"All Our Relations: Contested Space, Contested Knowledge," Conference on College Composition and Communication, Atlanta, April 6-9, 2011.

The phrase “all our relations” is a familiar one for many indigenous peoples in North America. It encapsulates an entire philosophy of humans in relation to other living things—plants, animals, rocks, earth—that emphasizes the intricately connected web of relationships that sustains our mutual ability to live out our shared existence on the earth together. In those teachings all living things matter, all are important, all must be treated as relatives. Even harmful, frightening or negative relatives are important and must be understood and honored if we are to survive together in the same spaces. “All our relations” is a phrase used both as invocation and conclusion—a heuristic that forces us to consider the balance between the weight of each human’s responsibility in maintaining the balance of the world and in understanding the smallness of each individual in relation to the larger web of meaning. I invoke “all our relations” here to allow CCCC’s scholars and teachers the chance to consider how such a concept of balance and webbed relationality might help us build a scholarly community in which knowledge and space are always contested. This is a space where it’s never taken for granted that we all value the same originary stories, but where the struggle between stories isn’t for dominance; rather, the struggle is to sustain our very rich, very productive differences in the face of social forces that call for dominance. This community, then, is one where the diversity of our disciplinary fields, and of the people who work here, is understood -as the heartbeat of a vital and vibrant future. More practically, in bringing this sense of “all our relations” to the CCCC, I want to encourage all members of the organization to acknowledge both the scholarly relationships that are frequently marginalized at the Convention and to make more substantial connections to the communities outside of higher education whose existence informs the work that we do. So, for the 2011 CCCC Convention, I’m asking you to share your space at our annual national gathering in the interest of producing knowledge that will help us contest, debate, revise & re-create who and what we are as both a disciplinary organization and as individual scholars, teachers, students, writers. Key to each of us being able to do this is the acknowledgement that we depend on each other—you and I, digital rhetorician and second-language writing instructor, istorian and 2-year college teacher, theorist and workplace studies scholar, ethodologist and tech writing teacher, administrator and graduate student. We, literally, make the disciplinary community habitable for one another even when—maybe, especially when—we don’t see the commonalities in our work, can’t discern the communal warp & weft of our dependence, have a hard time understanding the relevance of one to the other. This is a convention that focuses on those differences as the very strands of the web that makes us a community, a discipline. How then, to begin to interrogate and understand such a web? Consider some of these questions: • What spaces, knowledges, people and things is CCCC related to? How can those relatives be brought into the center of our conversations, in both our disciplinary and individual practices? • How do we define communities within our discipline and the institutions within which we build our professional homes? How do we make our work meaningful outside of those disciplines and institutions? • How can we build stronger communities within our classrooms? Within our graduate programs? Within our teacher preparation programs? • As a discipline, how do we (how might we) extend & complicate the stories we tell about ourselves? • How do we define “theory” & what it means to “theorize” in our discipline? What kinds of theories do we need to build in order to enrich our shared community? • What kinds of rhetorics do we enact as teachers and scholars? What kinds of methodologies and theories do we have to identify and study these rhetorics? • How are we being responsible to our relatives in the ways that we mentor one another, our graduate students, our undergraduates, our study participants, ourselves? • How might creative writing (all genres) and/or digital writing help us to explore ways we can attain a more vital and vibrant conversation about all kinds of writing? • How can languages other than English--including Indigenous languages and less commonly taught languages--become central to our rhetorical and pedagogical theories and practices? • Where is the space for an exploration of embodied rhetorics? • How can critical, gender, race, queer, disability, embodied, and cultural theories & rhetorics help us to re-make the culture of our discipline? • How do theories of civic engagement intersect with composition, rhetoric, writing, and the world we all live in? • How can our discipline transition from an understanding of rhetoric as a Greek and Roman tradition to rhetoric as a set of rules/practices locatable in all cultures, places, and times? As you read through this call, I hope you’ll think of ways to deliberately violate the categorical boundaries that the standard area clusters for submission usually force us to live within. What do I mean by that? For example, all too often when we talk about “teaching writing,” we’re really using a short-hand that means teaching first-year writing or teaching composition. But there are more kinds of writing getting taught than that and when we narrow our stories down, we run the risk of not listening to folks who are teaching digital writing or professional writing or life writing or writing in communities or second-language writing. These are, quite literally, our writing relations. And they have important things to bring to the table. As a way to encourage you to craft proposals that see connections instead of boundaries, I encourage you to eschew the usual cluster categories altogether and submit your proposal under #113—Contesting Boundaries! This new category is, in fact, the space where I hope all of the submissions arrive so that even the review process can become a moment of learning from each other! Why here? Why now? The city of Atlanta is itself a contested space. Built on land that was taken from the Cherokee and Creek nations, it plays a role in at least two iconic national narratives – that of manifest destiny and of a nation divided by slavery—out of which some of the most elemental contestations of knowledge in our national consciousness have arisen. As a geographical space celebrated as the epicenter of the “New South,” Atlanta stands at the crossroads of a contest of narratives of progress-despiteadversity like “the Trail of Tears,” “we shall overcome,” “the South shall rise again.” In fact, the city of Atlanta’s seal shows a phoenix rising from the ashes. And yet, all that has been destroyed in its history (i.e.: “overcome”) cannot simply be forgotten. In this racially diverse city of over 5 million, where thousands of immigrants (both forced and voluntary) have flocked for hundreds of years, where both poverty and plenty are visible on the face of the city, and where the non-white population is more than 60%, I invite you to consider how the complex, problematic history of the city of Atlanta might help us better understand our own community today. In the end, “all our relations” should remind us that only in our connections to others—even those profoundly and uncomfortably different than ourselves—can we find the key to our own survival. In asking you to take a more personal, more relational approach to our convention time together in Atlanta, I’m also asking you to take responsibility for your part in making the culture of our discipline, a place we’ve all chosen to live. For further information, visit: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/conv.