CEA 2021 - 52nd Annual Conference

The College English Association welcomes proposals for presentations on the general conference theme: Justice. The College English Association’s 52nd national conference will be held in Birmingham, Alabama, where the freedom ensured by civil rights has been contested by the government in both the past and present. Birmingham’s notoriety as a focal point of the Civil Rights Movement, including the Birmingham Campaign, the imprisonment of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the writing of his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is matched by the city’s renown for forging steel, founding Veteran’s Day, and hosting the USA’s second-oldest drag queen pageant. Whether it is past conflicts over racism or current struggles over race, the rights of women, or the LGBTQ community, Birmingham and Alabama are places where the right to justice for groups and individuals has been ignored, debated, defended, and championed.
Alabama, too, is part of a rich tradition of Southern Literature and has been home to Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, and Booker T. Washington and is a setting in books from authors as diverse as Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Ralph Ellison, Fannie Flagg, John Green, and Yaa Gyasi.
CEA invites proposals from academics in all areas of literature, language, film, composition, pedagogy, and creative, professional, and technical writing. We are especially interested in presentations that feature topics relating to justice in texts, disciplines, people, cultural studies, media, and pedagogy. For your proposal, you might consider these concepts related to Justice:
resistance: protesting injustice
equality: shifting perceptions of race, class, cultures, regions, genders, sexualities
discourse: employing rhetoric and argument
reclamation: spotlighting forgotten or unknown texts, authors, and cultures
physicality: placing the body/publishing the text in contested spaces
movements: challenging the status quo through ideas, genre, or form
legitimacy: considering literature and the law
education: teaching empathy and dialog
individuality: combining the personal and political
General Program
CEA also welcomes proposals for presentations in any of the areas English departments typically encompass, including literature criticism and scholarship, creative writing, composition/rhetoric, technical communication, linguistics, and film. We also welcome papers on areas that influence our work as academics, including student demographics, student/instructor accountability and assessment, student advising, academic leadership in departments and programs, and the place of the English department in the university.