The deadline for submissions to the CASDW/ACR’s Annual Award for Best Dissertation is Friday, April 12, 2024. The Joan Pavelich CASDW/ACR Annual Award for the Best Dissertation in Writing and Discourse Studies recognizes an outstanding PhD dissertation in writing studies, discourse studies, rhetoric, literacy education, communication studies, applied linguistics, or a cognate field. The awards will be given to students in a Canadian university or to a Canadian student studying outside Canada.

To be eligible, dissertations must have been defended between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023. An announcement of the winning dissertation will be made at the 2024 CASDW/ACR annual conference and the winner will be invited to present their work at the 2025 conference without needing to go through the proposal process. Nominees do not need to be CASDW/ACR members and self-nominations are highly welcomed.

The award includes a prize of $100 and a one-year free CASDW membership for the following year.

The deadline for nominations is Friday, April 12, 2024. Dissertation writers are encouraged to submit their work if it speaks to some of the following criteria:

·        Builds on or extends previous scholarship relevant to discourse and writing studies as well as addresses a notable gap in the scholarship; 

·        Re-conceives discourse and writing studies work through divergent thinking or diverse experiences;

·        Poses and addresses a significant research question;

·        Contributes new knowledge to writing and discourse studies and highlights the importance of its findings;

·        Showcases relevant and/or innovative methodology.

Applicants/nominators should send the following items to Nazih El-Bezre (Nazih.El-Bezre@ubc.ca):

·        a PDF file containing the dissertation (or a link to an online repository),

·        a CV, and

·        a cover sheet with the applicant’s full name, citizenship, institution and degree program, and contact information for their primary supervisor.

Committee Members:

Nazih El-Bezre (Nazih.El-Bezre@ubc.ca)
Katja Thieme
Alys Avalos Rivera
Leah Burns

The Call for Proposals is now open for CASDW/ACR’s 2024 Conference, which will be held in (limited) hybrid mode at McGill University in Montréal from 15-17 June, 2024! 

The theme of our conference is: Sustaining Writing in a Time of Crisis / Appuyer l’écriture en temps de crise / L’écriture de soutien en temps de crise. We welcome proposals for papers on this theme, and on all aspects of writing and discourse / rédactologie.

Proposals are due by January 15, 2024 by 11:59:59 (PT). Please go the CASDW-ACR Annual Conference webpage download a Call for Proposals (in English and en français) for more details about the types of proposal we welcome, the options for participating in person and virtually, and for a link to the submission form.

Nominations are being accepted for the 2023 Doreen Starke-Meyerring Annual Award for the best article or chapter in writing and discourse studies. This award celebrates the outstanding scholarship being produced within the Canadian writing and discourse studies community.

The Doreen Starke-Meyerring Annual Award recognizes the best journal article or book chapter published during the calendar year by a CASDW member. Co-authored articles or chapters will be eligible as long as one of the authors is a CASDW member.

In order to be eligible, nominees must have been CASDW members in 2023. In the case of co-authored pieces, at least one member must have been a CASDW member in 2023. The nominated article or chapter must have been published in 2023.

To nominate an article or chapter, please send a PDF of the journal article or book chapter and a complete reference to the selection committee. No other documents are needed!

The deadline for nominations is January 15, 2024. The winner of the award will be announced at the CASDW Annual Conference.  Authors are invited to nominate their own publications as well as those of other CASDW members.

The assessment criteria for the award are as follows: (1) the overall quality of the writing and thinking; (2) the significance of the question(s) addressed in the research; (3) the importance of the new knowledge presented in the article; and (4) and methodological approach and/or innovation.

The award includes a one-year CASDW membership for the following year.

Applicants/nominees should send a PDF of the journal article or book chapter, as well as a complete reference, to the selection committee listed below:

Brittany Amell: BrittanyAmell@cmail.carleton.ca

Sara Doody: sara.doody@uwaterloo.ca

Sara Humphreys: shumphreys@uvic.ca

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2022 Doreen Starke-Meyerring Award for the best article or chapter in writing and discourse studies!

The committee wishes to thank everyone who submitted nominations this year. The quality of the research and writing of all submissions was particularly high this year and speaks to the excellent, and important work, emerging from members of our association.

We’re pleased to announce that the winner of the 2022 award is:

Brittany Amell, for her chapter entitled, “Getting Stuck, Writing Badly, and Other Curious Impressions: Doctoral Writing and Imposter Feelings.” The chapter brings to light a rarely discussed, but commonly felt, reality for many doctoral writers: how imposter feelings can impact individual writers and how such feelings serve to reinforce systemic issues surrounding doctoral writing. In an approachable and engaging voice, Amell moves away from discussing imposter feelings as an individual issue, and instead focuses on how imposter feelings might point to systemic ruptures where “feeling outside” is a strength rather than something to be stigmatized. In addition to shedding light on a topic not often discussed in writing and discourse studies, the chapter offers several practical and pedagogical strategies for grappling with imposter feelings.

The committee also wishes to recognize, as an honourable mention, Katja Thieme’s article, “A Play on Occlusion: Uptake of Letters to the University President.” In this paper, Thieme presents both a compelling empirical account of how a particular genre—the letter to the university president—functions and advances theoretical ideas about genre uptake and occlusion. Of particular note is how the paper grapples with explorations of power and hierarchy through considering how genre occlusion is constructed and uptake made, at times, unavailable, impacting the degree to which individuals might participate in genre activities.

We are pleased to award three years worth of Annual Awards for Best Dissertation for dissertations completed in 2020 (Award for 2021), 2021 (Award for 2022), and 2022 (Award for 2023) respectively. On behalf of CASDW-ACR, congratulations to each of you!

The winners for each year are listed below in chronological order. For more on their vital and important contributions, please read about the studies “Best Dissertation Winners” webpage.

2021 Winner (Best Dissertation submitted in 2020)

• Kim Mitchell (University of Manitoba, 2021)
• Dissertation title: The theoretical construction and measurement of writing self-efficacy

Honourable mention: Sara Doody (McGill University, 2020). Dissertation title: Interdisciplinary writing should be simple, but it isn’t: A study of meta-genres in interdisciplinary life sciences doctoral programs.

2022 Winner (Best Dissertation submitted in 2021)

• Christin Wright-Taylor (University of Waterloo, 2021)
• Dissertation title: “Sorry If My Words Aren’t Right”: Writing Studies’ Partnership with Second Language Writing to Support Translingual Students in the Anglo-Canadian Classroom

2023 Winner (Best Dissertation submitted in 2022)

• Monique Kampherm (University of Waterloo, 2023)
• Dissertation title: Masks and Caricatures: Prosopopoeia, Ethopoeia, and the Effect of Social Media on Canadian Political Leaders’ Debates

The committee members (Sara Humphreys, Dana Landry, and Diana Wegner) wish to thank each of the award nominees for their outstanding contributions to the field. The group of dissertations was invigorating and inspiring, and we look forward to seeing where, by whom, and in what ways they are taken up.