This CFP is part of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention, which will be held in Philadelphia, PA, from March 6-9, 2025.

As we are faced with more and more artificial intelligence applications as replacements for writing practices, what must introductory composition courses revolutionize to demonstrate that writing is essential to self and the development of the thought process? From a rhetorical analysis to a researched proposal, writing courses develop crucial skills used across many disciplines. However, AI applications increasingly subvert and challenge those skills. Writing as a process and ritual are the core of humanities-based critical thinking, an often-missing element amongst the forces of misinformation and propaganda. Like Rebecca Moore Howard and others’ positions regarding plagiarism and the extensive history of the academy’s use of plagiarism rules as “the worst sort of liberal-culture gatekeeping, maintaining false distinctions between high and low literacy” (Sexuality, Textuality 475), this panel wishes to navigate pedagogies that encourage writing as a development of self, strategies that enhance humanities-writing as essential to thought, and creative and ambitious challenges to traditional forms of writing practices. In short, what low-stakes and high-stakes changes have revolutionized your writing practices? How might our writing exercises challenge notions of “high and low literacy” reinforced and cultivated by AI applications? Papers and presentations that address the conference theme are welcome, but not required. Please submit 150–250 word abstracts to reb423@lehigh.edu by Monday, September 30.