Reading & Working Groups
CWS graduate students currently host and facilitate two working / reading groups based on the interests of our current graduate students.
Below you will find:
Active Groups
Critical Disciplinary Scholars
The Critical Disciplinarity Scholars are a scholarly community that aims to support liberatory thought and practice by critically examining disciplinary power, positioning, and resistance within knowledge traditions.
Each semester we meet for five 90 minute discussions, each focused loosely on its own topic. Our goal is to talk about what it’s like to write inside your discipline, and to write yourself as part of your discipline. Our discussions focus loosely on
- the ways that our separate disciplines ask us to “be,” to present ourselves, our identities, our communities and our scholarship;
- the pains (and other feelings) that come with these presentations;
- experiences—exciting, bewildering, rebellious, and otherwise—of writing inside (and outside!) of disciplines.
Our meetings are free and open to graduate students, fellows, and other community members interested in these questions. As members use this space to consider difficult topics and experiences, it is of the utmost importance that we maintain a supportive, respectful atmosphere.
If you have questions or are interested in joining, contact Azlan Smith at azlans2@illinois.edu.
Writing Bodies
"Writing Bodies" was founded in the Fall of 2022. We are an interdisciplinary collection of scholars interested in better understanding how bodies write and are written. In our monthly meetings, we read and discuss work on embodiment, drawing from numerous fields, including: rhetoric and writing studies, disability studies, trans* and gender studies, critical race theory, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and education. Though led by graduate students in Writing Studies, Writing Bodies welcomes undergraduates, faculty, and staff to be regular or drop-in members of the reading group.
If you have questions are or are interested in joining, contact Fin McMahon at finolam2@illinois.edu.
Group Creation Guidelines
CWS Reading & Working Groups are intended to support our community members' wants and needs. Each group (current or historical) has come into being because a member of our community identified a need or an interest they wanted to share. As such, if you have an idea for a reading or working group, please consider proposing it to the center! We would love to support your ideas and help create a space where you can engage in the intellectual work you value.
Creating a reading or working group through the Center for Writing Studies can have many benefits, including:
- The option to promote your group on CWS's listservs - the Center keeps listservs of CWS affiliated grads, faculty, and alumni. If you create a CWS reading or working group, you can advertise that event to any or all of these listservs.
- Support in reserving space - while grads and faculty can reserve space on campus independently, working with the center can make that process easier.
- Potential modest financial support - for example, Critical Disciplinary Scholars is able to provide dinner for its participants through CWS funding.
- Longevity - many groups change coordinators over time. If your idea is one that you expect or hope to live beyond your time as a coordinator, incorporating the group in CWS allows for the potential of changing coordinators smoothly.
- On this note, if you are interested in an archived CWS group (listed below), please feel free to pitch its recreation or revival to the Center. We would be happy to support its return.
To make the process of proposing a group easier, CWS created guidelines for the creation and management of CWS Reading Groups, in Fall 2022. The guidelines are as follows:
- To first propose a reading or working group, organizers should submit a 75 word description of the group, intended for public consumption (in email messages to the CWS community and for posting on the CWS website). (The CWS admin team will reserve the right to edit—collaboratively with the proposer—for clarity, inclusiveness, etc.)
- Reading groups must be open to all in the university community who wish to participate.
- This means choosing to meet in accessible spaces and in accessible ways.
- Reading groups must submit their meeting times and locations to be added to the CWS calendar.
- Reading and working groups must be "renewed" each fall. Organizers should inform CWS ADs if there is interest in continuing the groups, which will not renew automatically.
If you are struggling with any of these guidelines, please reach out to the current CWS Admin Team for support. These guidelines are intended to facilitate your creation process, rather than to limit you. If you find that they are more of a harm than a help, please don't hesitate to reach out.
In addition to the above required guidelines, we would like to promote the HRI Reading Groups and remind CWS community members that HRI accepts reading group applications on an annual basis.
Past Groups
The Center for Writing Studies has collaborated in and/or founded other reading groups featuring affiliated CWS faculty and graduate students in the past. They include:
Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) Chat
CHAT Chats began informally in Summer 2016 and grew into a formal reading group in Fall 2016. The group meets every couple of weeks to discuss texts related to CHAT.
Social Justice Praxis
This working group began in Fall 2016. It seeks to build teaching practices that engage our students, and ourselves, in the transformative work of developing personal awareness, understanding structural inequality, embracing difference, and committing to action in pursuit of a more just world. The group meets once a month and works to create change within and outside CWS. CWS's Social Justice Education Symposium, held in Fall 2017, is an example of the programming that is central to this group.
Data Workshop Group
This workshop is designed to offer a constructive and generative space for advanced CWS graduate students to work through their dissertation research data. During each meeting, two grads present their data- or methods-in-progress to other graduate student attendees, who provide feedback and supportive suggestions for continued research. The group meets a handful of times throughout the semester.
Embodying Situated Activity
Embodying Situated Activity was an interdisciplinary group of faculty and graduate students interested in exploring multidisciplinary approaches to theorizing the body-in-interaction in material/ecological worlds and to researching and representing embodied situated activity.
Rhetorical Studies
The RSRG was an interdisciplinary group of faculty/grad students interested in all aspects of rhetoric and public discourse.
Youth, Literature, and Culture
Hosted by the Center for Children’s Books, this group served as a research workshop and reading group that explored youth literature, media, and culture from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and draws scholars from library science, education, English literature, and other departments.
Narrative Tellings, Retellings and Remediations: Readings on Situated Discourse Practice
Analysis of narratives has been central to many disciplines. Recent work has moved from an isolated focus on linguistic construction of narrative textuality to the situated discourse practices of narrative tellings and retellings, including semiotic remediations (whether shifts in material, embodied performance or across media—from talk to text to film to video game). In meetings led by the organizers, participants, and invited visitors, this reading group explored multidisciplinary approaches to narrative discourse practice.
Other Past Initiatives
Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives
The Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN) is a publicly available archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that together provide a historical record of the literacy practices and values of contributors, as those practices and values change.
The DALN was founded by Cynthia Selfe and Louis Ulman and serves to document the diverse literacy practices of individuals in the United States. The Center for Writing Studies is a contributing partner to DALN. Visit the archive here.