Recollections from Our Common Places (4C21-23 Documentarian Tales)

This second volume of Documentarian Tales features narratives by attendees of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Annual Convention (both virtual and in person). The first collection, Recollections from an Uncommon Time: 4C20 Documentarian Tales (2023), was conceived to be a product of the new Documentarian role at the 2020 Convention in Milwaukee. When that meeting was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Documentarian idea became a means for CCCC members to share a common experience at a most unusual time.

As with the earlier collection, the Tales in Recollections from Our Common Places began as responses to Documentarian daily surveys. Taken together, they narrate authors’ experiences on the days of the CCCC Convention in 2021, 2022, and 2023, foregrounding contrasts and commonalities between virtual and in-person conferences, and addressing such themes and issues as professional growth and belonging, forms of participation, the professional life of the field, accessibility, and work-life balance.

The essays in this volume resonate with the themes surfaced in the earlier collection and introduce new provocations about the terms of our work in writing studies and the changing landscape of our disciplinary participation, particularly in light of educational shifts occasioned by responses to the pandemic.