News

Call for Nominations: 2025 Doreen Starke-Meyerring Award for Best Article or Chapter in Writing & Discourse Studies

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Nominations are now being accepted for the 2025 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 2024. In the case of co-authored pieces, at least one member must have been a CASDW member in 2024. The nominated article or chapter must have been published in 2024.

To nominate an article or chapter, send a PDF of the journal article or book chapter and a complete reference to the Chair of the selection committee (shumphreys (at) uvic.ca). No other documents needed!

The deadline for nominations is March 10, 2025.

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) methodological approach and/or innovation.

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

CASDW/ACR 2025 Conference: Call for Proposals

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The CASDW/ACR annual conference will be held on Saturday May 31 & Sunday June 1 2025 at George Brown College, in Toronto, Ontario. We will join the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences conference and offer an as-hybrid-as-possible conference in-person and online with live-streaming when available.

We enthusiastically invite proposals for presentations, roundtables, or workshops, engaging all topics related to writing studies and discourse studies, and other fields that are relevant to the study of discourse and writing. Learn more by reading the Call for Proposals!

In the coming months, watch for information from CASDW/ACR on early-bird registration and more!

2024 Joan Pavelich CASDW/ACR Annual Award for the Best Dissertation in Writing and Discourse Studies

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The committee for the 2024 Joan Pavelich CASDW/ACR Annual Award for the Best Dissertation in Writing and Discourse Studies is delighted to present this award to Dr. Brittany Amell. Dr. Amell’s doctoral thesis—titled “Not all who want to, can—not all who can, will: Extending notions of unconventional doctoral dissertations”—presents a significant contribution to conversations in rhetorical genre theory, applied linguistics, and the study of disciplinary discourse.

In this complex project, Dr. Amell explores the diverse experiences and discursive choices of an international set of doctoral students and their unconventional dissertations. Dr. Amell’s work is firmly rooted in and thoroughly informed by current writing and discourse studies scholarship. With clarity and care, her insights both extend and challenge current approaches as she applies textography as a method, conducts interviews, collects questionnaire responses, and analyzes a significant and diverse corpus of dissertations. This research, rich in contextual detail, allows us to see how shifts in disciplinary setting as well as newly motivating values can turn what might otherwise appear to be conventional into an unconventional project as well as how the multiple negotiations that doctoral students need to engage in continue to constrain formal experimentation. Underlying Dr. Amell’s genre-theoretical analysis is a significant concern for both making doctoral scholarship more publicly accessible and creating more equitable conditions to better support marginalized scholars. This work questions the types of writing that are considered to belong in the university and challenges the status quo of which type of work gets legitimized. Throughout this dissertation, Dr. Amell is exceptionally adept at reflecting on and narrating her research process, describing the challenges of definition she encountered, and attending to the positions and intentions of her research participants. The committee strongly encourages the pursuit of further forms and versions of publication of this thorough and insightful work.

The committee chair, Dr. Katja Thieme, wishes to thank the committee members for their careful work: Nazih El-Bezre, Alys Avalos-Rivera, and Leah Burns. Finally, a wide call to the audience. Please keep this prize on your mind as you encounter doctoral students in any Canadian university or Canadian students studying outside Canada who are completing a dissertation in writing and discourse studies and may be finishing in the upcoming year. Please nominate them next year or encourage them to nominate themselves.”

2024 CASDW Annual Award for the Best Article or Chapter in Writing and Discourse Studies

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We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Doreen Starke-Meyerring Award for the best article or chapter in writing and discourse studies in 2023 are: Katja Thieme and Jennifer Walsh-Marr, for their manuscript entitled “First Year International Students and the Language of Indigenous Studies.”

Thieme and Walsh-Marr’s article advocates for the inclusion of Indigenous studies in first-year international writing courses as a means of highlighting local, and international, Indigenous issues while simultaneously engaging in language instruction. Their article invites readers to consider how to integrate Indigenous studies into writing classrooms in a compelling and approachable way that also accounts for diverse approaches to writing pedagogy, which is itself especially relevant given the number of Canadian institutions that have made commitments to implement TRC recommendations. In addition to being a highly applicable and transferable article, especially for writing teachers, Thieme and Walsh-Marr highlight the tensions and dissonance that can accompany the actual practice of teaching writing and consider how engagement with Indigenous studies helps make these tensions more overt in order that we might better grapple with them.

The committee also wishes to recognize, as an honourable mention, Kim Mitchell’s article, “Language as a Proxy for Race: Language and Literacy for the Nursing Profession.” Mitchell’s article brings a fresh and critical perspective to how writing studies scholarship, and scholars, can position themselves as viable interdisciplinary partners for fields like nursing. Mitchell’s approachable overview of how a critical writing studies perspective might inform nursing education brings into sharp focus some of the problematic implications of teaching so-called Standard English to nursing students. The actionable recommendations Mitchell discusses, while directly related to nursing, are also clearly applicable across disciplines.

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 in which members of our association are engaged.

CASDW24 Program

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As our conference date is fast approaching, we are happy to share the conference program on the CASDW24 webpage!

CASDW24 will run June 15-17 (Saturday to Monday), 2024 at UQAM in Montreal, QC. Presenters and attendees can plan their conference and anticipate what other sessions they can attend and engage in.