Therefore he is going to hold a preliminary get-to-know-you and project information meeting in the Performing Arts and Humanities Building, Room 441, on Friday, October 28th, from twelve till one fifty p.m. 

The meeting is open to all UMBC undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in participating for academic credit and experience.

Pizza will be provided.

If you have any question, write to mflane@umbc.edu.

See also the attached flyers.

Hoping to see you there!

MFL

The LLC has just released the schedule of classes for this coming Spring (see schedule here). Registration begins on October 31st. Keep in mind that these are the classes offered by our department's faculty and affiliate faculty.

As a reminder, you cannot register for any classes without first obtaining permission from your LLC advisor, so you are encouraged to consult with your advisor in a timely fashion. 

For more information, check out the website below.

Community writing teachers, students, scholars, and activists are in the unique position to study and influence how writing, images, and ideas create impact and circulate to address the issues facing our communities—climate change, population movements related to climate and political instability, systemic misogyny, racially motivated police killings, mass incarceration, expansion of corporate rights, resurgence of anti-immigrant rhetorics, educational injustices, gun violence—from both scholarly and practical perspectives. We believe that we are at a crossroads for higher education, broadly, and for Rhetoric and Writing Studies, specifically, and we must engage deeply, through every facet of our work, with the task at hand, with the ecology in which we live, and with the other members of our ecology, to whom we are profoundly connected.

For the 2017 conference, we ask that you think of this evolving entity not only as an infrastructure but as an ecology. The second Conference on Community Writing will convene around the theme of “Engaging Networks and Ecologies.” This theme alludes to academic theories, but is also grounded in daily practice and lived experience. Networks mean people having relationships: teachers with students, activists with governance, community members with students, and so on, and these can be in real or virtual environments. Ecologies mean the places we live, the health of the bodies that make up communities, and the interconnectedness of humans, non-humans, things, and places.  We function within our community ecologies, however large or small in size.  It is clear that impacts in parts of our ecology reverberate and can resonate in other parts. We witness this through our work in environmental communication, community literacies, service-learning, community publishing, advocacy writing, archival research, community-based research, critical literacies, activist rhetorics, and the many other kinds of work we do both inside and outside of the academy.

We also want to invoke, through our conference theme, theories of ecological writing studies, and to suggest a more deliberate synergy between these theories and those of community writing.  Following the social turn in rhetoric and composition, and the subsequent attention given to postprocess theories of writing, “ecology” became an increasingly popular lens through which to understand writing, as in ecological models of writing and student positioning (Cooper; Syverson), ecocomposition (Dobrin and Weisser), rhetorical ecologies (Edbauer), and postcomposition (Dobrin).  By engaging with the complex writing and rhetorical ecologies of, for example, texts, images, hashtags, or memes discussing racially motivated killings or misogynist political discourse, or of responses both on the ground and over social media to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests or the Long Island University faculty lockout, community writing scholarship and praxis has the potential to help catalyze change in communities writ small and large.

With all of these theories and implications of the concepts of networks and ecologies in mind, we ask:

We welcome proposals that address any of these questions or that interpret our theme in any number of ways.  Aca­d­e­mics of all lev­els, community partners, public intellectuals, activists, and students involved with engage­d pedagogy, research, activism, and social change are invited to submit a proposal for an indi­vid­ual paper, a pan­el of 3 or more pre­sen­ters, a roundtable discussion, an interactive work­shop, or a dig­i­tal “poster”  that will help us under­stand how writ­ing func­tions socially to inform, empower, and trans­form, as well as how we can engage networks and ecologies to sup­port community-based research, ped­agogy, and activism.

For more information visit: http://www.communitywriting.org/cfp/ 

Disclaimer: The LLC Program does not sponsor this event. Please consult the conference's webpage for more information.

The HASTAC Scholars application period is now open. Selected Scholars will serve a two-year term, beginning on November 1, 2016, and concluding on October 30, 2018. Read on for all the details you need to know in order to apply. Thank you for your interest! 

This program is designed to be shaped by the HASTAC Scholars each year. The HASTAC Scholars program is directed by two Ph.D. students—Kalle Westerling (CUNY) and Allison Guess (CUNY). These two directors provide leadership and arrange opportunities for the cohort of Scholars.

What do HASTAC Scholars actually do?

To know more about the application process, please visit: bit.ly/apply-to-hastac-scholars