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Kairos Awards

Kairos Awards

The deadline for nominations is March 15, 2025. Awards will be announced online and at the Computers and Writing Conference in Athens, Georgia.

Kairos currently presents the following annual awards:

These awards are presented each year at the Computers and Writing Conference (winners need not be present although they are certainly encouraged to attend).

We also invite you to browse the list of past award winners to experience the variety of webtexts and weblogs which have qualified in the past.

The deadline for nominations for all awards is March 15, 2025.

The Kairos Best Webtext Awards

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy recognizes outstanding webtexts published during the preceding calendar year (January 1 to December 31).

Criteria

Webtexts are texts authored specifically for publication on the World Wide Web. They could be scholarly examinations, individual and collaborative reviews, interactive exchanges between scholars, teachers, and practitioners, or extended interviews with leading scholars. All webtexts take advantage of the Web as a medium to present information in ways that traditional scholarly texts cannot. Please see our list of past award winners for some excellent examples.

Criteria for nominated webtexts are the following:

  • All webtexts must be publicly accessible via the World Wide Web. Hypertexts on CD-ROM are not accepted.
  • Webtexts should reflect the field of computers and writing and may include scholarly examinations of key issues, as published in electronic journals; syllabi and course materials; conference websites and reviews; electronic forums for interaction; resource guides; and more.
  • Webtexts should reflect outstanding work in both design and content, as each will be a key aspect of the evaluation process.
  • All webtexts considered for the current awards must have been authored and published on the Web between January 1 and December 31 of the previous calendar year.
  • Webtexts should be equivalent to "article-length"—webtexts that are considered monographs or "book-length" or primarily serve to house full-length documentary film should be submitted for awards more appropriate to those forms.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit nominations at this Google form.

This form will ask for a single PDF that contains the following:

  • Author information, including name, address, phone number, and email address
  • Nominator information (if different from the author)
  • Title, date, and place of publication of the webtext
  • Working URL of the webtext
  • A description of at least two paragraphs detailing how the webtext meets the award criteria.

If you have questions, please contact kairosrtp.awards@gmail.com.

The John Lovas Award

Scholars have been making significant contributions to knowledge in rhetoric and composition via the open-publishing tools of the Internet, in much the same way that Kairos has worked to push forward scholarship as the field's longest-running ejournal. The John Lovas Award is sponsored by Kairos in recognition and remembrance of John Lovas's contributions to the legitimation of academic knowledge sharing using the emerging tools of Web publishing, from blogging, to newsletters, to social media. Each year the award underscores the valuable contributions that such knowledge-creation and community-building have made to the discipline by recognizing a person or project whose active, sustained engagement with topics in rhetoric, composition, or computers and writing using emerging communication tools best exemplifies John's model of a public intellectual.

Criteria

The award will be given to the person or project which best meets the following criteria.

The project must

  • Be publicly available on the Internet.
  • Be at least six months old from the date of submission for consideration.
  • Be updated regularly (regularity is relevant to media, e.g., weekly or more frequently for social media, bimonthly or monthly for podcasts, etc.).
  • Engage with other born-digital academic compositions and knowledge-sharing projects, performing the role of a public intellectual.
  • Address any of the theoretical, practical, or praxis-based issues addressed in Kairos and other journals in computers and writing studies.

Nominees can be in a variety of Web-based media, such as podcasts, blogs, social media sites (e.g., Instagram, Twitter), and so forth. Please see our list of past award winners for examples of projects which meet these criteria. As of 2016, the criteria for the John Lovas Award has been opened up beyond blogs to include other digital projects.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit nominations at this Google form.

This form will ask for the a single PDF that contains the following:

  • Author information, including name, address, phone number, and email address
  • Nominator information (if different from the author)
  • Title, date, and place of publication of the project
  • Working URL of the project
  • A description of at least two paragraphs detailing how the project meets the award criteria.

If you have questions, please contact kairosrtp.awards@gmail.com.

The Kairos Awards for Graduate Students and Contingent Faculty

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is pleased to announce our annual Kairos Awards for Graduate Students and Contingent Faculty.

Three awards will be given to graduate students and/or contingent faculty in the field of computers and writing. These awards are based upon the three areas that guide our professional lives: Service, Scholarship, and Teaching.

We chose these areas because graduate students and contingent faculty are in fact professionals who do work in these areas, but who face institutional constraints that often undervalue—or flat out don't recognize in some cases—the work they do. For many graduate students and contingent faculty, their service, scholarship, and teaching often do not translate into simple acknowledgment, let alone higher pay, more travel funds, and better working conditions.

Graduate students and contingent faculty working in fields relating to the mission of Kairos (computers and writing, rhetoric-and-technology, etc.) are eligible to be nominated for an award.

Recipients can only win once per award but can be nominated/win for a different category in subsequent years.

Service Award

The Service Award is given to an individual whose work includes activities that promote excellent computers and writing pedagogy, theory, and community building.

Examples of service include, but are not limited to the following:

  • creating and artfully managing e-mail listservs, MOO spaces, webboard discussions, group blogs, wikis, or CMS community sites
  • serving on local campus, regional, or national committees related to our field
  • leading outreach, training, and workshops locally and/or at conferences
  • serving on C&W-oriented journal staff or editorial boards
  • volunteering time and expertise supporting the development of digital literacies

In your nomination letter and supporting documentation, please address the following items:

  • Evidence of service. Please provide descriptions of and/or URLs for blogs, CMS, and/or workshop pages, archives of discussions, documents from committee work, and/or examples of editorial/journal work.
  • Reach/Scope of service. Please provide information about the number of people who've attended workshops; diversity of people worked with; whether service takes applicant outside usual academic network to communities beyond the campus or the field.
  • Value of service and Relation to the field. What does it accomplish/contribute within computers-and-writing studies; who does it help; how has it been received?

Scholarship/Research Award

The Scholarship Award is given to a person whose research and scholarship is already excellent and/or also shows future promise for having an impact on our field. The committee is not looking for "the webtext or article of the year" (for that type of award, please nominate for the Best Webtext Award), but rather a pattern of excellent scholarship.

Examples of scholarship include the following:

  • articles, webtexts, book chapters
  • reviews, interviews, or a series of in-depth discussion/listserv posts
  • conference presentations,
  • textbooks and instructors' guides,
  • coursework papers, annotated bibliographies, and (lit) reviews
  • multimodal texts, written code, or software
  • editorial work, including collaborations with faculty or others

In your nomination letter, please address the following items:

  • Currency of scholarship. How do the author's ideas and insights add to the field?
  • Reach/scope. Where did the scholarship appear? To what audience is it addressed?
  • Value of scholarship to the field. To what extent does the scholarship situate itself among pedagogies and theory? Is there quantitative or qualitative data that support the scholarship's value? How is the scholarship relevant to the computers-and-writing field?

Teaching Award

The Teaching Award is given to a person who uses computers and writing pedagogies in her or his classroom-based practice to promote student learning.

The following are possible locations/spaces of classroom-based practice:

  • computer-networked environments
  • smart classrooms (i.e., with instructor's computer station)
  • hybrid courses (combinations of face-to-face and online teaching)
  • online/distance teaching, and
  • traditional classrooms

In your nomination letter, please address the following items:

  • Pedagogy. Does it focus on computers and writing-related pedagogical values such as, but not limited to student-centered, interactive, and process-based learning? Please include (or attach) specific information about the courses, such as syllabi, course Web sites, assignments or assignment sequences, and/or a summary of recent course evaluations.
  • Innovation. Do the assignment sequencing and activities take advantage of the pedagogy and technology available? Does the teacher teach writing and/or technologies in new ways, or ways that break from institutional/academic conventions?
  • Reflection. What has the teacher learned and what can other teachers learn about the craft of teaching with technology from the practices described?

Submission Guidelines

We invite you to nominate outstanding graduate students and adjuncts with whom you have worked by submitting nominations at at this Google form.

This form will ask for the following:

  • The name of the nominee
  • The nominee's contact information
  • A statement of nomination (either from an individual who knows the student/adjunct well, or a self-nomination)
  • A current CV for the nominee
  • 3–5 pieces of supporting documentation (could be URLs for sites that contain the documentation)

If you have questions, please contact kairosrtp.awards@gmail.com.

Gail E. Hawisher & Cynthia L. Selfe Caring for the Future Scholarship

The HSCF scholarship covers reasonable travel expenses, dorm lodging, and registration for one (or more, if possible) scholars who meet the eligibility criteria below so that they may attend the annual Computers and Writing conference in person.

Honoring the scholarship and mentorship of Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher, the goal of this award is to support first-time Computers and Writing in-person attendees, preferably at the undergraduate or early graduate level, who have shown an interest in furthering their studies in a computers and writing related field. In the spirit of the award and the work of Hawisher and Selfe, preference will be given to students whose race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, class, and/or nationality are underrepresented in the computers and writing field.

The deadline for applications is March 15, 2024. Awards will be announced online and at the Computers and Writing Conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

Read about the history of the Caring for the Future Award at http://hawisherselfe.org/about.html

Eligibility

Applicants must satisfy all of the following criteria for the scholarship:

  • be a full or part-time undergraduate or graduate student AND a first-time attendee at C&W (people with a degree intending to pursue an MA or PhD in the near future are also welcome to apply)
  • come from a traditionally underrepresented group
  • have current scholarly and/or pedagogical interests in some aspect of computers and writing
  • attend the C&W Graduate Research Network to present an in-progress project
  • attend the C&W Banquet Awards Ceremony to be recognized as the HSCF winner
  • be sponsored by a mentor who also intends to attend C&W

Because this is an award that covers travel to the Computers & Writing conference, in-person events to help a C&W newbie create a community are part of the eligibility criteria. We will be expanding this award to virtual attendance in future years.

Mentor Sponsorship

Mentors need to have a terminal degree, work in academia, and be able to introduce the student to the field of computers and writing. They do not have to be at the same institution as the student. Mentors should be able to attend the Computers & Writing conference to mentor their applicant. We suggest, at minimum, the mentor

  • meet with the student prior to C&W to explain how the conference works,
  • help the student prepare their GRN proposal,
  • attend GRN with the student,
  • introduce student to others at C&W sessions,
  • have a debriefing session midway through the conference,
  • join the student at the awards banquet, and
  • encourage the student to publish C&W conference session reviews with Kairos.

If the mentor of the scholarship winner cannot attend the conference, please let us know and we'll arrange to have a colleague serve as conference mentor. A mentor can agree to mentor more than one student per year who applies for the HSCF scholarship.

Applications

Award applications can be submitted by the applicant or the mentor. The information needed for the application include:

  • Applicant's Name
  • Applicant's Email
  • Applicant's Institution
  • Major/Program Name
  • Sponsoring Faculty Mentor's Name
  • Sponsoring Faculty Mentor's Institution
  • Expected Graduation Date
  • Expected Degree
  • Current Address
  • Current Phone Number
  • 1–2 page CV (or whatever similar document is available)
  • 250-word statement describing (1) your underrepresented status (including justification for its underrepresentation, if it's a nontraditionally recognized group), (2) your current scholarly and/or pedagogical work/interest in computers and writing, and (3) any future work you plan to undertake in the field of computers and writing.
  • a 250-word letter of support from the scholarship applicant's mentor. In this letter, the mentor must address 1) the potential of the candidate's scholarly/pedagogical work in computers and writing, and 2) their own past experience mentoring (if any) and commitment to serving as a mentor to this applicant at the C&W Conference.

Applications should be uploaded to this form.

If you have questions, please contact kairosrtp.awards@gmail.com.

Not eligible but still looking for some support?

Apply for a GRN Travel Grant. Awards are based solely on need. To qualify, applicants must be: 1) a student or non-tenure-track faculty member, and 2) accepted to present at the Graduate Research Network and/or the Computers and Writing Conference.