Event: There is still time to attend this year's ATTW conference!

[ten grrl]

Hello Everyone!

A friendly reminder that the ATTW conference is happening next week, April 17^th and 18th, both online and in person. I'm attaching the full conference program. There's still time to register through our ATTW Membership Portal. You won't want to miss keynotes by Drs. Octavio Pimentel and Sweta Baniya, an engaging discussion on how to support international scholars and students, and much more.

As we prepare for an exciting conference, I wanted to share a bit from this year's President's Address:

I am so proud to serve ATTW alongside my colleagues. ATTW is an organization that has leveraged the “just use of imagination” (Jones and Williams, 2020) for many years. We are a nonprofit organization that runs completely on love and volunteer labor. Our membership and conference registration fees are used entirely to support the conference. In fact, for several years, we have invested more than we’ve made as an

organization to do the right thing, even when it’s unpopular and expensive.

For example, in 2018, when the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Missouri that advised people of color and other minorities traveling to Missouri to take extreme caution, conference chairs Natasha Jones and Blake Scott worked with the Executive Committee to move the conference from Missouri to Kansas. The “just use of imagination” at ATTW meant that we invested in keeping our membership safe by moving venues, losing deposits, and starting from scratch.

In 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, ATTW hosted its first virtual conference, where we invested over $40,000 to provide accessible and equitable programming for our members.

From 2021-2024, we continued to keep our membership safe by hosting virtual conferences that privileged graduate student needs and aspirations.

As we started shifting back to in-person conferences, we continue to prioritize access and safety by providing different participation options, investing to create a digital conference that fosters collaboration and community.

We also implemented scholarships that make participation in our conference more accessible, including the New Scholar Moving Fund (proposed by Drs. Jamal-Jared Alexander and Rebecca Walton) and the Halcyon Lawrence Linguistic Justice in Technical Communication Memorial Scholarship, for which we collaborate with the family of our dear colleague, Halcyon Lawrence, to honor Dr. Lawrence’s contributions to the field and support new scholars.

These offerings are not convenient or easy—but they are critical to an organization that practices what it preaches in terms of access and social justice.

I am so grateful to all of you for investing in ATTW by sharing your presence and brilliance during this year’s conference. 

Laura 

Laura Gonzales, PhD

Associate Professor of Digital Writing and Cultural Rhetorics

Co-Director, TRACE Innovation Initiative

Department of English

University of Florida

Editor, Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric

President, Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW)

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