We invite colleagues at all stages of professional and personal transition to contribute to a conversation sponsored by the CCCC Standing Group for Senior, Late Career, and Retired Scholars in Rhetoric and Writing Studies (SGSLR) on “Navigating Professional and Personal Transitions in Digital Environments” (see description below). All are invited to contribute in one or more of the following ways:
1) Propose a contribution as a participant in our SGSLR roundtable session at the 2025 CCCC in Baltimore April 9-12 on some aspect of how we negotiate the complex transitions listed below. Send a 50-100 word draft or description of your proposed contribution by Tuesday, May 28 to Shirley.Rose. Include your contact information and a suggested title. Note: taking part in a Standing Group–sponsored panel or workshop does not count as a speaking role in terms of CCCC’s no multiple speaking roles policy.
2) Participate in one of SGSLR’s occasional zoom-based discussions on this same topic over several months before the CCCC meeting in April 2025. To receive information about dates and times of these discussions, send your name and address to Shirley.Rose
3) Circulate this invitation to colleagues who may be interested in participating in this SGSLR session at CCCC or in our occasional zoom-based conversations.
Proposed Roundtable Description: “Much to Love; Much to Loathe: Navigating Professional and Personal Transitions in Digital Environments”
We often speak of transitions, particularly professional transitions, in terms of career arcs, conflating the term with milestones. But transitions need not suggest forward or upward movement, and even professional transitions may well result from, or lead to personal transitions. Typical career arc transitions include earning degrees, acquiring a first position, becoming a publishing scholar, earning tenure and/or promotion, moving into administration, achieving honors, and retiring. But focusing on these transitions elides multiple others, including positive transitions such as movement between departments or institutions, shifting research focus, moving into a different discipline or field, and changing careers; or negative transitions such as job termination and department, program, or institution closing. Many of these professional transitions are accompanied by personal transitions, including relocation, changes in health, changes in family situations (marriage, divorce, having children), death of loved ones.
In addition, multiple people are affected by our transitions–one person’s transition affects many other people. Some of that is obvious, but for example, the moment when a mentor passes may be the moment when the one mentored realizes she’s become “senior faculty” herself. The field itself, and with it our professional organizations, also undergoes transitions. Sometimes these result from or are reflected by movements or turns such as the process movement, or the public turn. Sometimes they result from outside forces such as the COVID epidemic and the AI revolution. And sometimes they result from generational and demographic shifts—and here the conversation about transitions can become fraught.
Technologies are always a factor in how we experience these transitions. Digital technologies are increasingly necessary for almost all kinds of discourse, especially for those who must communicate across physical distances to maintain communities. While social media makes sharing the information and ideas simpler and also provides a means for multiple people to recognize, celebrate, or memorialize, it also reduces control over the circulation of information about ourselves and one another. Technology can build community on the one hand, but can also damage or destroy functional communities, so alienating users, filling the virtual universe with dis- and misinformation, scams, foreign protocols for interacting, unreadable memes and acronyms, and AI that “hallucinates” citations!
Practically, our goal for this proposed session is to start or stir the conversation about how we collectively acknowledge one another’s transitions. But we also want to reflect on how these transitions challenge and change us.
Many thanks from the SGSLR leadership group: Kathleen Shine Cain, Cinthia Gannett, and Shirley Rose
Shirley Rose
Emeritus Professor of English
Department of English
Arizona State University
PO Box 871401
Tempe AZ 85287-1401
Shirley.Rose
https://english.asu.edu/content/shirley-rose
Pronouns: she/her