Symposium Talk about Writing
The international symposium “Talk about Writing” aims to trace research on the constructions and understandings of writing that emerge in academic as well as other discourses, conversations, and texts about writing. Talking and writing about professional and academic writing takes place in a variety of areas: research on writing in different domains, writing instruction (both in higher education and other contexts), joint professional writing of various kinds, peer review and academic as well as non-academic publishing, academic supervision and assessment – and many more. These discourses about writing enable and constrain the respective practices and have a variety of implications for the writing subjects, e.g., for students, early career researchers, or employees, to name but a few. Furthermore, recent developments in the field of AI-assisted text generation and analysis are likely to effect fundamental changes of existing academic and other professional literacy practices. In the current debates, we have to be careful not to produce limited and decontextualized images of writing and writers. Therefore, it is key to reflect on how we talk about AI-assisted writing in order to critically address and accompany both current and future professional and academic literacy practices.