CFP: Writing Research Across Borders 2011

I'm excited to be involved with WRAB 2011 - it's a great conference with an international crowd discussing writing research. Here's the CFP:

Call for Proposals: Writing Research Across Borders II

George Mason University

February 17-20, 2011

Proposal Deadline May 3, 2010

As societies become more knowledge-intensive and communication technologies draw us more closely together, the importance of writing in economic, scientific, civic, personal, and social development becomes more apparent. Correspondingly, the imperative to conduct research on writing in schools and the workplace, in relationship to learning and development, and in all aspects of our lives has invigorated work among scholars in all regions of the world. The conference Writing Research Across Borders II will provide an opportunity for researchers to share their findings and set research agendas for the coming years.

Continuing the success of the three previous international research conferences held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the 2011 Writing Research Across Borders II will be held at George Mason University in the Washington D.C./Northern Virginia area. We invite proposals that will continue to deepen the cross-disciplinary, international dialogues across the many different domains of writing research.

As in past years, this conference will focus on writing development across the lifespan, including the impact of new technologies on learning to write, early acquisition of writing, writing across grade levels (K-20), writing in the disciplines and professions, and writing in the workplace or other community and institutional settings. We invite proposals presenting research in these areas. We also invite proposals on any other areas of writing use and practice, such as writing in progressive or large scale educational programs, or proposals that link writing research and policies. We welcome papers raising methodological issues about researching writing. We invite work from any research tradition that is grounded in the tradition’s previous research and pursues the methodical gathering of qualitative or quantitative data appropriate to its claims.

Proposals should identify the format preferred (panels, roundtables, individual presentations, and poster presentations). Individual or poster proposals should be a maximum of 500 words. Proposals with multiple presentations (panel and roundtable) should contain a short overview statement and then no more than 400 words per speaker. Proposals should specify the relevant research literatures, research questions, methods, data, and findings, as well as the scope and duration of the research projects.

The deadline for proposals is May 3, 2010. Please submit proposals in .doc or .rtf format by email attachment to <writing@education.ucsb.edu>. Also, be sure to include a title for your proposal and each speaker’s individual talk, as well as contact information for each individual presenter.

Conference information will be available at http://www.writing.ucsb.edu/wrconf11/

"Samsung is surrounded by the most primitive members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving cheeky ..."

I'm guessing this press release was translated into English:

“Samsung is surrounded by the most primitive members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving cheeky to introduce the most innovative robot mobile phone,” understood JK Shin, Executive associate President and supervisor of movable Communication department in Samsung Electronics. “With Samsung’s accumulated technology leadership in mobile phone industriousness and our consistent stratagem to support all obtainable in service system, I believe with the intention of Samsung provides the better choices and remuneration to our consumers” he added.

The release also informs us that the phone will give us access to the "gorged" Google Apps.

"An unpopular position"

Jeff Rice weighs in on the controversy of adjuncts being valued less in humanities departments than tenure-line professors. He takes a pragmatic view of adjuncts' choices and concludes with a piece of advice: "Don't take these jobs." And furthermore, he says:

And before you get to the stage where economic realities force you to take a job you don’t want: Pay attention to market forces when you go to graduate school so that you are preparing for a career that exists.

If Jeff's stance is unpopular, I suppose I will be taking an unpopular position by agreeing with it. Adjuncts, he argues, are tasked primarily with teaching, while tenure-line professors also shoulder research and service responsibilities - especially research, which is a critical part of the mission of a research university and is just as much the university's "real work" as teaching. Jeff lays this out quite well, and I would only add that we who train the next generation of PhDs need to be really conscious about emphasizing the choices these grad students will have as they prepare for their careers. Those choices are far more varied than adjunct/tenure line.