CFP: Writing & Pedagogy Special Issue on Disciplinary Ruptures in Writing Studies

Please consider submitting a proposal for a Writing & Pedagogy special issue focused on disciplinary ruptures in writing studies. See the full call below and reach out to the editorial team if you have any questions.

Disciplinary Ruptures in Writing Studies: Loss, Transformation, and Renewal

Academic institutions and professional networks are built around the presumption of continuity and shared history. However, journals cease publication, programs suspend admissions, degrees are eliminated, departments consolidated, and professional organizations dissolved or radically restructured. Such endings are often narrated administratively: as consequences of declining enrollments, financial pressures, institutional reorganization, or changing disciplinary priorities. Disciplinary networks, whatever form they take, are finite; however, even after they cease to function, these entities continue to shape the field through their archives and their absences, through the relationships and practices they leave behind, and through the pathways and possibilities their endings afford.

This special issue of Writing & Pedagogy asks what happens when institutions, publications, and programs that support writing research and instruction end. What intellectual, pedagogical, and communal capacities disappear with them? What persists through their archives, practices, people, and disciplinary afterlives? And what possibilities emerge when an ending allows us to see an institution more clearly and to distinguish what should be mourned and preserved from what might be reconsidered, relinquished, or rebuilt differently?

The recent dechartering of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a professional organization that has existed in the United States for 77 years to support composition scholars and practitioners, is at the forefront of many of our minds, but it is neither the first institutional ending writing studies has confronted nor the only one this special issue seeks to consider. We invite contributors from across the globe to examine the endings, disappearances, transformations, and afterlives of journals, academic programs, degrees, departments, professional organizations, conferences, centers, and other institutional formations connected to writing and pedagogy. We are especially interested in work that treats institutional finitude not only as an occasion for commemoration or critique, but also as a source of disciplinary learning: What can an ending teach us about how to build more durable, equitable, and responsive institutions next time?

Possible topics and approaches include, but are not limited to:

• Content analyses, research reviews, or archival studies of discontinued journals and other defunct publications, including attention to the conversations, methodologies, pedagogies, or communities that disappeared with them;
• Research-informed accounts of journals, programs, departments, centers, conferences, or professional organizations that closed, were consolidated, or underwent substantial restructuring, shift in funding streams, with particular attention to principles that might guide future institutions undertaking similar work;
• Firsthand accounts, autoethnographies, oral histories, or interview studies documenting efforts to sustain initiatives amid administrative indifference, institutional opposition, financial precarity, declining enrollment, leadership turnover, or changing disciplinary priorities;
• Case studies of institutional endings that examine how decisions were made, whose perspectives counted, how consequences were distributed, and what alternatives were (or were not) considered;
• Analyses of the labor involved in maintaining, closing, archiving, or rebuilding academic institutions, particularly the often-unrecognized work of contingent faculty, graduate students, staff, editors, program administrators, and community partners;
• Studies of institutional memory and forgetting, including questions of archival preservation, digital disappearance, inaccessible records, interrupted intellectual genealogies, and the responsibilities of those who inherit an institution’s materials;
• Accounts of the communities, professional identities, mentoring relationships, pedagogical traditions, or scholarly conversations displaced when an institution ends;
• Investigations of institutional afterlives: the ways people, ideas, practices, publications, and networks migrate into new organizations or persist outside the structures that originally sustained them;
• Comparative or historical studies of institutional closure, consolidation, reinvention, or succession within writing studies or adjacent fields;
• Critical reconsiderations of nostalgia, legacy, and preservation: What deserves to endure? What should be relinquished? When might an ending constitute an opportunity rather than a failure?
• Proposals or speculative models for building more durable, equitable, adaptable, and responsive journals, programs, departments, centers, conferences, and professional organizations;
• Pedagogical approaches that bring institutional histories, endings, archives, or afterlives into writing classrooms and curricula.

We welcome empirical, historical, archival, theoretical, and methodological scholarship, as well as research-informed narratives, institutional case studies, oral histories, interviews, dialogues, and other forms appropriate to the experiences and questions under consideration.

Proposals for January 30th should be between 300 and 500 words and include Author(s), Title, Abstract for the article. Proposal submissions are due to Jessica Early at jessica.early by January 30th, 2027.