Council of Writing Program Administrators

Call for Proposals for a collection

Writing the Earth: Rhetorics and Literacies of Sustainability Peter N. Goggin, editor

English studies is decades behind other disciplines in recognizing the importance of considering our research and teaching in light of local and global environmental exigencies. There is still a pervasive, if unacknowledged, belief that much of our work ought to focus on the triad of race/class/gender, whereas "environment" remains a category awkwardly associated with largely "white," middle-class values and geographies, and thus confined to the perimeters of our conversations.

--Derek Owens

Essay proposals are invited for a collection titled Writing the Earth: Rhetorics and Literacies of Sustainability. This collection invites scholars of literacy and rhetoric (in English studies and elsewhere) to pick up the gauntlet that Owens has thrown down before us and answer the challenge to put sustainability at the forefront of research and teaching in the humanities.

Although "sustainability" is generally understood as examining, reassessing, and changing current practices, policies and human endeavors to reduce the potential for harm to future generations, the concept has been constructed in multiple ways by many invested and interested parties to serve multiple agendas and purposes. The range and possibility for topics in this collection is therefore wide open, as long as they address sustainability through lenses of literacy and/or rhetorical theory. Therefore, topics might include, but are certainly not limited to: rhetorics of sustainability; rhetorics of sustainable development; environmental rhetoric; ecocriticism and ecocomposition; literacies of sustainability; discourses of sustainability; technology/media and sustainability; teaching writing and sustainability, and rhetorical places and spaces of sustainability. The focus may look broadly at a topic from a conceptual/theoretical perspective, or narrowly and pragmatically at a specific case.

Please send your 250-500-word proposal and a CV as electronic attachments in MSWord format to Peter Goggin (goggin1@asu.edu) by September 30, 2007

Peter N. Goggin Assistant Professor Department of English Arizona State University Box 870302, Tempe, AZ 85287-0302 Phone: (480)965-7748 Fax: (480)965-3451

Western States Rhetoric & Literacy Conference http://www.public.asu.edu/~petergo/wsrl/wsrl.html