Our 2024 Topic

Locations for Writing

Plenary Speakers:

Writing has long been defined as an activity that is not solely cognitive but also social, embodied, and material, arising from space (as a physical geography) and place (as a locus of meaning, affect, and identity). Even if writing appears to be happening automatically and everywhere/nowhere (via generative Artificial Intelligence, for instance), it originates somewhere and circulates elsewhere. Writing education is also social, embodied, and material, occurring in classrooms, writing centers, community centers, religious spaces, streets, homes, and the interstices among those and many other spaces and places—anywhere writing as a specific literacy is valued. Of course, the emplacement of writing and writing education does not mean that either is static. Locations themselves are dynamic: they are palimpsests of overlapping, often contested, histories interacting with “natural” and “artificial” environments. And when writing and the teaching and learning of writing connect locations, the dynamism can increase manyfold.