Tuesday, April 26, 2005

The sadness of Cs

I'm not really that sad, but I wanted to come up with a catchy title.

Proposals for CCCC are due in less than 1 week, and I have not even a draft done and wonder if I will. Two, and now it looks like three, potential panels have not come together. (And should one particular former potential panelist read this, I hope she won't take on any feelings of guilt or responsibility. Not that she would, necessarily, but I wanted to just nip that in the bud.) This last one didn't come together out of sheer inertia: three of us decided to do a panel together because we like each other, but we had no topic. We still have no topic. So...

But this morning I had a small flash of possible inspiration and thought I should do something on blogging, something that would somehow bring together my new blogging enthusiasm with my past and ongoing work on (1) managerial rhetorics and (2) connections between affect and literacy. It would be a presentation called "Affective Blogging," to play on a potentially more expected title ("Effective Blogging") in order to argue that blogging has the potential to bring out new affective relationships to literacy (or at least affective relationships that run counter to or exceed traditional academic literacies) and that thus potentially disrupts the managerial (aka ( "effective") model of teaching writing that we've inherited from the process movement and other sources. Something like that. It would also allow me to bring together threads I've gleaned from many of my wonderful fellow comp bloggers over the past several months. (And would prompt me to do more reading on networks etc since goodness knows I need that.)

But I haven't submitted an individual proposal since I was in grad school and feel sort of weird about it. Not that I can't get over feeling weird.

4 comments:

Marcia said...

Is submitting with a panel already formed one of those unwritten rules of success?

Does submitting individually mark one as less networked, or as less theoretically competent?

senioritis said...

I'm not sure about my answer to Marcia's question. For several years my presentations have been part of pre-arranged panels. I think that's just because I am so heavily networked: I'm always working on stuff in collaboration or at least connection with others. OTOH, as a Cs-goer, I like the panels that the conference puts together: they're kinetic, not overscripted. And honestly, I tend to avoid panels where everybody's from the same institution; they're usually boring. I only go to them if I know in advance that the people on the panel are doing interesting work.

Heck, Donna, I think you should do this topic! It sounds really interesting to me; I'll be there :)

Donna said...

I don't think submitting a panel is an unwritten rule of success, Marcia. Like Becky, I've just found over the past several years that I'm already in conversation with people, and those conversations turn into panels. So it feels weird this year to find that I'm not putting together a panel (which isn't to say I'm *not* in conversation with others; in fact, I've never felt more in conversation with others, ironically! It's just that for various reasons panels haven't gelled.)

I submitted individual proposals with success (and also no success), and I've also submitted panels that didn't get accepted. So neither is a guarantee of failure or success, IMO.

Keri said...

Hi, Donna. I also think that you submit this proposal. Your idea sounds very interesting. Sorry the panels fell through, but this sounds great. Good luck.