Conference Theme: Writing With
We are pleased to invite proposals for the University of Washington English Department Writing Programs’ sixth annual Praxis Conference, which will be held at the UW Seattle campus on Friday May 29th, 2026. The theme for the conference is Writing With, and we invite participants to think about the withness of writing, considering questions of who, what, when, and where. As the students in our classes write, they are writing with many things beyond their keyboard and an open Word doc: they write with their identities, senses, communities, places, backgrounds, knowledges, and stories in addition to their material affordances such as writing tools and technologies.The concept of withness allows us to understand writing as a highly relational, collaborative, interconnected, and embodied process, facilitating a praxis of writing which broadly encompasses a range of student literacies, communities, rhetorics, embodiments, etc.
The conference seeks to explore writing not only as communication, but as a practice intertwined with music, storytelling, memory, community building, and collective expression. We are interested in how it reflects the richness of voices and identities in our classrooms, and how it can serve as a bridge between personal experience and shared understanding. We offer the following questions as inspiration for your proposals:
- With whom?
- Who do we collaborate with, who do we cite, who do we study?
- Whose stories, experiences, narratives do we know with?
- How does literacy connect us with other communities and cultures?
- With when?
- How does our pedagogy engage contemporary social issues, in either implicit or explicit ways?
- What inherited timelines, traditions, or disruptions influence our pedagogical choices?
- Why do certain moments demand new approaches to teaching reading, writing, and communication?
- With where?
- How does a sense of place inform our writing and teaching?
- How does our pedagogy engage with the layered histories of the colonized lands where we work?
- With what?
- What methods, what experiences, what materials, what tools/technologies, what language(s)?
- What knowledges and communities do we know with?
- How do we know with our bodies?
- What literacies inform our practices/teaching/writing/composing?
- How are our practices of writing redefined, reinforced, reframed, or remade in current times?
Feel free to engage with any number of these questions, or bring your own questions relevant to the conference theme of withness. We welcome submissions from all who are interested in the teaching and/or practice of writing, including faculty, staff, students, and administrators at local colleges, K-12 schools, and UW’s three campuses, as well as community partners. Interdisciplinary approaches as well as proposals that address issues of equity are highly encouraged.
Proposals for 75 minute breakout sessions or posters should be 250-500 words and for one of the following types of presentations:
- 15-20 minute presentation from one to two presenters
- 75 minute panel (including Q&A) from multiple presenters proposing three related presentations on a topic related to the conference theme
- 75 minute roundtable discussion with audience members
- 75 minute workshop where presenter(s) lead participants to engage in a topic related to the conference theme and help work on participants’ own materials
- Poster presentations that address any topic related to the conference theme or English teaching
Please submit proposals via this webform. Please include the following:
Type of presentation
Title of the presentation
Presenter’s name(s), professional title(s) affiliation(s), and email(s)
250-500 word proposal
Deadline for submissions: March 13, 2026 by 11:59pm PST
Acceptance notifications will go out before the end of April.
Please contact the conference co-chairs with any questions: Hunter Little (hclittle@uw.edu), August Adent (aadent@uw.edu), and Ting-Ting Shiea (cshiea@uw.edu)