Economies of Writing

The 2012 Watson Conference will aim  to articulate the relations between diverse notions of “economy” and “writing” for U.S. rhetoric and composition.   Avenues for exploration might include  

• Writing instruction as a site and medium for the production of racialized, sexualized bodies, desires, consciousness, emotions 
• Institutional and disciplinary economies within higher education
• Rhetorics of the economy of writing: notions of efficiency, profit, competence, clarity, precision, efficacy, etc.
• Problematics of the transnational exchange of composition expertise
• Notions of labor and management in composition research and pedagogy
• Relations of language ecology to economic, cultural social, physical, biological ecologies
• Relations of linguistic labor and physical, intellectual, emotional labor
• Relations of power and rhetorical authority within specific modes of the production and circulation of writing
• Shifts and continuities in notions of authorship, intellectual property, and the commodification of language, writing, and composition skills
• Questions of translation in economies of writing
• Dominant and alternative economies for the production and distribution of scholarship in rhetoric and composition
• Writing and the (re)production of class, professional identities

—Min-Zhan Lu, Watson Conference Director, Professor of English and University Scholar, University of Louisville