My Substack Post on the Emotional Impact of Losing CCCC

[Alexandra Hidalgo]

Dear colleagues, 

I'm so glad we have this space to consider steps forward. Thank you again to Traci for organizing it. 

I wanted to share the post I wrote about CCCC on my "Love in Many Genres" Substack, which, as its name notes, deals with love and relationships. The loss to our professional lives is steep, and it's one we're going to spend years processing. Here, I analyze the emotional and personal losses instead, which may be just as steep. 

Do check it ouf and share it if it's interest: https://alexandrahidalgo.substack.com/p/when-the-powers-that-be-sunder-our

If nothing else, I have years of photos of CCCC in it! 

Thank you again,

Alex

--

 

Alexandra Hidalgo, Ph.D.

Crow Chair of English and Associate Professor

Department of English

University of Pittsburgh

Pronouns: she/her/hers

 

Editor-in-Chief | constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space

 

Love in Many Genres. A Substack that uses prose, video, and photography to explore love in all its messy and wondrous glory.

 

Love Them Tender. A YouTube channel about big-hearted books, movies, and TV shows.

 

Learn more at my website and on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

 

[Kate Tirabassi]

Hi, All, 

I wanted to share part of.my Facebook post (the earlier part was a lament about the vote to dissolve Cs) that offers a space for anyone who wants to share their own story, reflection, past photos, recent social media post(s) as a way to document this very difficult moment in our field's history. Feel free to ask me for more info, if you'd like--my contact info is below. The National Archive of Composition and Rhetoric Board is working with other groups too in efforts to preserve documents, but in case you want to share a story/reflection/photo about Cs and don't have a forum to do that, we thought the NACR could offer a space to collect stories for now on the GoogleDoc offered or via the NACR's gmail, if you'd rather not put it on a GoogleDoc. 

The stories (etc.) can certainly be anonymous, but in order to become part of the digital/physical archive (located at the Univ. of NH), I've asked for contact info in case the UNH Archivist needs to share their official donation form with each of you (getting more clarity on that from them soon). My post, the GoogleDoc, and gmail address for the NACR are all below: 

As a composition historian and a member of the NACR - National Archives of Composition & Rhetoric Board, I'm glad to see and ready to join the quick efforts among colleagues to preserve essential documents, resources, stories, manuscripts, meeting minutes, points of connection & mentorship, etc. As we've seen in other places over the past year, we cannot afford to lose our history and we cannot trust NCTE leadership not to erase or try to rewrite that history, since , in one vote, they tried to erase an entire professional organization. We will not be quiet.

Please--all stories, reminiscences that you've seen shared by colleagues--do save them so we can document not only this very sad moment (though documenting this moment is important too), but also any reflections on Conference on College Composition and Communication - CCCC's rich history. I will share a GoogleDoc link if you'd like your story, reflection shared with the NACR - National Archives of Composition & Rhetoric. We're meeting with the UNH archivist this week to find out more about how much digital space we might be able to have and further protocols for collecting stories.

Feel free to add your story, sign your name/institutional affiliation (if relevant/if you want to), and/or contact info so we can be in touch with you further about this effort: CCCC 2026 Summer Reflections, etc.

If you prefer not to add your story/reflection to a GoogleDoc but want to share it with the NACR, here's our email address: nationalarch...@gmail.com 

Kate Tirabassi, PhD

Professor of Communication, Affiliate Faculty in English, Director Center for Research & Writing

Keene State College

ktira...@keene.edu / kateti...@gmail.com / Discord contact: katetirabassi