Petit & Sieber | CCCC 2016 | Houston, Texas, USA | page 1 PRESENTED at the CONFERENCE ON COLLEGE COMPOSITION & COMMUNICATION HOUSTON, TEXAS, USA APRIL 2016 ______________________________________ The Great Multimodal Methodological Beatdown: Defending Composition’s Disciplinary Identity in Interdisciplinary Departments of English by Angela Petit and Sharon L. Sieber ______________________________________ The small college town where we lived and, until recently, worked has a small airport. Our latest boast about our airport is that we have graduated from several trips per day, back and forth to a hub city, by propeller-driven plane to four trips per day by jet. The jets are small, but they are jets. The flight to the city is so short that we have a joke—you can now arrive in the hub city before you leave our town. Our airport also has a gift shop. One item prominently displayed is a t-shirt with the saying, “Welcome! Now set your clocks back 25 years.” Now, we recall 25 years ago. At that time, we were doctoral students, discovering amazing fields: composition studies and comparative literature. The energy in these fields was amazing. We were hooked. Remembering that vibrant time and thinking of our experiences of composition in that college town we shared, we would have to add the number “1” to the 25 years on that airport t- shirt. 125 years would more accurately convey just how up to date the local university’s writing programs are, especially in the areas of research methods, multimodality, and doctoral education in composition. In light of this, our paper examines the challenges that composition specialists can face when they employ methods or hold beliefs about methodology that conflict with