The Direction 4C's | The Blogora

Submitted by Jim Brown on September 13, 2008 - 12:57pm

Colin and some others are raising the question of 4C's panel selection criteria. One point Colin makes is that 4C's has become more inclusive, and that this lends itself to a certain kind of proposal:

As the number of proposals has increased, the amount of space devoted to describing the actual projects has shrunk, and that is a trend that privileges the pithy, speculative kind of prose that is its own genre, and which requires far less disciplinary expertise than one might imagine. Again, this makes the process more inclusive, but it does so at the expense of thoughtful research that actually exists. It privileges light, buzzwordy, trendy proposal writing, the kind of writing that gets more difficult to produce once one actually undertakes research and gets into the nuances and complications involved. As Becky notes, "I could have taken a half hour to write a snappy little proposal for an opinion piece about plagiarism, with a little media analysis folded in, and it would have been on the program in a heartbeat." The fact is that our current proposal system privileges this, partly in the interests of making the program as inclusive as possible.

I haven't been around long enough to make much comment on 4C's panel selection processes or criteria. But what I do see happening right now (in panels at 4C's and on blogs) is an intense discussion about how to define the discipline. For me, this discussion of 4C's selection criteria is about what the discipline is or should be.

A recent blog discussion about Karen Kopelson's CCC article "Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition" raised these issues as well. Kopelson's article is interesting and should probably be required reading for all Rhetoric folks...even those not "doing" composition. She argues (among other things) that Rhet./Comp. spends a lot of time discussing what/who is "in" or "out." Our various interdisciplines are getting bigger. What happens next? Do folks start splitting off (again)?

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Proposals

Submitted by Anonymous on September 14, 2008 - 6:22am.

I reviewed CCCC proposals last year. My single criterion was whether or not this was interesting, smart work. One way to drop the overwhelming number of submissions, and also to raise the quality, is to require FULL PAPERS instead of abstracts.

Anyone can (and does) put together an abstract for an imaginary paper. The real paper usually falls short of the glowing abstract, of course. But if the paper is actually part of ongoing research, then send in a full paper for consideration. I imagine you'd watch proposal rates drop significantly. Maybe it would weed out the people who ultimately are a waste of conference space at CCCC (and there are plenty of them).

-Jenny

I like this idea. It would

Submitted by Jim Brown on September 16, 2008 - 3:57pm.

I like this idea. It would make the review process really long...and the conference much smaller. Though, it might not make things smaller. CCCC is still a conference that a lot of people aim for, and maybe requiring full-length papers wouldn't mean that submissions drop.

Still, it would mean reviewers reading a lot of papers.