In our recent intergenerational interview with the founding, former, and current editors of Computers and Composition for the journal’s forthcoming 40th Anniversary Special Issue, Drs. Cindy Selfe, Kristine Blair, and Jason Tham emphasized that the current moment calls for renewed attention to two areas the field has yet to fully address: multimodality and social justice. There is an urgent need to center human experience and address issues of access, equity, inclusion, and diversity through our teaching practices, pedagogical innovations, and collective research efforts. Multimodality holds considerable potential to advance these goals, enacting a human-centered approach to composition while addressing social-justice-related challenges (see below to learn more about our approach and how it’s been shaped).
To address and amplify this call, we invite you all (teachers, scholars, technical communicators, and administrators) across contexts and disciplines to share how you leverage multimodality to enact human-centered praxis and advance social justice in your teaching, scholarship, and collective work. We are particularly interested in learning how you integrate multimodality to foster human engagement and any form of social justice for your students, audiences, communities, or society more broadly. We welcome theoretical essays, pedagogical approaches and reflections, practical guides, observations, and multimodal pieces. Through this collective effort, we aim to create a collection of reflective, scholarly, or teaching resources for the Computers and Writing community (in addition to Writing Studies, Tech Comm, and analogous fields) to adopt, adapt, and expand, advancing our commitment to social justice and putting humans first.
We offer the following questions as suggested guidelines, and welcome any additional questions you consider relevant to our topic:
1) How do you use multimodality to center human experience and empower individuals across the lines of difference?
2) What opportunities does multimodal composition, broadly, and composing with technologies, specifically, offer in terms of fostering access and equity? What kind of access (e.g., technologies, resources, literacies, audiences, communities, cultures, etc.)?
3) How do you integrate multimodality in your teaching practices to promote inclusion, diversity, and accessibility?
4) How can multimodality foster intercultural and cross-cultural communication within your area of expertise?
5) In what ways might multimodal approaches help mitigate or balance the influence of Generative AI, and how do you see this reflected in your own practices as a teacher, scholar, or writer?
What is our approach to social justice and multimodality?
We embrace a multifaceted view of social justice and have identified several areas in which multimodality can be particularly instrumental. These include, but are not limited to:
- valuing and legitimizing the experiences and perspectives of those often silenced or marginalized (Selfe, 2009; Jones, 2016);
- redressing inequities and amplifying human agency (Walton et al., 2019);
- ensuring equitable access to technologies and digital literacies (Banks, 2005);
- promoting equitable writing instruction and assessment (Poe & Inoue, 2016);
- adapting a place-based approach to writing pedagogies (Powell, 2014);
- fostering accessibility (Kleinfeld, 2019; Butler, 2020; Yergeau et al., 2013);
- enacting a critical embodied pedagogy (Cedillo, 2023);
- validating individuals “on the linguistic margins” (Smitherman, 1999, p. 349);
- supporting multilingualism and translingual practices (Canagarajah, 2012; Gonzales, 2022);
- advancing design justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020); and
- encouraging multimodal digital advocacy (Warren-Riley & Hurley, 2017; Jiang & Tham, 2024).
Our view of multimodality is also not limited to multimodal texts that include images, visuals, colors, words, music, and sound, and are composed and distributed digitally (Takayoshi & Selfe, 2007), but encompasses those created through non-digital technologies (Shipka, 2011).
What is a blog carnival?
The Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative features blog posts from scholars, teachers, and practitioners from across the field of writing studies in Blog Carnivals. Blog Carnivals allow contributors to share diverse insights and perspectives from their scholarly work as teachers and researchers on a theme or topic, engaging the field in a more public setting than a journal or conference. We hope that this Blog Carnival functions as an opportunity for scholars to offer their perspectives, approaches, innovations, and ideas to others in the field who would like to incorporate social-justice-based and human-centered approaches to multimodal composition and digital rhetorics in their teaching, research, and praxis.
Timeline/Submission
100-150-word proposal due – Jan 23, 2026
Acceptance notices – Feb 6, 2026
Full blog entries due – Feb 23, 2026
Final publication due – March 19, 2026
If you’re interested in contributing to this blog carnival, please submit your contact information and 100-150-word proposal to this Google form by January 23rd, 2026.
The complete blog post should be between 850-1000 words (or a multimodal equivalent, which is highly encouraged). We welcome theoretical essays, pedagogical approaches, reflective accounts, practical guides, and observational contributions.
Contact
If you have any questions or if you have a submission in mind but need more guidance, please do not hesitate to reach out to the editors, Ali Alalem (aalalem@crimson.ua.edu) and Thais Rodrigues Cons (tcons@arizona.edu).
References
Banks, A. J. (2005). Race, rhetoric, and technology: Searching for higher ground. Routledge.
Butler, J. (2019). The Visual Experience of Accessing Captioned Television and Digital Videos. Television & New Media, 21(7), 679-696.
Canagarajah, S. (2012). Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations (1st ed.). Routledge.
Cedillo, C. V. (2018). What does it mean to move?: Race, disability, and critical embodiment pedagogy. Composition Forum, 39.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press.
Gonzales, L. (2022). Designing multilingual experiences in technical communication. University Press of Colorado.
Jones, N. N. (2016). The Technical Communicator as Advocate: Integrating a Social Justice Approach in Technical Communication. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(3), 342-361.
Kleinfeld, E. (2019). Reimagining multimodality through UDL: Inclusivity and accessibility. In S. Khadka & J. C. Lee (Eds.), Bridging the multimodal gap: From theory to practice (pp. 30–42). University Press of Colorado.
Poe, M., & Inoue, A. B. (2016). Toward Writing as Social Justice: An Idea Whose Time Has Come. College English,79(2), 119–126.
Powell, K. M. (2014). Locations and writing: Place-based learning, geographies of writing, and how place (still) matters in writing studies. College Composition and Communication, 66(1), 177–191.
Selfe, C. L. (2009). The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing. College Composition and Communication, 60(4), 616–663.
Shipka, J. (2011). Toward a composition made whole. University of Pittsburgh Press. Selfe, R. J., & Selfe, C. L. (2008). Convince me!” Valuing multimodal literacies and composing public service announcements. Theory Into Practice, 47(2), 83–92.
Smitherman, Geneva. “CCCC’s Role in the Struggle for Language Rights.” College Composition and Communication 50 (1999): 349-7.
Takayoshi, P., & Selfe, C. L. (2007). Thinking about multimodality. In C. L. Selfe (Ed.), Multimodal composition: Resource for teachers (pp. 1–12). Hampton Press.
Tham, J., & Jiang, J. (2024). Understanding writing instructors’ feelings toward the affordances of multimodal social advocacy projects: Implications for service-learning pedagogies. College Composition and Communication, 76(1), 4–34.
Walton, R., Moore, K., & Jones, N. (2019). Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn: Building Coalitions for Action (1st ed.). Routledge.
Warren-Riley, S., & Hurley, E. V. (2017). Multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing: Digital media advocacy and mundane texts. Composition Forum, 36.
Yergeau, M. R., Brewer, E., Kerschbaum, S. L., Oswal, S., Price, M., Salvo, M. J., Selfe, L. C., & Howes, F. (2013). Multimodality in motion: Disability and kairotic spaces. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 18(1).
