building with industry or community
members? What do these changes occasion in institutional approval
processes, methods of data collection, selection, segmentation, and
analysis methods? What ethical and methodological principles can be
innovated and/or adapted to ensure/guarantee respect, beneficence, and
justice?

Beyond the local, globalization and transnationalism are bound up in new
forms of power and new forms of resistance, with language and literacy
deeply linked to these dynamics. When considering composing practices
brought on by the increased accessibility of mobile technology, for
instance, we might also consider the challenges posed to public-sector
writing by authoritarian, neonationalist, and populist government regimes.
We might trace the impact of global economies of industries such as
manufacturing and service work; we might create ways to reveal the impact
of remote work or redistributions of workplace job forces. What
methodologies best illustrate the impact of clawbacks of remote work or
even the possibility of working with expectations such as loyalty oaths or
redistributions of workplace job forces? How have these changes been
brought on by pressures for environmental justice, affordable housing, and
accessible workplaces? How will such changes affect the processes of
outlining, writing, editing, and approval? In what cases will they disrupt
current genre systems and change the regularization and regulation of
specific genres? In a broader sense, how might authoritarianism and
precarity require us to rethink data collection approaches such as
interviews? How can we responsibly gain participants’ trust and safeguard
their data?

How are technological advances implicated in these changes? For example,
effectively nonconsensual incorporation of LLMs into routine composing
platforms raises important questions about privacy, intellectual property,
and unwanted change to writing processes. To what extent will LLMs
accelerate deskilling and reskilling of the labor of individual writers or
result in a ‘flattening’ or a normative baseline of writing as a cultural
practice? Increased mobility and accessibility for whom? How are ‘analog’
composing technologies moving into new roles or acquiring different
affordances in light of these advances? To what ends are these innovations
in writing technologies in a deeply unequal global economy – for example,
the planned obsolescence of certain writing technologies and practices? As
people begin to use LLMs more as writing partners, how will that change how
we understand the identities, duties, division of labor, and skill sets of
writers (cf. Brandt 2005)?

This Special Issue will feature 12 shorter-form methods articles
(5,000-6,000 words), focusing on specific current challenges or innovations
for methodologies (e.g., case study, ethnography) or methods (e.g.,
interviewing, eye-tracking, surveying) in Writing Studies. We do not expect
the sites of study to be new (although they can be); rather, we expect that
challenges and/or implications will be illustrated concretely with trial
examples from a new dataset (or an old dataset reconsidered). We are also
interested in articles that show how old questions or findings could or
should be reinterpreted. We are particularly interested in transnational
perspectives and
research from historically marginalized locations of writing.

To be considered for the Special Issue, please submit a ~500-word abstract
by January 10, 2025, to wcxeditors at gmail.com

Submit timeline:
● 500-word proposal by January 10, 2025
● Proposal decisions by January 24, 2025
● First drafts by March 21, 2025 with comments received by April 1, 2025
● Final revised manuscripts by May 15, 2025
● Published in the October 2026 issue

-- 
Dr. Clay Spinuzzi
Department of Rhetoric and Writing
University of Texas at Austin
208 W. 21st St., Stop B5500
Austin, TX  78712-1038
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