Call for Proposals
Productive (and Disruptive) Partnerships:
Faculty and Undergraduates Co-Authoring in English Studies
We invite proposals for an edited collection that investigates the complexities of co-authoring and publishing with undergraduates in the broad field of English Studies. We are interested in co-authoring that leads to knowledge production with “consequential publicness” (Downs et al. 94), including work that circulates in traditional academic venues, such as scholarly journals; community-engaged projects in which post-secondary educators and undergraduates collaboratively design public exhibits, co-author reports for various stakeholders, and collaborate to produce other types of documents; and projects in the digital humanities that lead to the co-creation of online archives and databases.
With the rise of undergraduate research, community-engaged learning, digital humanities, and other pedagogical and intellectual innovations during the first decades of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of post-secondary scholars and teachers are co-authoring with undergraduate students (e.g., Blanton and Walton; Bradley, Davis, Dierloff, Dmochowski, Grobman, Offenback, and Wilk; Crawford, Galloway, and Greer; Dubisar, Latimer, Mayfield, McGrew, Myers, Russell, and Thomas; Fishman, Hovland, Leonhard, and Randhawa; Fishman, Lunsford, McGregor, and Otuteye; Garrison and Sharif; Godbee, Bazan, Glise, Gonzalez, Quigley, and White; Jack and Massagee; Lueck, Law, and Zhang; Mina, McAfoose, Moulden, and Zilavy; Trapp and Dozé; Wallace and Bell). We seek proposals for essays that will contribute to the development of theoretically informed best practices in faculty-undergraduate co-authoring and add insights to disciplinary conversations around authorship, undergraduate research, and student learning, including work focused on increasing access, equity and social justice in English Studies and undergraduate research.
While the following list is not exhaustive, possible chapters in this collection might address the following questions:
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When undergraduate students’ voices enter disciplinary conversations, in what ways might they transform complicate, disrupt, and/or extend disciplinary conversations around attribution, co-authorship, collaboration, and (co)ownership of texts, including perspectives that work to alter dominant white, heteronormative, able-ist discourses around authorship (Abasi, et al.; Comfort; Holmes; Strnadova and Walmsley; Yergeau).
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How might co-authoring advance institutional, professional, and personal efforts to expand access and equity for both faculty and undergraduates? How do particular personal and professional identities and positionalities impact who participates in opportunities for post-secondary educators, scholars and undergraduates to co-author together?
- What additional ethical, intellectual, and/or pragmatic issues arise when post-secondary educators and scholars co-author with undergraduates?
- What types of courses and pedagogical strategies lead post-secondary educators to co-author publications with undergraduates? What types of scholarly or research projects lead post-secondary educators to co-author publications with undergraduates?
- What genres are students and faculty most commonly co-authoring? Scholarly articles? Exhibits? Community-based documents? Contributions to databases and catalogs? How might a more capacious definition of knowledge-making allow new genres to emerge as undergraduates become co-authors with faculty?
- How has student learning been impacted by opportunities for co-authoring? What skills and abilities are students developing through the co-authoring process with faculty that might transfer into their work as writers at post-secondary institutions and in their lives beyond the university? How can processes, practices, and understandings of co-authoring with undergraduates avoid contributing to problems of hyper-professionalization for emerging scholars?
- How have faculty been impacted by possibilities for co-authoring? What intellectual and affective rewards emerge from co-authoring experiences with undergraduates? How has or might faculty development be affected by opportunities for co-authoring with undergraduates? How are publications that are co-authored with undergraduates factored into annual evaluations and P&T decisions for faculty at different points in their careers and with varying positionalities and identities?
- How are success and failure defined when undergraduates and faculty engage in co-authorship?
- What challenges/opportunities do articles and essays co-authored by faculty and undergraduates present to editors and publishers?
- How does co-authoring with undergraduates in English Studies differ from other disciplines?
We welcome proposals from faculty and graduate students; undergraduates (current and former); editors; publishers; and other stakeholders.
Please submit a proposal, approximately 250 to 500 words, that discusses the proposed chapter to the editors, Laurie Grobman le...@psu.edu and Jane Greer gre...@umkc.edu.
Questions and queries are also welcome.
