I’d like to get some work from this MA before an audience. We talked about conferences, seminars, residencies and abstracts of papers last week at our drop-in with Michele, who gave us good info on this.
Next day Anna sent me details https://spaces.oca.ac.uk/wallet6/wp-content/uploads/sites/3554/2023/07/CFP-Writing-Artifacts-Edited-Collection.pdf of a CFP (call for papers) on something relevant for me.
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CFP: Writing Artifacts (Edited Collection)
Cydney Alexis•07/11/2023Announcement
Call for Papers
Date: July 6, 2023
Location: Texas, United States
Subject Fields
Art, Art History & Visual Studies,, Business History / Studies,, Composition & Rhetoric,, Cultural History / Studies,, Race / Ethnic Studies
Call for Proposals: Writing Artifacts (edited collection)
In our first edited collection The Material Culture of Writing (2022), we call for others to join us in addressing a gap in writing studies: scholarship on the histories and uses of writing artifacts that reveal the material lives of those who work with them. This CFP extends that effort. For this edited collection titled Writing Artifacts, we invite scholars in writing studies and material culture studies, as well as those across disciplines who study writing or writing artifacts, to help us build a rich archive of the objects and possessions that matter to the study and practice of writing–broadly construed.
What is a writing artifact? For the purposes of this collection, we mean any material thing taken up in acts of writing: tools, implements, possessions, objects–material and immaterial (such as digital objects)–that can teach us about writers and writing. Any mundane human thing can be an artifact when we approach it as worthy of study. Artifacts might be one writer’s personal possessions or heirlooms or those that communities rely on to achieve communal tasks or goals. They could be small objects or large ones, artifacts that uncover the histories of marginalized groups, forgotten or lost objects, or writing tools that we know little about, but about which we want to know more. We are interested in range, from a nineteenth-century “secretaire” desk to the library card, the writing on which could be used to trace sociomaterial inequities across communities. By writing, we signal both alphabetic scribal acts and acts of multimodal, symbolic meaning-making. Our hope is to see the lives, writing histories, and writing practices of everyday people reflected in the artifacts documented in this volume.
To help writers and scholars in diverse disciplines and from diverse professional writing backgrounds envision topics, we offer the following non-exhaustive list of potential focal objects:
- An heirloom, historical artifact, or object in your writing practice or home that you’re curious about researching
- Objects that have undergone “shift” in use during the pandemic or other times of flux/crisis
- Objects that undergird the writing process, even if they’re not traditional writing “objects”
- Sentimental or talismanic objects, those that sustain writing habits
- Objects that gatekeep, surveil, regulate, or impede writing
- Marginalized objects, ones that traditionally have not been showcased or preserved
- Literacy artifacts
- Writing identity artifacts
- Objects that might not at first glance seem like writing tools, but trigger writing and writing identity performance in public or private
- Objects that sustain or tell the stories of members of marginalized communities
- Mundane or vernacular objects
- Objects relevant to specific disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, or discourse community practices
- Objects related to research and lab practices
- Medical or health-related writing objects
- Workplace objects related to writing practice or production, including workplace sites such as businesses, libraries, and printing presses
- Writing and research tools, including AI-created/informed artifacts; coding, citation, and research management software; and revision tools
- Any object, really: such as office or desk objects, tools, digital files, good luck charms, art, music, devices, a rolodex, old communication technologies, new communication technologies, dining room tables, a laptop, family heirlooms, thrifted objects, an item housed in your university or workplace archives, hacked or modified objects, photographs that involve writing, quilts, typewriters, and assistive technologies such as screen readers.
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This sounds really appropriate for me. I think I’ll try to do it, if it doesn’t distract too much from the MA.
