Computers and Writing 2025

May 15–18 | University of Georgia

Call for Papers

Athens, Greece is credited as the birthplace of the Western rhetorical tradition. Home of the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia was established intentionally as a university town, self-consciously named as an homage to the home of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle and his Academy. While our Athens does continue the enthusiastic athletic tradition of Aristotle’s Athens, we’re more interested in extending our rhetorical forebearers’ study of rhetoric and writing technologies.

The 2025 Computers and Writing Conference’s theme is "Agency and Authorship." We invite proposals that consider how computers and technologies impact concepts of writerly influence and identity, which might include "slow rhetoric," craft, experiential pedagogy, rhetoric tied to non-human actants, assessment and agency, social justice and written voice, and practices and platforms.

The 2025 conference will emphasize place and how specific locales work with digital technologies to provide platforms for expressions of agency borne out of lived, place-based experience. Such consideration for the relationships between place, writing, and the digital world call us to reconsider what it means to come together for this conference in a particular place. Adding to the regular conference programming, attendees will self-select to participate in a field experience in or around Athens, GA that emphasizes the rhetorics of particular places and how their inhabitants enact authorship and agency. 

While artificial intelligence, and large language models in particular, are significant and ongoing subjects of consideration for teacher-scholars of digital writing, we encourage participants to theorize specific applications, concerns, or recommendations for machine-learning tools, or to consider approaches to the conference theme that work around or beyond AI. This conference and the conversations it fosters have existed for decades, and we also encourage proposals that connect to the historic concerns of rhetoricians and scholars of computers and writing. 

In evaluating proposals, the organizers will favor fully conceived panels of 3-4 speakers over individual papers, though individual proposals are still welcomed.

Proposals Might Address:

• What does it mean to experience agency through writing, whether online or offline?
• How do technologies adjust our notions of the relationship between rhetoric and craft?  
• How do particular places seed/support/sustain rhetorical and creative practices?
• Do we need a slow rhetoric?
• How do technologies, enforce, or challenge existing power structures and hierarchies?
• How do we discuss or enact AI writing practices in the face of climate change and political turmoil?
• How can community engaged and place-based pedagogies intersect with the virtual to create connections across boundaries?
• How do writing technologies impede, foster, or expand agency and access for marginalized populations?
• Can AI assume authorial identity? Or, at the very least, how might AI defamiliarize the concept of an author and what it means to “author” a text?
• How does rhetorical agency inform lived experience—and what are the ways in which digital technologies mediate/manifest/manipulate this relationship?