The Eastern Michigan University Written Communication Program and the Michigan State University Writing and Digital Environments Research Center invite you (faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, teachers, community members, anyone interested) to propose ideas for the fourth WIDE-EMU, a free (un)conference on Saturday, October 10, 2015 in East Lansing, Mich. We seek proposals that engage the framing question for this year’s event:
Is ____ writing?
What counts as writing? The definition of what we consider to be writing is constantly shifting, evolving, and expanding. Writing classrooms now ask students to work with social media, web design, data visualization, image manipulation, and a myriad of other artifacts and practices. The question is: can we call any of those activities writing? How does writing relate to audio, visual, digital, and multimodal composing processes? How do we situate writing in the classroom, especially when students increasingly engage in the production of artifacts that feature a range of modes (textual, visual, sonic, haptic, digital, and more)? Is writing different from or similar to making? Should multimodal making be considered writing? What are the institutional and disciplinary pressures for claiming writing? Who has the agency to claim what is/isn’t writing? What are the implications of assigning writing to all forms of making? What discourses do we construct and perpetuate by claiming the act of writing? In an age of digital consumption and production, how do we prepare students for complex work that goes far beyond the act of writing? Learn more about WIDE-EMU ’15 at https://sites.google.com/site/wideemu15/.
