Submissions due April 15, 2025
A primary goal of this special issue is to ask questions about the genealogy of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs, their current institutional limitations and affordances, and their possible futures. WAC programs have been fundamental to transforming writing pedagogy in campuses across the United States, and their institutionalization speaks to a successful interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary initiative. In some instances, however, this institutionalization has been in tension with the student-centered, anti-racist and/or even abolitionist approaches that WAC programs value. Recent austerity politics, moreover, have justified cuts across universities that also threaten or have the potential to threaten such programs. Given the multilayered and heterogeneous landscape of WAC programs across campuses, this special issue calls for a reflective focus on the history of WAC practices. As we articulate the function of WAC programs, especially given the recent urgency to address the needs and desires of BIPOC student populations, what might it mean to conceive the future of WAC by framing it via histories of liberation and place-based action? How might doing so push back against the forces and structures that have attempted to instrumentalize, homogenize, and depoliticize WAC?
This special issue recalls the radical history and complex origins of WAC in the United States. We are inspired by the complicated relationship that our own institution, the City University of New York (CUNY), has with the WAC programs on its various campuses. The role writing pedagogy has played in the history of CUNY, specifically as a practice of freedom, is evident in the work of foundational figures for equitable writing instruction such as Mina Shaughnessy, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Adrienne Rich. Current CUNY-wide WAC practices, though, do not necessarily reference this genealogy of resistance to anti-black violence and the striving by Black and brown communities for access in public higher education explicitly.
We invite provocations that imagine what the future of WAC programs could become while reframing WAC through an anti-racist, abolitionist lens. We are particularly interested in submissions written by and for BIPOC and allied faculty, as well as in scholarship focused particularly on Minority-Serving Institutions, public universities in underserved urban and rural areas, and other institutions similar to CUNY. Ultimately, we welcome work that reconsiders what we believe is WAC’s next essential step: its re/engagement with anti-racist, decolonial, abolitionist theory, related to a long history of practices of freedom rooted in Black studies. What is the relationship between WAC programs and the institutions in which they are housed? How have WAC programs responded to institutional/local pressures? What role can WAC programs and WAC practices play in pushing back against institutional oppressions?
We are also interested in essays focused on place-based movements for writing equity, and/or essays that recover/rebuild genealogies of foundational WAC figures. How does the development of WAC unfold in particular locations? How do the geographies, local histories, and/or current practices of those places play into the development of WAC as a program? Additionally, we invite pedagogical reflections that offer examples of putting theory into practice: designing or revising syllabi, assignments, rubrics, and writing-to-learn strategies in current classrooms affiliated with or adjacent to WAC. Given one’s location or institution, for example, what is possible and/or precluded in applying WAC principles in the classroom?
Submissions may be in English or take up a translanguaging or multilingual approach. We welcome essays and pedagogical reflections from 3,000 to 6,000 words. Submissions may explore but do not have to be limited to the following topics:
Please contact our managing editor, Allison Daniel, if you have any questions or would like the editors to review a proposal.