Professional Writing & Civic Engagement:

Redesigning Academe

Background
Connecting marketing projects to situation

Interactive Printables
The Checklists, Stickers, & Buttons
Our initial goal with the initiative was to encourage 4Cs attendees to use their economic and
social power as visitors to Indianapolis as a means
of showing support for marriage equality in the
capitol. We developed a checklist that offered
suggestions as to how to channel positive energy
to the local conference area. The added incentive
of taking and bringing back a near completed
checklist was the promise of a free button,
otherwise $1 each. Stickers were free.

The 4Equality part refers to the fact that the 2014 conference took place in Indiana. Because of attempts to constitutionally ban same-sex marriage in Indiana, prior to the
conference many 4C members discussed boycotting the
conference this year.
As residents of Indiana and Purdue students, we decided
something else needed to be done. It made little sense
for us to boycott a conference in our state, and we didnt
think a boycott made sense in this situation.

Drawing from our experience teaching ENGL 420 Business Writing, particularly marketing and advertising
projects, we set about marketing the cause of same-sex
marriage through the conference.

Customer Cards
We designed two business card sized customer
cards that attendees could take to resturants,
bars, and businesses around the conference site.
The idea was to either leave a card with ones bill
or present the card to business owners to show
the customer supports marriage equality or to
encourage a business to do the same.
Figure 1: The 4C4E Twitter page, showing recent
tweets, photos, and follower count in addition to
user interactions.

While we are dedicated to the fight for LGBTQ rights, we

also wanted to make a bigger point to conference goers:
our overarching goal was to develop strategies and materials that could help conference goers begin to think and
act outside the conference hotel and begin to consider
how all the money and resources 4C musters every year
could be used to have a positive impact on the area surrounding the conference site.

Networking and assessment

approach in talking to passersby and interested

attendees. At the table, we had 4 iPads that displayed different interactive elements of our initiative: a petition to write to an Indiana senator,
a digital survey about 4C4E, a map of area LGBTidentified businesses, and the website.

Next year 4C takes place in Tampa, Florida. While

we have some ideas about issues that 4C4E could
organize aroundthe national news is full or stories about the racism at work in Floridas Stand
Your Ground laws, for example, we are currently
discussing 4C4E work at 4C15 with folks who live
in the Tampa area. We think its important that local folks coordinate the work each year and that no
particular group be identified as the leaders of the
initiative.

Social Media Engagement

Website & Twitter
In the months leading up to the confernence, our
website was created and shared across various
social media profiles. Our Twitter was most active, as the platform is bustling during academic
conferences. We used the hashtag #4C4E to drive
Twitter participation and set up a hashtag tracking script to trace who was tweeting with it.
Throughout the conference, out follower count
grew from about 90 followers prior and to 150
after the conference concluded.

Custom Google Map

Prior to the conference, we scouted the conferPhysical Presence: Table & Volunteers
ence hotel and immediate downtown area. Using
Before the conference, we asked interested read- our knowledge of the surrounding businesses
ers and followers to volunteer their time to staff
and the Indianapolis Rainbow Chamber (LGBT
our table at 4Cs by periodically Tweeting and shar- business chamber of commerce), we generated a
ing a Google sign-up spreadsheet. A small HTML
custom Google map that was available to attend& PDF document of instructions were emailed to ees to show where LGBT-identified businesses
each volunteer to encourage a consistent
were located.

Weve decided not to establish 4C4E as a traditional

organization or as a part of the 4C organization
because we feel that the most important thing this
work can do is to bring in local perspectives to a
larger, national audience within our academic field.
By shifting decisions regarding what 4C4E does to
local groupings, we feel that their perspectives and
criticisms will be emphasized over national agendas. Additionally, we feel it is extremely important
that 4C4Es infrastructure support the ability to
raise local perspectives that may differ from others
across the country.
Figure 4: A look at the online survey we made available
during the conference & distributed afterwards via
Twitter and email.

If the decision making at the center of this infrastructure shifts to each new conference site, we
feel that decisions are more likely to be made with
less fear of the organizational or institutional reprisals that go along with more traditional infrastructures where decisions issue from a fixed center in
one location.
Also, we feel that dealing with local issues from the
outside by bringing in a few local faces risks tokenizing various struggles for equality as a sort of
flavor of the month.
Still, we are in the process of making the documents displayed here today open source and
creative commons-licensed so folks at 4C15 have
something to begin with. They can adapt, use,
modify what they like to fit their needs. Well also
support their work with resources, advice, etc. To
determine which strategies 4C14 conference goers
responded well to, we conducted a survey.

We wanted to draw attention to local issues, raise questions about what responsibility the conference had to
local people, and inspire discussions of how Professional
Writing can support civic engagement work.
The materials we exhibit here today represent our results;
these materials offer various strategies and tactics for
participation at the conference and in Indianapolis, and
we feel they help generate further discussion for how to
move forward and make stronger connections between
the conference organization and host cities in the future.

Future Work

What we did at 4C14

4C4E stands for 4C4Equality. The 4C denotes the Conference on College Composition and Communication, which
is the largest professional conference in the United States
for professors, instructors, and graduate students who
study and teach writing.

In fact, we questioned if a boycott would simply thumb

its nose at the struggles of Hoosiers who support LGBTQ
rights and marriage equality. In contrast to this call for a
boycott, we put out a call for action; we devised a strategy for demonstrating support for LGBTQ people and LGBTQ rights through the conference instead.

Implementation

Figure 2: Various iterations of the 4C4E logo

throughout the drafting process.

Figure 3: A shot of our conference table and two volunteers describing the 4C4E initiative to an attendee.

Figure 5: The reverse side of our checklist that was

distributed througout the conference to encourage
engagement. Participants also filled in their own
activities.

Liz Lane & Don Unger

lane34@purdue.edu/ungerd@purdue.edu
Special thanks to everyone who helped make the 4C4E intiative a success at the
2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication. We look forward
to contributing toward the initiative at the 2015 conference and beyond.

4C4E logo designed by Christopher Rubano

cmrubano@gmail.com