Call for Papers & New Media Texts: Reading (and Writing) New Media
(a collection of essay-texts edited by Jim Kalmbach and Cheryl Ball)

Reading has long been studied in literary theory and pedagogy, in education, and in composition studies, but we have not yet interrogated the act of reading in the context of digital new media texts. Consequently, as teachers of digital literacy, multimodal writing, and web authoring, we often ask students to interact with and create digital, multimodal, and web-based texts without asking them to reflect on what it means to read such texts.

The editors of Reading (and Writing) New Media invite proposals that address questions such as What does it mean to read new media? How have digital spaces changed the activity of reading? How does reading digital texts—including games, instant messages, digital art and music, and other forms— enlarge our conception of what a text is? Is there a digital canon forming, and what are the consequences of such a move? We also recognize that every act of reading is also an act of writing—a construction—and that reading cannot be separated from writing. We ask: What happens when writing morphs into composition or design? What sorts of composing processes inform the creation and reading of new media texts? What teaching possibilities lay at the intersection between reading and composing new media texts? We invite essays and new media texts that reflect broadly on these issues. New media texts will be published in an accompanying CD with print connections (i.e., an author of a new media text can submit an artist’s statement to be published in the book and which would point readers to the CD). The CD will also contain selections from the new media projects discussed in the essays.

Call for Abstracts

Writing Centers and Disability

Deadline: October 1, 2005

Abstracts (approximately 500 words) for potential contributions are invited for a new edited collection tentatively titled Writing Centers and Disability. This collection will investigate the vital, but often ignored intersection of Writing Center Studies and Disability Studies.

Contributions will ultimately fall into three general categories:

• Research on tutoring writers with disabilities,
• Research and narratives of experience of making the writing center space accessible, and
• First-person accounts, both narrative and theoretical, of the experience of tutoring a disabled person or of being a disabled person who works in or uses a writing center.

Call for Proposals: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work

(See the original CFP and a downloadable Word document at my site.)

Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin are excited about it and see it as a moment of new liberation and choice for consumers and workers alike. Gilles Deleuze saw it as horrifying, even worse than the disciplinary society Michel Foucault described. It goes by many names: Distributed capitalism, the control society, the informatics of domination, the support economy. Whatever its name, the characteristics are the same: control over organizations is as distributed as ownership is in managerial capitalism; digital technologies play a vital enabling role; consumption is individuated, taking the form of the desire for unique identities and unique experiences; direct relationships between customers and businesses become more important; and customers look for stable beneficial relationships among consumers and producers that support these individual experiences. These needs are supplied not by large, vertically integrated companies but by temporary "federations" of suppliers for each individual transaction. These federations are endlessly recombinant. Work is fragmented temporally, geographically, and disciplinarily. Lifelong employment is replaced by what Zuboff and Maxmin call "lifelong learning" -- what Donna Haraway calls continual deskilling and retraining.