CALL FOR PAPERS
Teaching Rhetoric and Composition Through the Archives
EDITORS: Tarez Samra Graban and Wendy Hayden
Since John C. Gerber’s invitation for readers of College Composition and Communication to come together at the
newly formed CCCC in order to more sustainably “develop[] a coordinated research program” about teaching
college composition (1950, p. 12), the field of Rhetoric and Composition has remained simultaneously
interested in both its knowledge-making and its history-making potential. Unsurprisingly, institutional archives
and repositories have played a critical role, serving as subjects of our graduate seminars, methodologies for our
research, service sites for our composition classes, and agents in our disciplinary identifications. This collection
turns specifically to the ways in which institutional archives have been—or can be—sites for a kind of
instruction that is endemic to Rhetoric and Composition studies.
We seek contributions that theorize, highlight, and illustrate (through syllabi or course artifacts) a pedagogy that
addresses how our approach to teaching about/for/through the archive is specific to—and emerges from—
Rhetoric and Composition as a field. That is, our approach to this collection not only reflects values in the field
that cause us to teach specifically in and through the archives, it also justifies our pedagogy according to the
various archival spaces in which we have taught, the various institutional challenges we have had in proposing
and conducting these courses, the various collaborations we have held, the various inequities we have
encountered due to uneven status or privilege, and the various theoretical questions raised by teaching
with/through various digital and physical sites. To that end, we seek contributions that focus on any of the
following possibilities:
● Ways of teaching about the archives: What do we do when we approach the archive as text, i.e.,
when the whole archive becomes a site for terministic inquiry? How does this approach help foster the
habits of mind that are essential for creating and using archives and for being a good steward of private
and public collections?
● Ways of teaching for the archives: What do we do when we approach the archive as collaboration, i.e.,
when the whole archive becomes a site for methodological reflection, as well as the discovery of
interdisciplinary topics? How do we partner with the university archives and archival studies scholars on
teaching archival theory and interdisciplinary research? How do these projects support curricular and
archival goals simultaneously, enabling students to conduct essential processing or inventorying on
behalf of the archive?
● Ways of teaching through the archives: What do we do when we approach the archive as activism,
i.e., when the whole archive becomes a site for locating epistemic omissions and gaps—gendered,
raced, disciplinary, institutional, and material?
This collection will be in conversation with existing compilations such as Working in the Archives (2010), Beyond
the Archives (2008), and Pedagogies of Public Memory (2016). Southern Illinois University Press has encouraged us
to submit a formal proposal, and we hope to place the collection with them.
Interested contributors should send 50-word biographies and 500-word proposals with a working title for
the chapter as file attachments to tgraban@fsu.edu and whayden@hunter.cuny.edu by January 10,
2017. Notification of acceptance will be provided by March 2017, with initial drafts of submissions due in Fall
2017. Chapter submission guidelines will be forthcoming upon notification of acceptance. To include as full a
range of submissions as possible, chapters will be no longer than 6000 words (including notes, appendix and
bibliography). We especially encourage collaborative submissions that are co-authored or co-prepared with
archivists, librarians, and archival studies scholars.
DIRECT ANY QUESTIONS TO THE EDITORS:
Tarez Samra Graban (tgraban@fsu.edu) and Wendy Hayden (whayden@hunter.cuny.edu)
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