Sam Phillips, Violet Livingston, Timothy Oleksiak, and Stephanie West-Puckett, guest editors

This is an open call to academics across rank and community leaders.

Too much is happening without our consent—without concern for the right that each of us has to create boundaries, have them respected, and move in the world with pleasure, joy, and self-determination.

Global political leaders and CEOs of corporations degrade our planet even as a mass chorus of people demand they stop. Kids in Flint, MI have not consented to drink lead. In the United States, the Supreme Court initiated chaos with its Dobbs decision, which prevents women’s bodily autonomy. Child bearing people did not consent to having their choices determined for them. Edutech companies like Turnitin insist that students, whose papers are required to be uploaded, retain the rights to their work but educators fail to instruct them on what that means or how such companies profit off students’ free labor. Students do not consent to having their ideas monetized without sharing in the profits. To our minds, we cannot help but understand consent as a, if not the crucial topic of seriously playful consideration. This special issue brings together rhetoric, composition, literacy, literature, linguistics, and creative writing scholar-teachers to consider what consent is, what it might be, and how thinking with consent might shape the way we do our work.

As co-editors, we have taken the ideas of consent playfully seriously beginning with the work of Violet Livingston and her dissertation. Timothy Oleksiak has published in this journal on consent as a practice of writing and has forthcoming work on consent in the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Rhetoric. Steph West-Puckett’s award-winning Failing Sideways comes at the idea of the shared negotiation of student and teacher boundaries… sideways. As an emerging scholar, Sam Phillips’s conference presentations and dissertation work engage deeply with ideas of rhetorical consent in the writing classroom. Each of us has taken these ideas seriously as queer, feminist thinkers.

Our working definition of consent is the successful, autonomous and willing communication of all parties’ desire to engage in an interaction, including but not limited to the verbal and embodied acts that indicate affirmation or refusal of requests. Consent is a fantasy that allows us to transform the pain of the present moment with the hope for a more just and pleasurable future. Rhetorical consent is the idea that we can invent the rhetorics necessary to negotiate our power, pleasure, autonomy, interdependence, participation and bodies within and beyond institutions of higher learning, as queer and historically marginalized people have always done. In this way, consent becomes a politic of world-building offering alternative possibilities for new futures. We are interested in moving from consent as a critical feminist value to dynamic feminist praxis.

Our intention is to illustrate to the English studies community how nimble and important consent as a meaningful concept is and what potentials are embedded within a careful study of consent. We invite scholars from across English studies to consider eight domains that have kairotic appeal for those of us interested in consent as a feminist praxis.

 

Domain 1: Composition Theory, Practice, or Praxis

What teaching practices emerge from a capacious imagining of what consent could be and where it might lead students? Those interested in pedagogies of consent might explore how basic theories of pedagogy might be augmented and enlarged when consent is an articulated value. Consider not just what students read in a consent-informed pedagogy, but how they read and what writing is possible through such experiences. A pedagogy of rhetorical consent intersects with the principles of Students’ Right to Their Own Language.

 

Domain 2: Assessment

How does an expanded understanding of consent shape the way we respond to student writing, approach program assessment, and enact effective teacher training? Recent work describing an “ethical turn” in writing assessment (East and Slomp, 2023) encourages a focus on students as equitable participants in writing assessment. Consent as a framework allows English studies scholars to consider students not only as passive subjects of assessment, but as actively negotiating the terms of assessment itself (Von Bergen, 2023). We encourage proposals that consider consent as a tool to decenter normative assessment practices and create space for students’ minoritized, queer, idiosyncratic language practices.

 

Domain 3: Administration

What are the fundamental values in administration that can be unsettled or enabled with a more deliberate focus on consent? We imagine contributors might consider how consent frameworks can influence writing program and writing center administration, critique sedimented practice and imagine more capacious approaches (and guiding documents) on local, national, and international scales (Perryman-Clark, 2023; Perryman-Clark and Craig, 2019). Similarly, we invite contributions that consider how consent frameworks can help writing program administrators and unit leaders negotiate boundaries and create consensual relationships within departments and with upper administration.

 

Domain 4: Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Key Terms

How might we develop the theories crucial for English studies more purposefully with consent as a grounding concept? Here we encourage contributors to consider key concepts like exigence, stasis, narrative, etc. as a focus. What new knowledge emerges when we think about consent and these key terms together? Alternatively, what key terms specifically related to consent are necessary to theorize and put into action if consent rhetorics are to advance?

 

Domain 5: Digital and Technological Consent

In the age of machine writing and AI-generated image, sound, and moving image, how does thinking about and with consent shape our human-computer composing interactions? How might consent frameworks serve as guiding technologies to mitigate against loss of privacy, data protection, and surveillance when composing with AI? What layers exist or need to exist to disrupt automated consent and help composers make informed decisions about risk and benefit?

 

Domain 6: Creative Writing Theory and Practice

What tropes, cliches, or barriers to writing creatively about violations of consent should creative writers consider as they develop their craft? What techniques for creative nonfiction or fiction should writers consider beyond trigger warnings (Livingston, 2015) to prepare readers for potentially violent experiences in our writing? How should we theorize consent in the craft of creative nonfiction or fiction?

 

Domain 7: Literary Studies and the Teaching of Literature

In their introductory remarks to a colloquium, “Historicizing Consent: Bodies, Wills, and Desires,” Harris and Somerset (2022) suggest, “If we attend closely to past conversations about consent rather than imposing our own assumptions, their insights into what is at stake can bring new perspectives to our own present” (270). What theories, meanings, and values within literary texts (think Chaucer, Shakespeare, the poetry of Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Toni Morrison, etc.) can enrich our understanding of the histories of consent and their influence on our present?

 

Domain 8: Linguistics and Multilingual, Translingual, and Critical Language Awareness

How might we think through the tacit, institutionalized, and coerced “consent” on standardized English language and Western cultural, intellectual, and rhetorical traditions at large in academia? We encourage proposals that consider the ways consent might facilitate or problematize efforts to de-center normative English and embrace Black language (Baker-Bell, 2020; Inoue 2015; Young, 2018), global Englishes (Wang, 2022; Jimenez, 2021), and/or mad (Price, 2011) language practices.

The contributions in this special issue may come at any of these questions and categories obliquely. We are specifically seeking contributions from scholars, teachers, and activists from historically marginalized groups and/or contributions that attend to the intellectual traditions of these groups—critical AI studies, machine learning, critiques or advances of EduTech, Critical Race Theory, Critical Literacies, Decolonial/Anti-colonial critiques, Critiques of American Empire, Multilingual language learners and global Englishes, Black feminist praxis, Queer of Color critique, new Methods and Methodologies that emerge from a deep consideration of consent as a practice of writing. We are committed to careful mentorship of proposals through the publication process and respect the autonomy of authors to work in their theoretical and methodological traditions.

 

Genres and What to Submit

We seek a wide range of epistemological and methodological approaches to the ideas discussed in this proposal. Three of us have written in non-traditional academic genres and strongly encourage experimentation that ranges from lyric essays to the development of interactive, computer-simulated experiences that emerge from disciplinary scholarship and an author’s lived realities (see Oleksiak, 2018; West-Puckett and Shepley, 2019; Livingston, 2020; Hawkins, 2022 for examples). More specifically, we encourage colleges to compose:

• Formal academic prose grounded in deep scholarly expertise (5,000-6,000 suggested word count)
• Counterstories bringing consent and Critical Race Theory together
• Assessment practices emerging from a consideration of consent
• A critical discourse analysis of uninformed consent on the linguistic hegemony of standardized English and a Western rhetorical tradition
• Empirical studies of consent pedagogies that account for the messy uptakes and failures in a specific writing context
• Poetry on theories and pedagogies of consent
• Photography with artists’ statements and accompanying alt-text descriptions
• Administrative policies revived or emerging from a precisely articulated consent framework
• Community Engaged Literacy programs and assessments grounded in consent
• Personal, lyric, or reportage-style creative nonfiction essays on consent theories, practices, pedagogies, and methods
• Theoretically-grounded classroom narratives, syllabi, or assignments reflecting on successes and failures with consent pedagogy
• Structured dialogues or interviews with consent activists
• Other forms of scholarship not listed

Please include the following information in your proposal (500-word maximum):

• Which of the eight domains do you believe your contribution engages?
• What issues relating to consent and English studies are you engaging in your work?
• What contribution type are you offering to the collection: academic research, non-academic research, poetry, image, structured dialogue, etc?
• 5–8 item bibliography (not included in 500-word limit)

 

Assessment of Proposals

We are looking for proposals that help us see what the final project will look like in printed form. Do we have a strong sense of what the deliverable will look like?

We also want an unambiguous engagement with the ideas and values of consent beyond a forensic analysis that seeks to determine if consent was given in a particular context.

We will read proposals in relation to each other to see which ideas fit with our own vision for the special collection.

As editors, we have committed to a developmental approach to feedback and decision-making. There will be no generic responses to your proposals. Collectively, we will look at both what is there in the proposal and what potentials for development we see. We have committed to the “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices” as a vision and will apply its values to our unique circumstances as editors. All contributing authors should also familiarize themselves with the CCCC “Position Statement on Citation Justice in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies.” We are committed to the spirit of the CCCC “Statement on Editorial Ethics” and the careful mentorship of proposals through the publication process and respect the autonomy of authors to work in their theoretical and methodological traditions.

 

Timeline 

Action Step	Date
Call for Proposals Circulate	September 9, 2024
Informational Zoom Session with Special Issue Editors View the session recording.	September 27, 2024 via zoom from 10–11 a.m. ET
Proposals Due to InformedRefusal@gmail.com	October 25, 2024 before 10 a.m. ET to account for technical troubles
Decisions Sent to Contributors	November 7–8, 2024
Complete MS to Special Issue Editors	March 4, 2025
Editorial Feedback to Contributors	May 9, 2025
MS Revisions Due to Special Issue Editors	August 7, 2025
Special Issue Submitted to College English	September 2, 2025
Publication of Special Issue	November 2025

 

Please submit proposals to us at InformedRefusal@gmail.com. Make sure to use the subject “Submission to CE Special Issue on Consent.”

Please feel safe and free to inquire with questions and concerns before deadlines. We believe deeply that no question is too silly or simple. We recognize that not every potential contributor has mentorship on the proposal process. We commit to educational support for those who request it and need it.

 

References

Anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices: A heuristic for editors, reviewers, and authors, 2021. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic.

Bahrainwala, Lamiyah, and Kate Lockwood Harris. “De-whitening Consent Amidst COVID-19 Rhetoric.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 109, no. 4, 2023, pp. 1–22.

Baker-Bell, April. Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Routledge, 2020.

East, Martin, and David Slomp. “The Ethical Turn in Writing Assessment: How Far Have We Come, and Where DO We Still Need to Go?” Language Teaching, vol. 57, 2023, pp. 1–12.

Fischel, Joseph J. Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice. U of California P, 2019.

Harris, Carissa M., and Fiona Somerset. “Introduction: Historicizing Consent: Bodies, Wills, Desires.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 44, 2022, pp. 268–271.

Hawkins, Ames. “Lettering Me Queer: An Open Letter to Gurlesque.” Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric. Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander, eds. 2022, pp. 328–338.

Inoue, Asao B. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Parlor Press, 2015.

Jimenez, Florianne. “Echoing + Resistant Imagining: Filipino Student Writing Under American Colonial Rule.” Journal for the History of Rhetoric, vol. 24, no. 1, 2021, pp. 39–53.

Kukla, Quill R. “A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent.” Ethics, vol. 131, no. 1-4, 2018, pp. 119–38.

Kulbaga, Theresa A., and Leland G. Spencer. Campus of Consent: Sexual and Social Justice in Higher Education, U of Massachusetts P, 2019.

Livingston, Violet. “Excerpts from Terms of Play: Poetics on Consent as Method.” Cluster on Queer Rhetorical Listening, edited by Timothy Oleksiak. Peitho 23.1 (Fall 2020).

———. (writing under Kathleen Ann Livingston) “On Rage, Shame, ‘Realness,’ and Accountability to Survivors.” Harlot, vol. 12, no. 4., pp. 1–16.

———. “Teaching Consent When a Perp is Running for President.” 4C4E zine (October 2017).

———. “‘Doing it All the Time’: A Queer Consent Workshop.” Peitho 18.1 (Fall/Winter 2015).

Lockwood Harris, Kate. “Yes Means Yes and No Means No, but Both These Mantras Need to Go: Communication Myths in Consent Education and Anti-Rape Activism.” Journal of Applied Communication Research, vol. 46, no. 2, 2018, pp. 155–178.

MacKinnon, Catharine A. “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: ‘Pleasure under Patriarchy.’” Ethics, vol. 99, no. 2, 1989, pp. 314–346.

Oleksiak, Timothy. “Composing Consent as a Response to the Challenge of Openness.” College English, vol. 84, no. 5, 2022, pp. 429–446.

———. “Necessary Foreclosures or, Notes on Consent as a Practice of Writing.” Routledge Handbook of Feminist Rhetoric, Jacqueline Rhodes and Suban Nur Cooley, eds. Forthcoming.

Perryman-Clark, Staci. The New Work of Writing Across the Curriculum: Diversity and Inclusion, Collaborative Partnerships, and Faculty Development. University Press of Colorado, 2023.

Perryman-Clark, Staci, and Collin L. Craig. “Black Student Success Models: Institutional Profiles of Writing Programs,” Black Perspectives in Writing Program Administration: From the Margins to the Center, 2019, pp. 101–114.

Position Statement on Citational Justice in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies. Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2022. Retrieved from https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/citation-justice.

Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. U of Michigan P, 2011.

Statement on Editorial Ethics. Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2023. Retrieved from https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/editorial-ethics.

Von Bergen, Megan. “Defining Ungrading: Alternative Writing Assessment as Jeremiad.” Composition Studies, vol. 51, no. 2, 2023, pp. 137–194.

Wang, Zhaozhe. “Autoethnographic Performance of Difference as Antiracist Pedagogy.” Linguistic Justice on Campus: Pedagogy and Advocacy for Multilingual Students. Brooke R. Schreiber, Eunjeong Lee, and Jennifer T. Johnson, eds. Multilingual Matters, 2022, pp. 41–57.

West-Puckett, S. J., & Shepley, G. Radical museology/radical pedagogy: Curating beyond boundaries. Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, vol. 4, no. 1, 2020. http://journalofmultimodalrhetorics.com/4-1-issue-west-puckett-shepley.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Rusty Barrett. Other People’s English: Code-meshing, Code-switching, and African American Literacy, Parlor Press, LLC, 2018.

Call for Proposals: Teaching English in the Two-Year College and College English

I feel like what we do and who we are is overlooked.

—Jason C. Evans, 2023 TYCA Conference Chair’s Address

The perception that the work occurring in two-year colleges and reports of it in TETYC are relevant only to those spaces means that the new knowledge the journal offers can be overlooked, even when it clearly contributes to a larger disciplinary conversation.

—Holly Hassel, Mark Reynolds, Jeff Sommers and Howard Tinberg, “Editorial Perspectives on Teaching English in the Two-Year College,” p. 332

In an effort to shine a light on the work of English studies faculty teaching at access-intensive two- and four-year institutions, the editors of Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC) and College English (CE) will co-edit and publish a series of symposia over the next three years. These symposia are designed to address significant challenges facing students, faculty, research, and academic programs in the field. To reach the widest possible audience, each symposium will be published concurrently in both journals.

Faculty working at two-year colleges and open- or access-intensive institutions comprise the majority of college English instructors and work with the most diverse student populations in higher education. We believe these faculty, courses, and programs should be central to our disciplinary conversations about access, equity, and justice in college English studies. We hope these symposia will provide our readers with opportunities to learn from the experiences, perspectives, and research of English faculty at two-year and other access-intensive institutions as we work together to help all students achieve greater civic engagement, social mobility, and personal enrichment.

The first symposium in this series will address the inequitable educational experiences our students encounter in higher education English classrooms and programs. We intend to publish five short articles (around 2,000 words each) demonstrating what English studies faculty at two-year colleges and access-intensive institutions are doing to address the material inequities our students encounter in higher education English classrooms and programs. Contributors to this first symposium should consider how college English faculty may help to address and mitigate the effects of a number of issues, including

• inequities in teaching and learning;
• material inequities in campus resources and student support services;
• cultural and socioeconomic differences;
• disparities in college preparation;
• labor issues; and
• other issues related to equity and access that may be addressed through institutional policy, mentoring, inclusive English studies curricula, fair and equitable assessment practices, or pedagogical approaches that invite individual student perspectives, employ universal design strategies, foster a sense of student belonging, etc.

We encourage scholars working in a variety of English studies subdisciplines—composition, literature, creative writing, professional writing, digital media, etc.—to propose articles of 1,500–2,000 words for this symposium.

Please submit a 500-word proposal (exclusive of references) explaining your proposed article’s topic and approach as well as the relevance of your topic to the theme for this symposium. Please email proposals to both CollegeEnglishEditors@gmail.com and tetyc.editor@gmail.com.

We ask that all potential contributors read and commit to following the guidelines offered by both the Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors and the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Position Statement on Citation Justice in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies.

Timeline for Publication:

• July 15, 2024: Proposals due
• August 30: Authors informed of editors’ decisions
• September 30: First drafts due to editors
• October 15: Symposium editors’ feedback and instructions to authors
• November 15: Revisions due back to symposium editors for approval and possible follow-up
• January 1: Abstract, bios, permissions, and completed citation checks due to the CE and TETYC editorial teams.
• Symposium published in CE in March 2025 and in TETYC in May 2025.

We welcome your questions about this symposium! Please email us at CollegeEnglishEditors@gmail.com and tetyc.editor@gmail.com.

Works Cited

Evans, Jason C. “Teaching English in the Two-Year College Conference Chair’s Address.” Teaching English in the Two Year College,  vol. 51, no. 1, 2023, pp. 12–16.

Hassel, Holly, Mark Reynolds, Jeff Sommers, and Howard Tinberg. “Editorial Perspectives on Teaching English in the Two-Year College,” Scholarly Editing: History, Performance, special issue of College English, vol. 81, no. 4, 2019, pp. 314–38.

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Symposium: The Homosexual Imagination: A Fifty-Year Retrospective | Guest editor: Aja Y. Martinez

No longer accepting submissions.

This fraught political moment has been characterized, in part, by an attack on the movement of legal storytelling most often referred to as Critical Race Theory (CRT). Throughout the movement’s history, CRT-related scholars have reached out to the humanities, especially English studies (inclusive of literature, creative writing, and rhetoric and writing studies). Now is the time to collectively respond to their call. Scholars in the humanities have the tools to recognize the most recent attack on CRT as the marketing and branding exercise it is. We know that it is insufficient to point out how the opposition gets CRT wrong. Their story about CRT (although based on lies and inaccuracies) has already been too persuasive. As English studies scholars, we know that we must fight story with story. More to the point: we must fight tall tales, myths, and presuppositions with the truth only stories can reveal.

Through their stories, legal storytelling exemplars such as Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, Patricia J. Williams, and Derrick A. Bell tell us (but also their field and any other field or person who has read their work) that story is how to do this work—story is the way. Telling stories is how we invite a multiplicity of audiences into the conversation, how we build opportunities for points of access to the content, be it the Constitution, theory, legal precedent, etc. The methodology of story in turn informs how we, as teachers of reading and writing, teach people to write their stories. Our broad field of English studies includes contributions to concepts such as world building, dialogue, character development, style, diction, etc. Ours is the discipline of writing process and revision, of reading and analysis, of rhetorical situation and effectiveness. We know how to compose; we know how to engage an audience; we know how to teach others to do this as well. Who better to take on this charge and carry it forward than us, English studies? We have the tools, the equipment, the training, the lens to engage this conversation on counterstory, the counterstories that will counter the stories the racist, radical right would weave and tell to disinform the public about CRT.

Our field can rise to the occasion, supporting CRT in this time of struggle. We are leaders in a conversation about the core questions of American society. Through our field’s unique humanities-informed approach to the methodology of counterstory we can resource, equip, and contribute to the sustainability of CRT for years to come. But we must get it right. Our work as counterstory scholars, teachers, and writers in English studies must be meticulous and precise. Any work we do with counterstory must be informed by the tenets of CRT. It cannot be sloppy work—it cannot be devoid of the interdisciplinary research involved in doing the reading, an awareness of the histories and key figures, and knowing the foundations of CRT as an academic field and movement.

In the past two and half years of this mainstream, hot-button national fight, the urgency of storytelling through the methodology of counterstory has been underutilized by those seeking to defend and promote Critical Race Theory. It is time for scholars in the humanities—scholars of English studies in particular—to heed the call for collaboration issued by CRT founders and legal storytelling exemplars Delgado, Stefancic, Williams, and Bell. It is time to take back the narrative from those who would promote distortion and disinformation. It is time to extend the storytelling legacy of CRT, writing our own stories so others can be told.

Possible topics and questions to consider:

• How do the histories, tenets, key figures, theories, methods, and/or pedagogies of CRT inform your work within English studies?
• Within this political moment of vitriolic backlash against CRT, how does your work as an English studies teacher-scholar-activist intervene in or contribute to resisting these ideologies at the local/state/national levels?
• What is the interface between CRT and your disciplinary area of English studies, and what are the implications of this intersection for the future of CRT in education?

We are seeking:

• Article-length works (7,500 words)
• Autoethnographies, personal essays, or counterstories (2,000–4,000 words)
• Retrospective or prospective analyses (2,000–4,000 words)
• Bibliographic essays that trace a significant theory, idea, or approach throughout the work or history of CRT connecting that theory, idea, or approach to the field of English studies (2,000–4,000 words)
• Personal reminisces (300 words)

All submissions will undergo peer review prior to formal acceptance in this issue. Proposals should identify the intended topic, focus, and genre of the submission and briefly describe the author’s method or approach. Proposals should be no longer than 500 words, exclusive of the bibliography. Please email proposals to aja.martinez@unt.edu with the subject line “CRT Issue.”