CFP: Standing Group on IP Sponsored Panel @ 2027 CCCC
ten grrl
Colleagues,
Please see below the call for panelists for the Standing Group on Intellectual Property Sponsored Panel at the 2027 Conference on College Composition (CCCC) below. You can view the call here, too: https://shorturl.at/gGejk.
Thanks,
Charles & Devon
Call for Panelists: Standing Group on Intellectual Property (IP) Sponsored Panel at the 2027 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)
Who Owns Writing? Intellectual Property, Authorship, and Privacy in Contemporary Writing Environments
This panel is sponsored by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Standing Group on Intellectual Property (IP) and is guaranteed a spot in the program at CCCC 2027 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The CCCC Standing Group on IP panel engages the 2027 conference theme, Design Writing Futures, by examining how contemporary technologies, policies, and platforms are shaping future conditions of IP, authorship, and privacy. Authorship and IP are longstanding, central concerns in writing studies, yet emerging technologies and digital platforms are transforming how writing–including authorship, ownership, and privacy–are understood and negotiated. Digital platforms, collaborative writing tools, generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI), large-scale data collection, and the datafication of writing program administration increasingly shape how writing is produced, circulated, and stored, which raises urgent questions about ownership, attribution, and writer privacy.
The CCCC Standing Group on IP seeks panelists for a sponsored session at CCCC 2027 titled, Who Owns Writing? Intellectual Property, Authorship, and Privacy in Contemporary Writing Environments. Taking its title from Douglas Hesse’s (2005) seminal CCCC Chair’s Address, this panel asks, 'Who Owns Writing?' once again, but within the shifted and shifting landscape of contemporary writing environments. Contemporary writing environments increasingly produce forms of distributed authorship that expose the limits of IP frameworks built around individual ownership. This panel brings together scholars to study such challenges and to examine how writing circulates across platforms. By examining the dynamics across diverse writing contexts, the panel considers how writing studies might respond to such shifts and develop more ethical and equitable approaches to authorship and IP. We invite proposals that explore how writing circulates across technological platforms, public discourse, classrooms, and collaborative environments in ways that complicate questions of authorship and writer privacy. We welcome theoretical, pedagogical, and case-based approaches. Possible topics include:
- digital platform writing
- Gen AI
- collaborative authorship
- copyright and open-source software
- open access scholarship
- student writing ownership
- data collection and privacy
- writing program administration and IP
- remix and remediation
- the circulation or reuse of texts across media and communities.
The CCCC Standing Group on IP and Composition/Communication Studies was planned by Karen Burke Lefevre, Andrea Lunsford, and others in 1993 in response to their recognition that copyright issues were becoming increasingly complicated for scholars and students in rhetoric and composition studies. Since then, group members have authored several policy statements, works of scholarship (including a 2019 special issue of Kairos), and informational articles designed to open discussion and provide guidance on issues of plagiarism, textual commodification, economies and ethics of authorship, Gen AI, legal parameters of composing, and more.
Please send 250-word proposals via email to CCCC Standing Group on IP Chair Dr. Charles Woods (charle...@etamu.edu) and CCCC Standing Group on IP Vice-Chair Dr. Devon Fitzgerald (fitzg...@winthrop.edu) by May 1, 2026. We are happy to field questions.
References
Hesse, Douglas D. “Who Owns Writing?” College Composition and Communication 57.2 (2005): 335-357.