CFP for Collection on Undocumented Youth
After winning a presidential race characterized by scandal and bigotry, President-elect Donald Trump has set his sights on undocumented youth, some of whom have lived in relative safety under President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Trump has vowed to eliminate DACA--an Obama executive order that provides deferred deportation and work permits to undocumented young people brought to the US by their parents--making the threat of deportation all too real for undocumented youth. He has also signed two executive orders that target undocumented persons, restrict sanctuary cities, build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and ban legal residents with green cards and visas. The resurgence of state-sanctioned persecution of undocumented youth highlights an urgent need for scholars, teachers, and activists to refocus our work on undocumented youth in order to question the ethics of policies and practices that seek to deport these young members of our society. This is especially true for scholars and teachers of rhetoric and writing, as we find ourselves teaching undocumented students in our courses while the field itself reconsiders how its pedagogical and scholarly practices--what we do, who we do it for, and what our methods are--are situated within departments and institutions.
Because undocumented young people are part of our classrooms and communities, this book considers how scholarship in rhetoric and composition can respond to the continuing precarities of this population. Expanding on the work that has been done in relation to migrant literacies and positionalities, this collection seeks to more directly put these strands into conversation through a focus on undocumented youth, with new work that encompasses activism, policy analysis, post- and de-colonial critique, transnationalism, and others. This collection will be the first of its kind to bring together work on undocumented youth within the discipline of rhetoric and composition. The book will also feature writing by undocumented college students, as their voices are of utmost importance in this sociohistorical moment.
We invite contributions that consider the following:
Teaching, assigning, and assessing writing
Community-engaged and service learning pedagogies
Activism and advocacy in and out of the classroom
Teaching and learning in institutions of higher ed
Building cultural and social literacies
Program design and administration
We welcome submissions in the form of an essay, classroom study, or research article. Our goal is to start a new and pressing conversation about how the teaching and study of rhetoric, writing, and literacy should proceed in an era when so many of our students lack legal status, or live in realities informed by disparities in legal status.
The primary audience for this collection will be U.S. Rhetoric and Composition scholars, but we are encouraging international submissions and expect the collection to be of interest to scholars who study or teach writing, rhetoric, and literacy in other contexts.
Genevieve Garcia de Mueller (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), Rubén Casas (California State University, Fresno), and Ana Milena Ribero (Oregon State University)
Timeline and proposal specifications:
All proposals are due by August 1, 2017. Please e-mail proposals to firstname.lastname@example.org, as an attachment. Determinations on proposals will be made by August 30, 2017, and acceptances will be sent out soon thereafter. All review drafts for chapters will be due by January 5, 2018.
Proposals should be 2-4 pages (~600-1,200 words) and provide the following information: a proposed title for your chapter, an abstract, and the author’s contact information, title, and institutional affiliation. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified and sent chapter style guidelines. Final chapters will be in APA style. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a triple-blind review basis.