CFP: Blank-in-the-loop Writing: Rethinking Processes, Tools, and Workflows – A Sweetland DRC Blog Carnival Call

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Dear colleagues,

I am writing to share a call for proposals (pasted below and linked here) for an upcoming Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative blog carnival broadly framed as [blank]-in-the-loop writing. Brief proposals are due by Wednesday, April 8. We genuinely hope the call will elicit widespread interest, and we would appreciate you forwarding this to anyone who you think would be interested in submitting a proposal. We’re optimistic about the timeline leading to a prospective carnival publishing window around the end of May, within the week or so prior to Computers & Writing (June 4-7).

Please direct any questions both to co-editor Mehdi Mohammadi (mmoh81 AT unm.edu) and to me at derekmu AT umich.edu.

All the best,

Derek

Blog Carnival 25: [Blank]-in-the-loop Writing: Rethinking Processes, Tools, and Workflows – A Sweetland DRC Blog Carnival Call

Mehdi Mohammadi & Derek Mueller

We invite you to join us for a blog carnival in renewed observance of writing’s warpy, elastic loops. By elastic loops, we mean writing processes that are flexible, adaptive, and continuously reshaped by shifting contexts, tools, and participants. In this sense, in-the-loop writing refers to composing practices in which human and nonhuman agents—writers, collaborators, software, platforms—interact dynamically, each shaping how writing unfolds. These loops are warpy not only because they shift and stretch, but because they are situated: they take shape within particular material, institutional, and rhetorical conditions that influence what is possible in any given moment.

In “Machine-in-the-loop writing: Optimizing the rhetorical load” (2024), Alan Knowles offers a theoretical framework for Rhetorical Load Sharing (RLS), describing how writing tasks are distributed across these agents within accessorized workflows. Such workflows might include, for example, a writer drafting in a word processor, consulting sources through search engines, using generative AI for brainstorming or revision, and coordinating feedback through collaborative platforms. Knowles emphasizes the ongoing rebalancing between human-in-the-loop (HITL) and machine-in-the-loop (MITL) writing, maintaining that we have much to learn as we write, teach, and collaborate along authorship spectrums—especially at a moment when generative AI tools are being rapidly promoted and adopted across higher education.

We find Knowles’ framework productively extended in Michael Salvo and John Sherrill’s Artificial Infrastructures (2025), which explores contemporary uses of generative AI by writers. Salvo and Sherrill examine specific use cases as a way of tracing authorship continuums along which humans and machines share rhetorical work. At the same time, critical and timely scholarship by Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Megan McIntyre, and Maggie Fernandes (on refusal), Dustin Edwards (on environmental harm), Annette Vee (on authorship and agency), contributors to Elisabeth Buck and Joshua Botvin’s edited collection (on writing centers), and CCCC executive leadership (on consent and transparency; see 2026 CCCC Resolutions) reminds us that these loops are not neutral. What may initially appear as simple human-machine interaction is often entangled with broader questions of labor, ethics, infrastructure, and power—sometimes with significant consequences. Beyond this selection, many more studies over the past several years have explored how generative AI is reshaping writing practices and conditions.

With this as pretext, we invite blog carnival entries that take up the premise of [blank]-in-the-loop writing, where contributors fill in the blank and elaborate on their choice. This framing invites attention to the complexity of writing loops and the many elements—expected or unexpected—that participate in them. One or more of the following questions may guide contributions:

  • What is reliably in-the-loop for you? What is surprisingly in-the-loop? How did its role emerge, and how does it participate in Rhetorical Load Sharing (RLS)?

  • Who or what is a routine or ritual part of your writing workflow? How does this shape the loop?

  • How has generative AI become part of (or been refused within) a specific writing situation?

  • Where does your writing loop break down, resist, or produce friction? What does that reveal about power, control, or dependency?

  • What ethical concerns emerge in your loop, and how do you respond to them?

  • How has your loop shifted recently? What changed, and what was gained or lost?

We invite serious, playful, and thoughtful extensions of these ideas. We envision a carnival that reflects a mosaic of ways writing workflows (or composing processes) skew, adapt, expand, redouble, simplify, and more. There is still much to explore about what is in the loop, and we invite participants to make those dynamics visible—offering new ways to understand the kaleidoscopic possibilities of writing today.

What is a Blog Carnival?

The Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative features medium-short form writing by scholars, teachers, and practitioners from across the field of rhetoric and composition/writing studies in periodic, thematic blog carnivals, open events called to convene a scholarly conversation held over a couple of weeks. Blog carnivals invite contributors to share diverse insights and perspectives from their scholarly work as teachers and researchers on a theme or topic, engaging the field in a more public setting than a paywalled journal or registration-only conference. We hope that this blog carnival functions as an opportunity for scholars to write and engage in dialogue about rhetorical load sharing (RLS), about the many variations on [blank]-in-the-loop writing that have been activated, deepened, or redrawn in recent years.

Carnival Specs – Timing, Scope, Guidelines

  • Submit descriptive proposals of up to 200 words by April 8, 2026.

  • Notifications of acceptance will be emailed by April 15, 2026. We envision this to be a maximally inclusive carnival in that if submissions exceed the number of entries we can feature on the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative website, overrun entries may be self-published (e.g., on WordPress or Substack), and we will include links to such entries in the carnival frontmatter.

  • Entries are due by Monday, May 11, 2026.

  • Suggested scope: 800-1200 words. Entries should include a title. The suggested word count does not include references. APA 7 is the preferred format.

  • Multimodal elements (e.g., photographs, diagrams, illustrations, video or audio clips) must include captions, credit attributions, and a copyright disclosure.

  • Generative AI disclosure: Include a brief statement about any uses of generative artificial intelligence in the development of the contribution. Simply, with the goal of transparency, we ask contributors to note whether and how GenAI tools were used (or explicitly refused).

  • Editorial correspondence: Please direct any questions both to Mehdi Mohammadi (mmoh81 AT unm.edu) and Derek Mueller (derekmu AT umich.edu).

-end-

Derek N. Mueller
Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature
University of Michigan
On research leave/duty off campus until June 30, 2026
derekmu || http://www.derekmueller.net/rc/