Call For Papers: Special Issue of Literacy in Composition Studies Title: The Transnational Movement of People and Information Guest Editors: Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Kate Vieira, Morris Young To be considered, please submit a 250-word abstract that discusses the proposed article to the editors at kevieira@wisc.edu. The deadline for proposal submissions is March 14, 2014. The movement of people and information across national borders is rapid and widespread. By some estimates, over 180 million people worldwide are currently living outside the country of their birth, keeping in contact with homelands, forging new migratory networks, and navigating new circumstances through writing. Literacy in composition studies has begun to respond to this context through increased attention to the global, the international, and the transnational. This special issue seeks to forward this emerging area of interest. Often defined as a set of skills and resources, literacy has figured prominently in debates about immigrants’ national integration. Some have called for migrants’ swift assimilation through literacy, others have pointed to the value of migrants’ diverse literacy legacies, and still others have examined how their literacies change in new national contexts. But if we think of literacy more materially, as skills and resources made possible by the technology of writing, it becomes clear that literacy plays a role in more than migrants’ incorporation within nations. It also shapes their movement among them. Writing can facilitate transnational communication and network migration via the postal system and Internet. And writing is a key tool in migration policy, as nation states use immigration documents, such as visas and passports, to allow some migrants in and to keep others out. Writing, in other words, is deeply imbricated both in transnational lived experiences and in the infrastructures that govern transnational mobility. The central question this special issue asks is how. We welcome articles that address these issues empirically, theoretically, and/or rhetorically. Among the questions to be considered are the following: How do migrants’ literacy practices change and persist across time and national borders? How does the transnational inhere in local literacies? How do other semiotic practices interact with writing in transnational contexts? How is literacy taught and learned transnationally? How does writing itself move? What are the implications of changing communication technologies, such as the post and the Internet, for transnational lives and literacies? How does writing motivate, influence, or restrict the travels of people? How have structural forces (such as governments, institutions, race, etc.) facilitated and/or discouraged literacy and immigration? Which methodologies might glean productive inquiries into transnational literacies? Literacy in Composition Studies is a peer-reviewed venue for a broad range of scholarship in literacy and writing studies. http://licsjournal.org. -- Kate Vieira Assistant Professor English Department, Program in Composition and Rhetoric University of Wisconsin, Madison kevieira@wisc.edu