Category: Announcements

Emily Winderman and I have a new piece out in the Quarterly Journal of Speech Forum: Rhetorics of reproductive justice and injustice in the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. We’re very grateful to Kari Vasby Anderson for the opportunity to share this work.

Abstract: Our contribution to this forum concerns the June 24th, 2022 leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson draft decision penned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The leak exemplifies how the transgressive and fluid movement of information across sealed institutional boundaries was channeled into a different bodily register, one that sought to police the gender fluidity imputed by the phrase “pregnant people” amidst the emergence of a new abortion coalition. As an alternative to the imperative to seal institutional leaks and limit gender fluidity, we highlight the importance of the Reproductive Justice framework to constitute more capacious coalitions with wider, more intersectional platforms than was once enshrined by Roe v. Wade.

The first fifty readers who access this forum piece through this link should be able to download for free. (no paywall)

Here is the dedicated link (paywall): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00335630.2022.2128205

Hi folks,

On alternating years, the Rhetoric Society of America hosts seminars and workshops for faculty and graduate students. This upcoming year, Dr. Michael Lechuga of the University of New Mexico and I will be leading a two-day workshop from May 25-27. The sessions will be held at Pennsylvania State University in College Park, with limited remote access. I’m writing now because the deadline to apply for this (and all other) sessions is approaching on October 15, 2022. Please follow this link to apply! As that site notes, applicants will be notified of your acceptance into a particular session (or multiple sessions) by November 15, 2022.

Below, you’ll find a description of our session on “Secrecy, Surveillance, and Settler Colonialism,” (also available via the hyperlink). I hope you’ll check it out!

Best wishes,

Atilla

Secrecy, Surveillance, and Settler Colonialism

Our topical focus is the rhetoric of settler colonialism with emphasis on erasure, disinformation, and conspiratorial reasoning, as exemplified by the dehumanization of migrants at the Mexico/US border, the “Stop the Steal” January 6, 2021, white supremacist insurrection, and the infiltration of colonialist themes in popular science fiction narratives. We invite participants to think through the connections between events like the January 6 insurrection, gun violence, and pandemic politics as explained through the lens of settler colonialism. Our workshop focuses on how the critical frameworks of psychoanalysis and assemblage theory are instrumental for rhetoricians’ understanding of the lasting legacy of settler colonialism in the United States. Together, we (Lechuga and Hallsby) represent expertise in both rhetorical criticism, assemblage/affect theory (Lechuga), and psychoanalysis (Hallsby). We offer attendees an affect-driven framework for emerging rhetorical scholars, designed with the specific goal of attending to Settler Colonialism’s ideological, material, and unconscious formations. 

Participants should expect to complete some assigned readings ahead of time and to submit a (2pp) statement about what they are already researching. During the session, we aim to discuss how the frameworks introduced during the workshop might be enlisted to revise or approach these topics. Position papers should also include a statement of participants’ goals for the workshop (e.g., creating a syllabus, conference paper, journal submission/revision, white papers/public facing, advocacy). The workshop will be divided between lecture and break-out groups/discussions. During break-out discussions, participants will also have the option to work individually or in a group (i.e., they may choose to be either self-directed or collaborate with others working on similar projects.)

Whereas Rhetorical Studies conventionally emphasizes the rhetorical situation/ecology as a general contextual framework for persuasion, representation, and power, we would advance arguments for understanding rhetoric’s persisting habitus as a Settler Situation, a set of recurring/repeating historical contexts appealing to topoi of jingoistic conquest, extraction economies, and racial purity. We offer the following framing questions: (1) How do we read and measure settler-colonial narratives/events? What is the archive of settler colonialism? If the archive is secret, what tools or techniques do rhetoricians have available to read it? (2) How does the Settler Situation redefine the conventional boundaries of the rhetorical text? What aspects of rhetoric’s conventional focus on public address and representation are retained by this framework and which are transformed by it? (3) How do (psychoanalytic/assemblage-based) theories of affect account for the combined psychological and material injury created by contemporary nationalist discourses? (4) How do present-but-unarticulated or unacknowledged affects produce recurring patterns of historical trauma? What can rhetorical studies contribute to the understanding of these historical patterns? 

Hi all,

I’m posting this awards call for the Public Address Division (PAD) of the National Communication Association (NCA) to ensure that it has a semi-permanent web-presence that folks might be able to redirect to beyond list-servs and social media. As a member of the Benson-Campbell committee, I’d like to ensure that folks see the call for nominations below! Share as widely or as frequently as you’d like! The due date for this award is Friday, September 16, 2022. Please send a packet with your materials to bensoncampbellaward@gmail.com. Advisor letters may be sent separately as needed.

Call for Nominations: Benson/Campbell Dissertation Award

The Public Address Division of the National Communication Association welcomes nominations for the 2022 Benson-Campbell Dissertation Research Award, which honors the scholarly contributions of Thomas Benson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell by recognizing outstanding promise in doctoral research in rhetoric and public address.

We recognize that the study of public address has often privileged the study of hegemonic figures, groups, methods, and rhetorics. Therefore, we encourage scholars whose position and/or scholarship expands beyond these historical limitations to submit their work for consideration. With these values in mind, we will assess proposals based on the following criteria: 

1. The originality of the proposal
2. Significance of the potential findings
3. Contribution to (and beyond) the theory, history, or criticism of public address; 
4. Appropriateness and/or innovation of the research design and method. 

A $500 award will be presented at the business meeting of the Public Address Division at the 2022 NCA convention. Competition for the Benson-Campbell Award is open to graduate student members of the Public Address Division who have successfully defended a Ph.D. dissertation prospectus. A completed nomination packet consists of:

1. A 7-10 page summary of the dissertation prospectus
2. A statement by the nominee about the progress of the dissertation to date
3. A letter of support from the nominee’s dissertation advisor that certifies that the nominee has completed their dissertation prospectus meeting and/or has successfully defended the prospectus. The dissertation advisor’s letter should also provide a rationale for why the nominee should receive the award. 

Andre E. Johnson (Committee Chair, University of Memphis), Atilla Hallsby (University of Minnesota TC) and Matthew Houdek (Rochester Institute of Technology) comprise the 2022 selection committee for this award.

Complete nomination packets must be submitted electronically to Andre Johnson at       bensoncampbellaward@gmail.com by no later than Friday, September 16, 2022, in order for the nominee to be considered for the award.
Please direct questions to Andre E. Johnson at (bensoncampbellaward@gmail.com).

The UnTextbook of Rhetorical Theory is now an open educational resource with the University of Minnesota Libraries! Reading Rhetorical Theory: Speech, Representation, and Power is now available to read in a digital format or to download.

From the textbook page: This textbook offers a undergraduate-appropriate survey of rhetorical theory centered on techniques of speaking, cultural modes of representation, and entrenched hierarchies of power. It covers rhetoric’s problematic “origins” in ancient Greece, rhetoric as a feature of 20th-century sign- and symbol-systems, rhetoric’s role in crafting shared ideologies and belief systems, narrative-, argument-, and visual-based approaches to rhetoric, and a variety of different “situations” (rhetorical, settler colonial, secrecy/surveillance, and digital) where rhetoric continues to be found and felt in contemporary U.S. culture. This book also includes audio or video recordings for each chapter, recommended written assignments, and study guides for quizzes/exams. Developed in the wake of the 2020 global pandemic, this resource is designed for a range of modalities (online synchronous, online asynchronous, in-person, and hybrid). Additional materials (PowerPoint slides, quiz/exam questions) are also available to confirmed instructors upon request.

This May, I will be presenting research at the Association for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) Symposium, “Rhetoric in Motu,” and at the Rhetoric Society of America convention. Brief abstracts and hyperlinks to the presentations are available below!

“Re-canonizing Rhetoric: The Secret in and of Discourse.“

Abstract: This presentation offers the secret as common ground between different scholarly criticisms that reject and/or revise rhetorical theory’s foundation in ancient Greece. Although secrets most often refer to hidden or concealed information, I argue that this term may instead be understood as a productive force (rather than as ‘mere’ negation). On the one hand, scholars who wish to revise the ancient rhetorical contexts by pointing out what is ignored or under-noticed within them are attentive to secrets in discourse: the suppressed originators of the persuasive arts, who include women sophists, foreign-born non-citizens, and the enslaved peoples of ancient Syracuse. On the other hand, scholars who either abandon or reinvent the history of rhetoric are attentive to the secret of discourse, in which rhetoric’s ‘core’ meaning is troped and transformed. Here, I examine how metaphor evolves from the Greek to the Roman context to support the interests of imperial conquest. I conclude by describing these registers as indicative of how rhetoric has and might still become unrecognizable to its former self through progressive revision and retroactive signification.

“Only Time Like the Present: The Metaphysics of kairos and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.” Co-author: Kurt Zemlicka, Indiana University.

Abstract: This presentation considers the problem of rhetorical temporality staged by the Department of Energy’s (DoE) Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the world’s 3rd deep geological repository licensed to store radioactive waste. Because the WIPP houses materials that will remain hazardous for 10,000 years, the DoE instituted a marker project to communicate a linear message of warning to future populations. Secrecy remains a key rhetorical mode of political time management for the project: site data would remain part-concealed, part-open to prolong institutional and public memories of mortal danger. Building upon the idea of rhetoric as time management, we argue that the “future societies analysis” conducted by projects familiar colonialist practices indefinitely into the future. Kairos, as an obsessive fixation upon the present, also authorizes the appropriation of indigenous temporalities, a continuing commitment to extractive forms of capitalism, and the reproduction of familiar stereotypes about Latin America and the inner city as “third worlds.” We conclude with observations about kairos as a metaphysics and examine how a deconstructed understanding of kairos/chronos shifts commonplace understandings of rhetorical temporality.

“Rhetoric Before the Back Alley: Revisiting the Abortion Mill.” Co-authors: Emily Winderman and Vanessa Nyarko, University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities.

Abstract: On November 9, 1912, publishers Sam H. Clark and C.H. Crockard were indicted by a federal grand jury in Fargo, ND for distributing “obscene and immoral reading matter” throughout the Midwest via interstate mail. Using the pseudonym “Jim Jam Junior” the two published a tabloid they titled Jim Jam Jems, which featured (among other topics) stories about criminalized abortion, the American Medical Association’s vaccine requirements, and regressive social standards of feminine purity.  As we argue, one critical rhetorical feature of the Jim Jam Jems tabloid is its figuration of an inflammatory anti-abortion stance through space-based metaphors — the mill and the factory — unique to the imaginary of the historical moment of this publication. Whereas today the locative phrase “the back alley” signifies a particular historical memory of abortion prior to the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, for Clark and Crockard it did not. In this presentation, we situate our work alongside other rhetorical scholarship concerned with the historical memory of abortion. We then locate Jim Jam Jems within a governing legal and social context. We then offer a thick description of a focal series of entries from the tabloid concerning Dr. Charles H. Hunter, which begins with the sensationalized 1912 story titled “Three Weeks in the Magic City.” Finally, we conclude with reflections about the relevance of the Jim Jam Jems case for contemporary analyses of abortion rhetoric.

https://the-un-textbook.ghost.io

This open-access resource for college-level rhetorical theory classes includes chapters on the ancient history of rhetoric, the twentieth-century invention of the symbol and the sign, an overview of ideology, narrative, argumentation, visual rhetoric and the rhetorical situation, and coverage of topics like settler colonialism, secrecy/surveillance, and digital rhetoric. The resource includes an agenda for synchronous online teaching and 3 recommended “short paper” written assignments.

The UnTextbook has new course pages forthcoming, including a course page for “The Rhetoric of Secrecy and Surveillance” (to be completed by May 2022) and my “Graduate Survey of Rhetorical Theory” (to be completed by December 2022). Additionally, the main chapters of the Rhetorical Theory UnTextbook will be re-released as an open-access Pressbook with the University of Minnesota Libraries in Spring 2022.