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Call for Proposals – Cavalier Conference on Writing and Literature

9th Annual Cavalier Conference on Writing and Literature
“Building Community and Connections”
April 12, 2024

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Stacey Waite, Associate Professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

When we gather with students in our classes or fellow teachers on our campuses, in person or virtually, we often have the goal of “building community.” The communities called forth in these spaces can be large, complex, and global, or as modest as a classroom.

How do we go about building these communities now, in practice, or in our imagined futures? What shared work, texts, or practices help build the connections that create communities? What barriers get in the way? Who has been included and excluded, and how can communities be diversified and enlarged? How has the COVID-19 pandemic challenged our notions and practices of community-building? Is community always good?

How can we balance “the extraordinary rhetorical power one can gain through speaking of community” with the possibility, as Joseph Harris observed more than three decades ago, that it can “become an empty and sentimental word?”

We invite proposals for interactive panels and individual presentations on these and other questions related to the theme of community and connections.

Non-exhaustive list of suggested topics:

  • Writing in the global community
  • Forming community around literary genres
  • Communities within and around literary texts
  • Fictional representations of community
  • Classroom culture (for better or worse)
  • High school and college teachers in community to help ease students’ transitions
  • Virtual global community-building
  • Community rules that silence voices
  • Learning from and with communities of disability
  • Community-building in new faculty orientation
  • Co-curricular communities
  • Accommodations and community
  • Service learning & community-building
  • Faculty development and mentoring communities
  • Adjunct instructor communities
  • Reading and writing community literacy
  • Fandom communities
  • Cultural community-building with libraries, museums, bookstores, or other entities
  • Student clubs and community-building
  • Threshold concepts and academic community-building
  • Transitions between onsite and online learning communities
  • Shaping community in online and hybrid classes

Deadline extended: send in your proposal by February 23, 2024.

Submit your proposal today