Open Call for Proposals

Proposal Deadline: May 1, 2007

The Gevirtz Graduate School of Education and the Writing Programs at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of California, Davis invite proposals for their interdisciplinary conference, "Writing Research Across Borders," to be held February 22-24, 2008 in Santa Barbara, California.

This is an exciting time where research on writing is having many births, rebirths, and growing spurts in many nations and with foci on many levels of schooling and development across the lifespan. At the 2008 Santa Barbara Conference on Writing Research we hope to foster dialogues across different writing research traditions, located in different national, disciplinary, and programmatic venues. We have invited a premier panel of plenary and featured speakers to represent the diversity of writing research in the world and to open the door for further broad participation from researchers of all nations interested in all age levels, institutional settings, and disciplinary approaches.

This conference follows on the successes of the 2002 and 2005 Santa Barbara Conferences on Writing Research, which had the themes of "Writing as a Human Activity" and "Writing Research in the Making."

We invite proposals for panels, roundtables, and individual presentations that discuss works in progress, completed research, and reflections on how writing research is conceived, proposed, funded, carried out, published, and responded to.

Proposals should be under 300 words and in English (for a fuller statement on language diversity at our conference, please see the Conference Language page. Please send proposals via email (as a Microsoft Word attachment or in the email body) to writing@education.ucsb.edu or send paper copies to the address below.

In addition, through the generosity of the Writing Program of the University of California at Davis and Chris Thaiss, the Clark Kerr Professor of Writing at UC Davis, we are able to offer several fellowships to help support travel expenses for speakers. Fellowships will be awarded based on financial need and proposal quality. If you would like to apply for a fellowship, please submit a separate fellowship application letter explaining your need for funding and how the fellowship would fit with any other potential sources of funding available to you.

If you have questions about the fellowship application letter or other aspects of the submission process, please feel free to contact Dr. Charles Bazerman or Suzie Null, the Writing Research Across Borders Conference Coordinators. Both can be reached at writing@education.ucsb.edu.

Writing Research Across Borders Conference
Proposal Committee
c/o Charles Bazerman
Gevirtz Graduate School of Education
UC Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9490

Thank you for your interest in our conference.