SWCA CONFERENCE

Join writing center practitioners from across the southeastern US and beyond for the 2024 SWCA conference, hosted by Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Download the CFP to share or read it below. Questions? Email us at swca.conference@gmail.com.

Location: Courtyard by Marriott Atlanta Decatur Downtown/Emory. Hosted by Emory University, Atlanta, GA

Dates:  February 22-25, 2024

     Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2023 [submission form coming soon]
     Decisions released by: December 8, 2023

The 2024 SWCA conference hosted by Emory University will focus on the theme of "Writing Center Movements," calling on participants to investigate how our centers and writers are moving, to where, and with whom. 

Atlanta has long been recognized for the roles it has played in social and racial justice progress. While it is well known for its role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, it continues to be a national (even global) center of activism. Anti-racist, diversity, and justice work have been part of writing center conversations for decades, and writing centers must respond to—and often participate in—such social and political movements with renewed urgency (e.g. Garcia 2017; Greenfield 2019; Williams 2022). For many in our southeast region, this urgency is heightened by current events that impact our work as educators and writers.

Inherent in the concept of movements is the idea that working toward justice is never completed, is always in motion—that we should not, as Mitchell and Randolph charged in their 2018 IWCA address, do what we've done before but rather, as Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison and Deirdre Garriott urge in their forthcoming edited collection, ask ourselves what we are doing and how we are growing. With this in mind, we envision SWCA 2024 as an occasion not only for gathering, but also for collaborating and sharing what moves us. 

As individual writing centers as well as the field more broadly grapple with our place within movements, the work of our centers remains simultaneously invested in other kinds of movement: helping writers gain the rhetorical skills to move their readers to action; promoting rhetorical understanding that helps writers to move between discourses and communities; critically evaluating who moves (or doesn’t move) through our centers and how. 

We therefore invite participants to explore the theme of movement from a variety of angles as it relates to the following questions and areas (and beyond):

Writers: 

• How are writing centers supporting underrepresented and marginalized writers in the Southeast—BIPOC writers, trans and queer writers, undocumented writers, and others—whose movement and expression may be inhibited by policies and laws?

• How can writing centers assist writers in developing flexibility and mobility while simultaneously recognizing the realities of stasis and limits to literacy’s power to move audiences (Guerra 2016)?

• How do writing centers help writers move between genres, disciplines, and communities?

• How do two-year campuses prepare writers to move into new institutions, new industries, or new roles within their existing communities? How do two-year and four-year colleges imagine how their writers move, and what role do writing centers play in that?

Writing Centers: 

• What student and staff populations move through our centers? How do they use or access writing centers, and how do centers enable or constrain this movement?

• How do centers account for embodiment and physicality, accessibility and disability? 

• How have writing centers moved between virtual and in-person spaces? 

• How do writing centers collaborate or form coalitions with other campus and community organizations? How do these partnerships impact our understanding of how writing or literacy circulates?

• How are writing centers guiding or participating in campus justice and equity initiatives?

• How are Southeastern writing centers contending with varying opinions regarding what texts and content instructors teach and how to secure resources to meet writers' needs?

Writing Center Practitioners: 

• How can we understand the needs of staff who move between different campus roles and identities?

• How can writing centers advocate for contingent professionals who may work at multiple institutions, or who encounter barriers to career development?

• How do directors and other staff understand and enact the goals of their mission statements? -How do hiring processes impact who moves into or out of our centers?

Writing Center Scholarship and Praxis: 

• In what direction(s) is Writing Center scholarship moving now?

• How are we now understanding our relationships to other fields or disciplines?

• How should Writing Center scholarship or praxis react to or participate in social and political events? 

We invite participants to propose creative, active sessions that make use of the collaborative possibilities of our conference gathering. Beyond typical conference papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, and poster sessions, we encourage imaginings beyond traditional forms, and welcome you to interpret the theme in new ways beyond what we’ve suggested. We invite proposals for new possibilities—even sessions or meetings that may move us into the larger Atlanta community, beyond Emory’s campus.