The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

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We don’t know about y’all, but we are tired. Too tired to write academic articles, book chapters, dissertations, and all the other fancy genres that the academy values. You see, since COVID hit, we’ve been performing more carework than ever: Ruth for her two young kids who are now home all day every day, and Vyshali for her disabled bodymind after a pandemic-induced reduction in physical therapy and routine clinical care. We aren’t alone, either. During this pandemic, parents, disabled people, and caregivers have been disproportionately severed from their usual networks of care at the same time we are overwhelmed by carework for ourselves or others. Furthermore, the pandemic intensified already existing trauma against BIPOC, queer and trans folks, fat people, and disabled folks--and especially those who live at the intersections of these identities.

And yet, many of us are still writing. Ruth is homeschooling her kindergartener, developing lesson plans and literacy materials. Vyshali is crafting and refining materials for her online classes, writing her dissertation, occasionally tweeting about chronic pain and fatigue. Our friends are composing Facebook updates about their COVID recovery, collaborative statements about Black Lives Matter and faculty life during COVID, Twitter threads about parenting during lockdown, and more. This writing is multimodal. It’s vibrant. It’s communal. It’s radical. And we want to give it the attention it deserves in the Summer 2022 special issue for Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics.

We want to make this really clear: this is not a typical CFP, and we are not looking for academic essays about writing in the time of COVID. Instead, we are looking for short (and we mean short) personal narratives and reflections about the intersection of carework and multimodal composing during COVID. We want to know about the barriers you faced in your writing during the pandemic, and the multimodal compositions you created as you navigated carework for yourself or others. We especially want to feature the stories of multiply-marginalized graduate students, contingent faculty, independent scholars, and pre-tenure and non-tenure-track faculty. 

You might be thinking: What? You’re asking the people most burdened by COVID restrictions to write and submit something NOW? And yes, we are. We feel compelled to archive this moment, in what we hope is the least exploitative way possible, because we're afraid that in two to three years' time, our journals will primarily feature the voices of people not impacted by the virus. Reports already indicate that women are submitting fewer articles to academic journals during the pandemic, as they are disproportionately impacted by the increased carework--an impact felt, we can assume, exponentially by BIPOC women and disabled people. But we also know, as people who are performing more carework than ever, that we *are* writing. That our writerly experiences are important and should be recognized by the academy. Our hope is this forum will mitigate any potential absence of parents, caregivers, and disabled folks from our scholarly journals by recording the stories of their multimodal writerly lives during the pandemic.

Also, and we can’t stress this enough: we want the writing you do for this issue to be easy for you. Life is chaos, all this carework saps energy and time, and we refuse to pretend these are normal times. We’re open to pretty much any genre. Like we said, we aren’t looking for academic essays with a million citations and MLA/APA format and all that jazz. Who has time for that type of writing right now? We don’t! Instead, we’re looking for short personal reflections, snippets of poetry, flash nonfiction, photo essays, sound essays of you trying to write while a herd of hungry children yells in the background, multimodal essays of writing with an uncooperative bodymind, interviews among friends about how you’ve been writing, video rants, playlists, lists, web comics, and whatever else you can come up with. Our only request is that you think through how increased carework has shaped your writerly life during COVID: the barriers you face, the multimodal genres you’re experimenting with, the communities you engage with, etc. 

If all this sounds amazing but you’re overwhelmed by the prospect of writing the kind of proposal that academia expects, and yet you feel compelled to contribute somehow, you can fill out this Google Form by July 15.

Here, you can offer to contribute as a respondent or request a writing partner. For the latter option, we will email you a list of all the interested collaborators two months before the deadline, and you can contact people from there. Or not. You might change your mind. That’s OK. What seems possible in March may not be possible in September. And we get that. 

Send your submissions and queries to Vyshali Manivannan and Ruth Osorio at careworkandwriting@gmail.com by September 1, 2021.

After that, Vyshali and Ruth will review and provide feedback to all contributors. (We’ll be transparent here and say we won’t know our approach to selecting pieces until we’re reviewing them. We might publish all the things, or we might make choices to amplify certain, overlooked perspectives. But we vow to communicate with empathy and care throughout each step.) We will work on revisions in October and November; contributors will have the opportunity to read each other’s work and offer feedback as well.

Then, we’ll publish the issue in Summer 2022.

We work on crip time, so this proposed timeline is fluid--for us, the editors, and for you, the contributors. 

What would happen if we offered academics an intellectual playground and charged them with crafting visions of futures? What would it look like? How far could you push your mind?

For this special issue of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, we aim to celebrate the work that has been done and that has propelled us forward, while stretching the imagination further. In 2020, we lost both Representative John Lewis, immortalized forever in comic form (the March trilogy), and actor Chadwick Boseman, who brought an iconic comic hero to life (Black Panther). The form of Lewis’ graphic autobiography introduced his hero’s journey to a new generation, who likely also looked to both the film Black Panther (2018) as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther comics to imagine what possibilities could look like. 

The way that comics as a form is able to connect and bend temporality is but one example of the way multimodal rhetorics can be used as a tool to both understand the long history of freedom struggles and build upward and onward from there. This special issue seeks brave investigations and inquiries that use multimodal rhetorics to show us your vision of new futures. We are open to considering various forms for final products but are particularly interested in comics, short films, and digital projects, as well as more traditional scholarly article length/style manuscripts. It is important to us that your project takes the form that best suits the vision you have and in the way that best articulates it.

Questions to consider (but if you have a different question you’d like to answer, still submit):

• What are the conditions necessary to craft a postcolonial/decolonial education?

• What does it mean for history to be revisionist? 

• What might queering the future look like in practice?

• How might education look different if we could completely reimagine the structure of the Academy?

• How do popular notions of Afrofuturism push us closer towards understandings of a freer future? What are the limitations? Where are the areas that still need work?

• What does it mean to bring the idea of “play” into your practice as a scholar?

For those projects selected, we will be forming a cohort. As the co-editors of the upcoming special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on Black Digital Humanities have modeled, we will be guiding these projects through revisions and the review process, as well as planning and encouraging group work sessions, for peer to peer review. The hope is that we will be able to build together, rather than imagining separate futures.