Abstract
Happy New Year. The new year provides an opportunity to both reflect on our first 6 months as editors as well as look to the future of Written Communication. Our first two issues have featured a variety of methods, including ethnography, curriculum analysis, case study, quasi-experimental design, linguistic and content analysis, register analysis, integrative analysis, and a systematic scoping review. Authors published in WCX in the last 6 months have provided insights from Sweden, Mexico, Spain, Morocco, Germany, Chile, China, the Netherlands, England, and the United States.
If methodological and geographic diversity are nothing new to WCX, the new year also brings changes, including a substantially re-envisioned Journal Description and Aims & Scope. Revisions retain critical aspects of the journal’s mission while also reflecting the current landscape of research on writing: long-time WCX readers will recognize several lines of inquiry first mapped out in 1984 (e.g., explorations of the “relations among writing, reading, speaking, and listening”). Even though these lines of inquiry remain compelling to the field, it was time to realign these charter statements with the work that WCX has been publishing over the last decade or so—as well as to send some strong signals about the kinds of work we would like to see more of. For instance, readers will see new invitations for transcultural and transscriptal writing practices; materialist studies of writing; research from historically marginalized locations of writing; multimodality and transmodality; relationships among gender, race, socioeconomic status, disability, neurodivergence, and writing; and studies of writing as a means of oppression, liberation, and resistance. These changes reaffirm our commitment to what WCX has already been doing and should do more of: publishing research on writing systems and writing pedagogy/assessment beyond English language contexts. Thank you to the Editorial Board members for helping to bring about this much-needed re-envisioning of these statements.
Written Communication, like any journal, is shaped by the goodwill and expertise of its editorial board members. It is with our sincerest thanks, therefore, that we say goodbye to several members who have elected to step down after generous service to this journal: Lee-Ann Breuch, Jeanne Fahnestock, Linda Flower, Jeff Grabill, Ronald T. Kellogg, Neal Lerner, Mary Jo Reiff, and Kate Vieira.
In turn, we are delighted to welcome these scholars to the WCX Editorial Board:
Ellen Cushman, Northeastern University Steven Fraiberg, Michigan State University S. Scott Graham, University of Texas at Austin Catherine Kell, University of Cape Town Federico Navarro, O’Higgins University Patrick Proctor, Boston College Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania Zoi Traga-Philippakos, University of Tennessee Åsa Wengelin, Gothenburg University Youngjoo Yi, The Ohio State University Xiaoye You, Pennsylvania State University
We thank Tieanna Graphenreed for her work as the WCX editorial assistant during our initial 6 months as editors. She ensured that the journal transition went smoothly and that we met production deadlines during a period in which we were all learning new systems. She leaves an essential trove of meticulous documentation and workflow processes that will be useful long after our editorship.
Finally, we are pleased to introduce our two new editorial assistants: Roshny Maria Roy and Maryam Khan. Roshny is currently pursuing a PhD in English at Northeastern University with a focus on immigrant literacies, multilingualism, and digital archiving. Maryam is an MA candidate at the University of Maine and has a growing interest in exploring conflict literature, especially in the identification/depiction of gender and environment during wartime in both fiction and nonfiction texts. They both look forward to gaining experience with the academic publication process and to working with WCX authors.