Writing the Impossible into Being: Linguistic Justice, Counternarrative, and Preposterous Futures
Crisis conditions—political, institutional, ecological—do more than constrain; they produce kairotic openings. Under conditions of chaos, what counts as sayable, legible, and possible is both contested and reconfigured. In these moments, linguistic justice, counternarrative, and speculative/multimodal composing practices emerge not only as tools of critique, but as methods of worldmaking.
Dominant discourse determines what is plausible. It policies language, regulates voice, and narrows the boundaries of imagination. Yet, as scholars such as April Baker-Bell, Aja Y. Martinez, and Audre Lorde remind us, language is never neutral—it is a site of struggle, possibility, and transformation.
This CFP invites scholars, teachers, and practitioners to explore how:
- Linguistic justice disrupts dominant language ideologies
- Radical reimagining fosters preposterous writing opportunities
- Counternarrative challenges, reframes, and reimagines lived experience
- Speculative, impossible, or “preposterous” writing enables writers to compose futures that institutions render unthinkable
Rather than asking what writing is, this conversation asks:
- What futures can writing make possible?
- What becomes sayable when writers refuse the limits of dominant discourse?
This CFP is grounded in the understanding that:
- Counternarrative is retrospective, resistant, and futural
- Linguistic justice is both a pedagogical and political intervention
- Speculative and multimodal composing practices are not escapist—they are epistemological
- Radical reimagining creates hopeful writing spaces that facilitate safe harbors for students, faculty, teacher-scholars and community activists
Drawing on work such as:
- Louise Dunlap (cultures of silence)
- Bettina Love (abolitionist teaching)
- Angela Davis (radical reimagination)
- April Baker-Bell (linguistic justice)
- Jarvis R. Givens (the art of Black Teaching)
- Patrick Reinsborough & Doyle Canning (narrative power)
- bell hooks (language as a place of struggle)
- Audre Lorde (silence will not protect us)
- Aja Y. Martinez (disrupting the erasures in standardized, majoritarian methods)
We seek to explore how writing functions as a site of intervention—a way to interrupt silencing, challenge normativity, and imagine otherwise.
We welcome proposals that engage (but are not limited to):
- Linguistic Justice & Language Politics
- Anti-racist and anti-carceral approaches to writing assessment and feedback
- Translingual, code-meshing, and language sovereignty practices
- Institutional constraints on language and voice
Counternarrative as Method & Praxis
- Autoethnography, testimony, and narrative resistance
- Teaching counternarrative in composition classrooms
- Personal Narrative as a tool for disrupting dominant epistemologies
Speculative / Impossible / Preposterous Writing
- Afrofuturism, speculative storytelling, and radical imagination
- Writing as worldmaking in contexts of constraint or crisis
- “Preposterous” or excessive/unrestricted writing as a refusal of institutional norms
Multimodal & Transnational Composing
- Digital, sonic, visual, and embodied rhetorics
- COIL and global/transnational writing pedagogies
- Protest, music, and multimodal resistance
Writing Futures in Times of Crisis
- Pedagogies of hope, refusal, and imagination
- Writing in the context of political repression, climate crisis, or institutional rollback
- Designing assignments that move students beyond critique into futurity
Reimagining Dialogic Support/Feedback in AI Saturated Spaces
- Anti-carceral feedback models (Fernandes et al., 2023; Moro, 2020)
- Community storytelling with climate-affected groups
- Culturally-sustaining assessment practices
- Accessibility-forward writing program design
- Data feminism
- Design justice (Libertz, 2025)
Submit by email to rasheda.young and dr.liz by end of day on Monday, May 18. Please include:
- Title
- Abstract (250-300 words)
- Brief bio (100 words)