Call for Proposals or Submissions: Issue #2 - Keeping Complexity in the Frame

CALL FOR PROPOSALS AND SUBMISSIONS

Keeping Complexity in the Frame: Troubling Common Conceptual Anchors

The study of literate activity often depends upon familiar conceptual anchors–terms that help us make sense of writing as a social, cognitive, and material practice. At times, those terms can also obscure complexity, naturalize ideologies, and/or resist critique. 

For our second issue, Literate Activity invites scholarship that troubles the comfort of familiar conceptual grounds. Prior and Olinger (2019) offered zombie concepts as a way to think about ideological gravitational pulls that can obscure the rich complexities of our work, noting:  

Even in the face of fatal empirical evidence and theoretical critique,[…] ideologies reanimate a host of zombie concepts (e.g., discourse communities, autonomous texts, singular authorship, literal meaning, stylistic clarity, writing ability as a psychological trait) and continue to ensnare practice theories of academic literacies and human becoming (p. 127-128, emphasis added).

In addition to Prior and Olinger’s list of ideologically weighted concepts, potential contributions might also interrogate other areas such as “standard language approaches,” “ writing transfer ideologies,” “straightforward trajectories,” “linearity of becoming/development,” “writing as individual cognition,” “writer and audience as fixed roles,” the institutional logics that naturalize such frameworks. We do not see this list as exhaustive, and invite contributors to develop manuscripts around other conceptual anchors they may encounter in their scholarship and work. 

In an effort to productively trouble familiar conceptual anchors, papers for this call might engage with issues around the following broadly situated questions: 

  • What terms, concepts, frameworks, well-worn ways-of-knowing might be conceptually stultifying new lines of inquiry by continually tracing the familiar outlines of literate activity and writing without keeping and managing complexity? 
  • How might re-examining such terms open new possibilities for studying literate activity, teaching, and becoming?
  • What histories, ideologies, blackboxed features (Latour, 2005), etc., might be revealed through strategic inquiry? How might such inquiry shed light on the lived complexities of writing? 
  • What sorts of complexities are giving you optimism for the state of your teaching, research, etc.? 
  • What hardly settled features of textual action need we make useful sense of writing in the 21st century? 
  • Where do you see productive complexity, ambiguity, or contradiction emerging in your own research or pedagogy? 

We especially welcome submissions that:

  • Draw from data to illuminate rather than resolve complexity, making visible the quotidian tensions, contradictions, and negotiations that animate literate activity.
  • Situate conceptual reflection within empirical inquiry
  • Engage seriously with empirical data–texts, transcripts, artifacts, or field notes–to complicate or re-animate familiar conceptual anchors and/or theories;
  • Reflect on how methodological choices maintain (or mask) complexity;
  • Offer generative alternatives to zombie concepts while resisting accounts that both fix literate activity into particular settings and freeze literate activity into singular semiotic modalities


Publication Timeline for the Second Issue

If you are submitting a proposal, please submit by no later than January 31, 2026.

We will accept manuscript drafts on a rolling basis until May 31, 2026. Submissions will be reviewed as they are received, with the first round of reviews completed 8 weeks after initial submissions.

Final revised manuscripts will be due in September 2026. Copy-editing and other production activities will be completed in October 2026, and the second issue will be published in November 2026.

Please view our submissions portal at https://submissions.wacclearinghouse.org/. Please don’t hesitate to direct any inquiries to our editors, ryanware@landmark.edu, bruce.kovanen@ndsu.edu, kevin.roozen@ucf.edu.


Editorial Process

We will use an anonymized submission peer referee process. Reviews should be multimodal. That is, reviewers will be asked to provide at least 500 words about the manuscript, describe how they see its overall controlling purpose being made and/or achieved, and outline a realistic process of revision and resubmission, but they will also be asked to engage with marginalia comments in the text-artifact. We can also imagine the possibility of reviewers recording audio or video for the scholars whose work they have reviewed to supplement written reviews. Lastly, reviewers will be invited to sign their reviews. Should authors have questions regarding reviews of their manuscripts, they will be invited to contact the editors of Literate Activity who will serve as touchpoints in the review process.

 

General Call for Submissions.

We welcome submissions of original research articles, pedagogical articles, and reviews of extant scholarship, but we are also excited to widen the margins of what academic journals consider publishable scholarship. To those ends, we encourage writers to submit artifacts such as:

  • Original research articles. As a digital publication, we are less concerned with strict word counts and instead encourage authors to consider the scope of argument and data analysis as much more flexible. With that in mind, we encourage a variety of manuscript lengths from what is considered a “standard” length such as 6,000 to 8,000 words to much longer, such as up to 20,000 words. All research with human subjects must be conducted with approval from the relevant Institutional Review Board.
  • Pedagogical articles that engage with employing literate activity approaches, especially reaching moving beyond attention to the design of assignments in K-12, undergraduate, and graduate coursework to address what pedagogical interventions grounded in literate activity can afford students and teachers alike in supporting literate development and becoming. As with original articles, scope and data may drive a flexible manuscript length.
  • Reviews. We welcome reviews of extant scholarship of up to 3000 words. We are excited to include retrospective accounts of research and/or scholarship that may have been published some time ago, but that either was formative to the growth or thinking of our writers, that bears some relationship or resonance to current developments transdisciplinarily, or that in some way remains exigent to our writers.
  • Scenes. Scenes might include a strip of data (an image, video clip, audio file, etc.) and a ~500-1500-word description that indexes how that scene illuminates dimensions of literate activity in some sense and in potentially less formalized genres. How does the data illuminate the material conditions of literate activity? How does the data show people doing things with texts? All research with human subjects must be conducted with approval from the relevant Institutional Review Board
  • Emergent scholarship and dialogue is an experimental corner of our journal, ES/D provides scholars with a space (texts/artifacts up to 2500 words) to submit brief but focused treatments of data excerpts with a documented narrative (Prior, 1994; Roozen & Erickson, 2017; Ware, 2022) from some emergent project grounded in theoretical work around the nature of semiotic/literate activity, textuality, etc. Should ES/D submissions move forward into the journal space, they will be matched with another scholar for a dialogue/response (not a review). We envision this as a ‘working space’ that functions as a kind of offshoot of the journal. We see it as a means of inviting and supporting substantial collaboration, and we can imagine longer-form projects emerging from ES/D submissions over time.

When you submit your work for consideration, please include an abstract (~250 words) and indicate what type of text-artifact you have submitted from the list above. Please contact the editors Ryan Ware, Bruce Kovanen, or Kevin Roozen with any questions.

For more information about submitting to the journal, please see the Clearinghouse invitation to contribute scholarly work, its statement on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, and its statement on publication ethics. Submissions and peer reviews should be informed by these statements. Our peer review process is also expected to be guided by the statement on anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices, which can be found at https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic.

Like other publications on the Clearinghouse, articles in our journal are released under Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow authors to retain copyright to their work. To learn more about these licenses, please view the Clearinghouse's Creative Commons Licenses page.

To make a submission, please visit the WAC Clearinghouse submissions portal.