Dear Colleagues,
We’re pleased to share with you the CFP for the CCC special issue for 2026. The text for the CFP is below, and it is attached as a PDF as well.
Please circulate widely and reach out if you have any questions or concerns.
Best,
Matt & Kara
September 2026 Special Issue CFP: The Politics of Writing, Composing, and Communication
Editors: Matthew Davis & Kara Taczak
Proposals Due: September 1, 2025
As the September 2025 special issue, “AI & Writing,” makes its way toward publication, CCC is inviting proposals for the 2026 special issue, “The Politics of Writing, Composing, and Communication.” We are soliciting proposals for the 2026 special issue in all genres published by CCC (articles, review essays, and research briefs).
In the editorial introduction for the February 2025 issue, we wrote that “CCC works best when it is a centripetal force with a centrifugal focus. In other words, CCC should bring together scholars across writing- and rhetoric-related disciplines to focus on the outward impacts of our research, teaching, and administration: on our students, our communities, and our shared world” (361). This special issue aims to do just that: to turn our focus outward, to consider what writing, rhetoric, and composition studies mean in a broader political orbit.
Much recent work has explored the internal politics of the discipline–variously defined–highlighting how disciplinary politics both reflects and is shaped by broader political realities (e.g. Delpit; Lazere; Selfe and Selfe; Clark and Ivanic; Kirsch and Ritchie; Chase; and Samuels, among many others). We join these scholars in challenging the notion that the “real world” exists apart from the work we do—in classrooms, offices, conferences, and publications. Here, however, we invite contributors to engage that centrifugal focus to investigate how local, state, regional, national, and international contexts are influenced by our writing, research, methods, pedagogies, and administrative activities—that is to say, our works—and how that work is impacted by politics outside of the discipline.
This invitation raises a tricky, important question: what exactly do we mean by politics? Politics is both sprawling and immanent. On one hand, is “Big P Politics”—the macro scale of governmental sense of Politics that includes public agencies, institutions, and their formal operations at the level of law, policy, and regulation. On the other hand, is “little p politics”—the micro scale of quotidian, interpersonal, informal operations of people, work, relationships, and interactions. The binary between Politics and politics breaks down quickly: Politics tries to govern politics, just as politics forms and inflects Politics. Still, the binary has heuristic power because both focalize attention on how scale influences the exertion and negotiation of power; how power is aggregated, built into systems, and reinforced through writing; and–as crucially–the roles that writing plays in effectively resisting and subverting the aggregation and exertion of power.
We welcome you to take up, push against, expand, or explode these two senses of politics. We welcome you to propose work that does more than criticize (though we certainly have and have need of much criticism!) or hew to party platforms. We welcome you to propose work that moves toward a more just, verdant, and peaceful world (to borrow from the MacArthur Foundation). We welcome you to consider what writing studies—the various spaces within it—might mean for politics even as we are mindful that writing is inherently political.
Below we offer possibilities for topics and questions; however, we are open to many different interpretations of this call.
Possible topics include but are not limited to the role of writing and composing in:
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conceptions, definitions, and frameworks for the study of political rhetoric, composition, and writing studies
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the politics of and beyond the writing classroom
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language and the evolving political lexicon
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academic freedom, and attacks thereon
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writing programs, writing centers, and critical literacy practices
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collective action and coalitional work about writing outside of the discipline
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anti-authoritarian/anti-oligarchic approaches to research, administration, teaching, and pedagogy
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labor and economics inside and outside of writing & writing programs
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genAI Politics (the huge push by the government and encouraging the establishing of large data centers) and politics (institutional approaches, journal policies, writing program policies and responses)
Possible driving questions include but are not limited to:
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How do we think through the challenges of writing and composing at local, regional, national, and international scales where, on one hand, discourse is degraded (through misinformation, disinformation, etc) and, on the other hand, argument is less effective and writing and composing more important than ever?
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What methods are available for studying the intersections of writing and politics in print and digital environments? What new methods might we need to develop?
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How do writing programs reflect (or reinforce) political agendas, institutional or otherwise?
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To what nearby disciplines–like communications, political science & theory, or economics–should writing instructors attend more closely, and why?
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What new, and perhaps further afield areas of interdisciplinary academic inquiry– like surveillance studies, crisis studies, and others–might we draw from and contribute to as we investigate the connections of writing and politics?
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What role does writing play in academic solidarity and activism within and beyond institutional spaces?
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What are the changing politics of genre, and what textual forms do they take?
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How do writing programs and writing centers participate in or challenge institutional power through their approaches to addressing issues related to language, labor, and access?
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What are the ethical and political stakes of composing in algorithm-driven spaces where surveillance, automation, and platform logics influence meaning-making, knowledge production, and authorship credibility?
Submission Information
CCC invites proposals for all of its genres for this special issue, and proposal length varies depending on the genre proposed. The proposals for all genres are peer-reviewed, and you can find more information about writing for CCC here.
Article – Proposals for special issue articles should be around 500 words. Finalized articles should be no longer than 7,500 words and should make an original contribution to the discipline.
Research Brief – Proposals for the research brief should be around 250 words. The research brief is a new genre at CCC that aims to synthesize the research on a given topic in 2,500-3,000 words.
Review Essay – Proposals for review essays should list the major works—whether print, digital, or a mix—proposed for review and should be around 250 words. The review essay is a synthetic review of multiple (three to five, usually) major works on a given topic in the discipline and tends to be no more than 3,000 words in length.
We welcome proposals from marginalized scholars, international researchers and writers, and scholars from diverse institutional types such as two-year or tribal colleges. We encourage collaboration and coauthorship.
If you’re interested in writing anonymously or under a pseudonym because of the current political climate at your workplace, please email us to discuss this as an option.
Submission Information
No later than September 1, 2025, please submit your proposal via email as a .docx file to ccceditorialteam following the word-count guidelines listed above for the appropriate genre. Acceptance notifications will be sent in October 2025, and full manuscripts will be due February 1, 2026.
Tentative Timeline
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Proposals Due: September 1, 2025
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Peer-Review Decisions and Feedback to Authors: October 2025
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Full Drafts Due: February 1, 2026
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Peer-Review Decisions and Feedback to Authors: March 2026
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Final Drafts Due: April 15, 2026
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Publication: September 2026
If you have questions about the special issue theme or proposal process, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at ccceditorialteam.
Best,
Matt & Kara
Editorial Team, College Composition & CommunicationMatt Davis and Kara Taczak, Editors
Megan Busch, Managing Editor