The following announcement was published on nextGEN by Kyle Larson on September 10, 2020:

Hi Everyone,

It is exciting to officially announce: 

nextGEN now has a CCCC Special Committee, with a three-year appointment.

I am excited and honored to co-chair this committee with Dr. Sherita V. Roundtree, who’s really just overall brilliant and whose research focuses particularly on emotional, pedagogical, and institutional support for Black women graduate students. 

We are also incredibly fortunate to have a mix of nextGEN community members, start-up team members, and moderators serving on the committee. The purposeful combination of these participating, founding, and moderating perspectives--all from different universities--is intended to enhance our capacity to do actually meaningful, important work to support and advocate with and for you.

Committee membership includes:

• Kyle Larson, Miami University (Co-Chair)
• Sherita V. Roundtree, Towson University (Co-Chair)
• Sweta Baniya, Virginia Tech University (Member)
• Genesis Barco-Medina, Northeastern University (Member)
• Estee Beck, The University of Texas at Arlington (Member)
• James Eubanks, University of Alabama (Member)
• Ashanka Kumari, Texas A&M University - Commerce (Member)
• Nupoor Ranade, North Carolina State University (Member)
• Kayla Sparks, Texas Christian University (Member)
• Candace Epps-Robertson, University of North Carolina (Executive Committee Liaison)
• Asao B. Inoue, Arizona State University (Former CCCC Chair Consultant)
• 
  

Throughout the process of building this committee, we made certain to develop its internal structure, and charges following the same principle that nextGEN always follows for tasks and matters of concern: if the institutionalized genre conventions don’t work for us, why not see if we can use different ones or build ones that actually do work for us.

We have included explicit language in the committee’s overview, principles, and charges emphasizing that nextGEN--the community, the movement--will continue to organize and develop with complete independence, as it always has. In other words,  the nextGEN committee does not represent the community being subsumed under the direction of CCCC.

Quite differently: When Dr. Vershawn Young contacted us with the idea of forming a nextGEN Special Committee, he expressed a desire for the nextGEN community to have a direct line of communication with the CCCC Executive Committee. That way, our community’s needs, recommendations, and requests can be heard, voted on, and taken up by the field’s flagship organization. Part of the committee’s work will therefore involve an important community-building aspect: learning more explicitly about our needs, desires, and demands as graduate students and as people with lives outside of graduate school. 

While three-year committee appointments are the standard for CCCC, we included explicit language that the nextGEN committee does not necessarily need to maintain the exact same membership for all three years, but can instead create its own internal membership structure and timelines within the overall three-year appointment. That way, the committee has the possibility of bringing onboard other moderators and community members. It also provides more space for current members to follow their own decisions on what’s best for them and where they wish to focus their labor and attention. 

We are excited about this opportunity to further the mission of nextGEN and push for critical changes that support graduate students and highlight their work in the fields of composition, literacy, and rhetorical studies. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel encouraged to contact Kyle Larsion (larsonkr@miamioh.edu) and/or Sherita Roundtree (sroundtree@towson.edu). 

nextGEN CCCC Special Committee