[ecrea] CFP: Reading and Writing in the Twenty-First-Century Literary Studies Classroom: Theory and Practice

Cfp reading conference

Reading and Writing in the Twenty-First-Century Literary Studies 
Classroom: Theory and Practice
The University of Queensland
Brisbane, Australia
6-8 July 2017

Deadline for submissions: 3 February 2017
Contact for general queries: Judith Seaboyer (j.seaboyer /at/ uq.edu.au)
Confirmed speakers:
Dr David Aldridge, Oxford Brookes University
Dr Tully Barnett, Flinders University
Professor Helen Sword, University of Auckland

Please send 250-word proposals for papers, panels, or workshops by 3 
February 2017 to (readingwritingtheorypractice /at/ gmail.com) with the subject 
line Reading and Writing cfp.

This broad-ranging conference will assume good reading and its 
concomitant good writing to be essential both to the mastery of 
disciplinary content and to the transformative potential of an education 
in literary studies. To that end we seek papers that consider reading 
and writing from a range of perspectives, practical and theoretical. 
What are the challenges, difficulties, and pleasures for students and 
teachers? What strategies and techniques encourage timely compliance 
with course reading requirements and foster critically engaged, 
well-argued responses? What critical theories model critique in the 
twenty-first-century classroom, and what might be, as Rita Felski has 
recently asked, the limits of that critique? Reading that is active and 
thus potentially critical, ethical, creative, hospitable, 
transformative-and pleasurable-may be intrinsic to disciplinary 
knowledge, but how do we help students acquire the skills needed to 
de-code complex texts and respond to them?    And what effects are 
twenty-first-century technologies/modes of knowledge production and 
dissemination having on how as well as what students do and don't read? 
What are the intersections and tensions between digital and traditional 
ways of reading and writing? Does constant hyperlinking, as Naomi Baron, 
Nicholas Carr and others have suggested, undermine the brain's capacity 
to focus in order to process long-form text? How might we foster what 
neuroscientist and literacy researcher Maryanne Wolf has termed 
bi-literacy, the capacity to shift between, and indeed to distinguish 
between, two kinds of activities: the efficient reading-for-information 
that involves scanning, clicking, linking and the "slow and meditative 
possession of a book" literary scholar and essayist Sven Birkerts has 
termed "deep reading"?  What platforms do your students use for reading 
and writing? In what ways is technology changing student drafting, 
reviewing, and response to feedback?
       Finally, what texts and what kinds of texts and what theories of 
reading and writing are core in an increasingly marketised university in 
which non-vocational degrees are increasingly marginalised? And how 
might an education that fosters an imaginative, thoughtful, hospitable, 
adaptable citizenry, give students an edge in a job market in crisis?
       Some starting points:
* How do we empower our students to write "with passion, with skill, 
with courage, and with style"? (Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing)
* How do we test the invisible activity that is reading? * What kinds of 
assessment best develop reading and/or writing skills? Tests or writing 
or a blend of both? * What texts and what genres do we choose to teach, 
and why? * Do we encourage our students to be surface or symptomatic 
readers? Is what Paul Ricoeur termed a "hermeneutics of suspicion" "a 
mandatory injunction [or] a possibility among other possibilities"? (Eve 
Kosofsky Sedgwick). * How much are we influenced by outside forces? How 
are programs shaped by shrinking budgets combined with the massification 
of tertiary education? And what influence do debates such as the one 
over trigger warnings have on how and what we teach, and on student 
learning? * Can literature, or literary criticism, effect change? What 
work can texts perform? For example, can literature, as Martha Nussbaum 
insists, "[cultivate] powers of imagination that are essential to 
citizenship"? Or is this a consolatory fiction, as Suzanne Keen suggests?
* How do we evaluate reading? What assumptions about taste cultures, 
cultural competences, and the ethics of engagement with texts are 
embedded in the ways we model, teach, and assess student reading? * What 
are the affordances of technologies? How are they changing the way 
students read and write? How do we help students to makes sense of and 
benefit most from a range of platforms for both activities?
* As workloads and the ratio of students to instructors increase, can 
technology encourage better student reading and writing? * How might we 
foster bi-literacy?
* What might be the repercussions, pedagogical and financial, of online 
education, including MOOCs, for reading and writing in literary studies?
* Do long-form reading and/or writing remain important skills?
* What are the effects of shifts from solitary to online social reading?
* What cognitive differences occur when reading and writing take place 
on digital rather than traditional platforms?
* Is there a link between complex critical reading skills and better 
writing?
* Full-time enrolment by part-time students: How might we inspire 
students to immerse themselves in reading and writing about their 
discipline in the face of day-to-day time constraints, genuine and 
perceived, and the awareness that it's possible to scrape a passing 
grade while having read very little? * Can good reading and writing 
skills give our students an edge on the job market? And how do we, and 
our students, sell those critical skills?

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