Feeling Connected, Reconnected, or Unconnected: Navigating CCCC 2025 and Cost/Benefit Ratios of Future Conference Connections
By Adrienne Jankens
Tags: Conference Planning, Community, Connection, Cost, Health, Place, Food, Goals
As I draft this reflection on CCCC 2025 in late September 2025, I am preparing to enter the final weeks of co-chairing the 2025 Conference on Community Writing. I think about it almost every day: how conference-goers will experience each day of CCW 2025 on our Wayne State University campus in Detroit. Last week, I walked through our reserved conference spaces again. I pretended I was a conference attendee leaving one building to find a session in another; I noticed the pathways I would most likely take; I considered where I would sit to take a rest between sessions; I noticed art I had not seen before. Hosting a conference about community writing and designing community, I want to help people feel connected—and to get connected if they feel alone when they arrive.
As Jennifer and I reviewed survey responses from CCCC 2025 Documentarians, I noticed striking comments about whether and how CCCC 2025 attendees felt connected to other participants, to conference events, or to the discipline. If the purpose of a conference is to bring us together around shared goals, visions, and questions, then connection—in some form—would seem integral. I wonder what we can learn from considering both how documentarian participants felt connected and how they felt unconnected, at times, to the conference as a whole.
One question from the documentarian survey in use since 2020 has been, “What will be your path or pattern of movement today? Where will you go? What places and spaces will you occupy?” In their introduction to Recollections from an Uncommon Time, Julie Lindquist, Bree Straayer, and Bump Halbritter describe this attention to a “path” as one of the documentarian’s designated project “components”: “Choose a path through the convention experience and record some observations about the things you see and hear” (16). This is a survey question likely initially driven by both our scholarly attention to space and place and our conference planning attention to accessibility and community (see the Spring 2024 issue of Composition Studies for recent discussions of conference accessibility). I also think this question (and its responses) might support our conference planning attention to cost/benefit ratios, which I am thinking about a lot as we hit the final weeks of preparation for CCW 2025: Is it worth hosting an event in a special space if no one can find it? Will attendees stick around longer if we spring for appetizers? How can we ensure folks circulate the booths in the exhibit room we paid extra money to reserve? When the costs of extra rooms and more food and offsite adventures will trickle down to conference attendees, who are already burdened with so many costs and less and less funding, how can we rethink the ways we provide community through conferencing (see Giaimo 169)?
In the 2025 responses, this question showed us that on a conference Thursday, conference-goers are primarily bound to the convention center and their hotel rooms; on Friday, they spend most of their time at the conference, but hope to venture out for good food or to see local sites; on Saturday, many note trying to get one last CCCC session in before heading to the airport or hitting the road. I certainly followed this rhythm at CCCC 2025: a full day of collaboration and sessions in the convention center Thursday, a little less session attendance Friday (with a trip out for dinner with my friend Nicole and then, in the rain, dessert with Jennifer), and Saturday, tired, a workshop, and pizza we carried-out and ate in the hotel lobby. Early Sunday morning, in the dark, we hopped in our Uber and headed to the airport to fly back to Detroit. For a conference attendee, having this sense of conference flow can help with planning one’s days (e.g., Thursday, I should plan on being in the convention center all day—any planned meetups outside the convention center will likely make my schedule impossible); as a conference planner, I look at this flow and think, damn, there better be good (and inexpensive) food available in the spaces where people are spending all this time.
But reading responses to other questions, I see our reflections on navigating a conference are just as much about how we choose to attend to our goals and plans for each day as much as the path we plan for getting around. Documentarians contributed reflections on how they made decisions about what to see and do at the conference:
“There are fewer talks on the schedule that interest me, so I suppose now I am looking for titles and descriptions that surprise me...that might lead to new knowledge, new ways to think and perhaps better understand what other teacher scholars do.”
“I hope I'll be inspired by some of the things I see and learn today. Being at a community college rather than a four-year makes it a little difficult to attend sessions that can be applied to my context, but I'm going to try and be strategic about which ones I go to. The first one was about using K-12 grading practices in our classrooms, but the presenter never showed up (and there was no indication that the session had been canceled), so that was a little disappointing.”
“I should also note that last night I resolved to look for high-quality antiracist events today. I didn't prioritize that on the first day because I was just improvising, and I noticed at the end of the day that I got nearly none of that pedagogical content.”
And our feelings of connection and lack of connection can influence these decisions about navigating the conference. In their reflective surveys, some participants highlighted the energy that comes from making a connection at CCCC or even being that connection for someone else:
“Composition studies is a field that has it's [sic] own history, pedagogy, and theory, and while we (compositionists) mine other fields to inform our field and our work, this is very different than suggesting composition studies needs other fields to help us do our work. This is all to say that Adrienne understands this. She was the person I met who stood in for all of the people who do not relate to me or my work at my institution. The irony of a compositionist being isolated in a writing program is beyond confounding, but it's where I'm at.”
“It was in fact a pleasure to meet Dr. Kofi Adisa. He was kind, welcoming, and fun. It helped to alleviate my nerves. It is wonderful, especially as a "fringe" member of 4Cs—not a student, professional, or scholar, but a hopeful doctoral student—to feel welcomed. Much of academia, as we know, can feel stifling or marked by boundaries, but I think the ethos of rhetoric and composition supports collegial rapport building in a wide variety of contexts, both conventional and otherwise.”
“I appreciate all the feedback I received on my work from the workshop participants. The workshop itself was such a great experience for me. The environment was more friendly and welcoming than the regular conference environment. I mean, after spending the whole day with the same group of people, discussing their works and mine, I felt being a part of this group and felt comfortable. I had the opportunity to make real connections. This doesn’t usually happen when I rush from one presentation session to the other during the regular conference sessions.”
“I have tried to bring our school’s “relentless welcome” idea to my attendance: seeking opportunities to talk to people by keeping my head up and eyes out for people who look like they may need a listening ear.”
But this energy can be hard to capture when that feeling of connection is not there. Some participants wrote explicitly about feeling lonely:
“I did meet new faces at the documentarians gathering, which was nice. I don't know many people here so it feels a bit lonely, especially when so many people are clearly here with people they know and work with at their home institutions.”
“Rewarding: Speaker sessions were intellectually generative, and to be in dialogue (even if passively) felt reinforcing. Challenging: The loneliness, to be sure; I wished I knew others. This made me think about how a well-coordinated transition into graduate school in large part depends on building social connection and forming a community.”
Others described the awkwardness of social interactions, or their anticipation of this awkwardness:
“I hope to avoid being quiet for the whole session and not being able to speak with other participants. Sometimes, my nervousness gets the best of me, that is why most of the time, I would rather be silent than share my ideas.”
“I expect to be comfortable on the streets and at restaurants. I tend to feel awkward in conference spaces. Sometimes I feel invisible or dismissed when I try to talk to people. I listen intently at panels but either can't think of a question in time or don't get chosen. Then I may want to talk to a panelist after but they are already swarmed with people or rushing off to their next thing. So I either stand awkwardly to wait or just leave.”
And the lack of a handshake that “felt like an official snub” and “made those imposter syndrome feelings creep back in.”
To navigate both these potential social scenes and our own goals, plans, and feelings, is sometimes challenging in the physical space of the conference center. As one participant reflected, “I can say that I feel most comfortable in the morning, before it gets too crowded. Yesterday afternoon, for example, it was difficult to find somewhere, a little quiet, to sit.” I reflect on my own story of my visit to the 2014 convention in Indianapolis, the day after my dissertation defense, when my advisor encouraged me to take a break and not to worry about attending a session: “I took her advice, left by way of the escalator, went outside, and walked across the bridge behind the convention center, to the zoo. I talked to the bears for a moment. I went to the botanical garden, walked paths away from people, found a spot in the back of the just-awakening garden, and cried” (Jankens 36).
Beyond the pressures of social engagement—beyond the ability to show up and put on a professional game face—there are myriad questions about cost/benefit ratios that both conference planners and conference attendees must consider. Genie Nicole Giaimo describes the cost decisions conference planners face, but also reflects on how these decisions impact the decisions of potential conference goers:
. . . [T]here are the additional hidden costs of in-person academic conferences. For those of us who are disabled or who are caretakers or who struggle with travel and other anxiety, in-person conferences are either entirely prohibitive or immensely draining. Many of us struggle to keep pace with 12-hour days, multiple time-zone travel, and week-long commitments. Those of us with health concerns or with immunocompromised family members face additional risks to in-person events as COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases circulate in high numbers throughout the year (169).
While I am not presently facing health concerns, radiation therapy for breast cancer did indeed keep me home from CCCC 2024. And for me to attend CCCC 2025—and to host CCW 2025—I rely on my parents to be available for the whole week to take care of my four children while I work to max out the benefits I can get from applying my fullest presence to the conference event.
To assess that max benefit, I need to thoughtfully consider why I choose to attend the conferences that I do. My own survey reflection on what was most rewarding about CCCC 2025 highlights how I have come to see CCCC serving a particular function in my professional life:
For me, it’s clear the most rewarding part of the conference was the one-on-one time I had with colleagues either to catch up or to accomplish a task. A challenge for me throughout the week, though, was, outside of these one-on-one meet ups, I didn’t really find much I wanted to attend, and when I did attend something I thought would be useful based on the description in the program, it really didn’t provide me with clear takeaways for research or admin thinking. It might be that I attend CCCC for community, and I have to attend other conferences, like CWPA and CCW, for the kinds of WORK I actually do.
This moment of reflection following the conference was helpful for me in thinking about how I will design my goals for each conference I am attending—how I will get those most out of any professional development decision, especially in these times when our travel funding is being cut (along with everything else). Perhaps one organization—and one conference—cannot do everything. Perhaps as we attend the conferences in our field (or, as I have experienced the past two years with CCW, co-chair these conferences), we need to reflect on how our time is best spent engaging in (or designing) particular activities that support our goals or needs, as well as on how these goals and needs might be different each time we attend a conference (and each time we collaborate in planning one).
Works Cited
Giaimo, Genie Nicole. “Reimagining Academic Conferences and Professional Volunteerism in a World of Academic Precarity.” Composition Studies, vol. 53, no. 1, 2025, pp. 165-170.
Jankens, Adrienne. “A Sweet Spot, a Safe Space.” Recollections from an Uncommon Time: 4C20 Documentarian Tales, edited by Julie Lindquist, Bree Straayer, and Bump Halbritter, 2023, pp. 35-45.
Lindquist, Julie, Bree Straayer, and Bump Halbritter. Recollections from an Uncommon Time: 4C20 Documentarian Tales, NCTE/CCCC and the WAC Clearinghouse, 2023.