The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric
RhetCanada’s 2026 annual general meeting will take place online on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 4 p.m. EST. Members will receive an email with the Zoom link a few days before the meeting, and meeting documents will be available on our Current AGM Documents page. We look forward to seeing you there!
The Final RhetCan 20206 Program is now available. We look forward to seeing you at the conference!
RhetCanada (The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric) invites submissions for our 2026 conference from May 28th-30th at St. Jerome’s University (SJU), a college of the University of Waterloo. This conference will be a large and unique joint event, comprising the annual conferences of RhetCanada and the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing/Association canadienne de redactologie, and the Rhetoricon project.
For more information and submission instructions, see the conference website. Deadline for submissions is January 19th, 2026.
Congratulations to the winners of RhetCanada’s 2025 student paper awards:
The Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award: Rency Luan and Ritika Puri for “Chiastic Figuration in The Analects”
The RhetCanada Undergraduate Paper Award: Zoya Randhawa for “Rhetorical Figures During Crisis: An Analysis of Michelle Obama’s Speech at Kamala Harris’ Kalamazoo Rally”
The programme for the 2025 annual RhetCanada conference is now available. The conference will be held online on May 31 and in person from June 4-6 at George Brown College in Toronto, in association with the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities.
The CFP for our 2025 annual conference is now available. The conference will be held online on May 31 and in person from June 4-6 at George Brown College in Toronto, in association with the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities.
Ancient Greek Sophistry and Its Legacy is an international conference which will be held Thursday, Dec. 12 online. The conference will feature sixteen presentations by scholars from seven countries. The conference celebrates the publication of a special issue of Humanities, and is sponsored by RhetCanada. For more information and to register, see the conference webpage.
RhetCanada’s 2024 Annual General Meeting will take place online on Tuesday, Sept. 3 starting at 3 p.m. EDT (Toronto time), which is noon in Vancouver, 1 p.m. in Calgary, 2 p.m. in Winnipeg, and 4 p.m. in the Maritimes (a half-hour later in Newfoundland). Members will receive an email with a Zoom link, and meeting documents will be posted shortly.
Congratulations to Sarah Casey, who has won RhetCanada’s 2024 Michael Purves-Smith Paper Award for the best paper presented by a graduate student at the RhetCan annual conference, and to Rachel Roy, who received a runner-up prize for the award.
In her winning paper, “Risk as a Common Topos,” Sarah described how communication and scholarship often treat risk as an idion topos for discussing uncertainty and hazards. She argues that it has become a koinon topos in our social discourse, one where we find technical arguments for risk management… or where we find arguments for managing all kinds of other things.
In her runner-up paper, “Locating Recuperative Ethos: Students with Disabilities Navigate University Accommodations,” Rachel identified the rhetorical moves that students make as they access the university, and argued that students perform “recuperative ethos” and “agile epistemologies” (Molloy) as they reconstruct these rhetorical moves.
As always, the conference featured an array of impressive student papers, and the judges would like to express their appreciation to all the students who presented.
The programme for RhetCanada’s 2024 conference, which will be held online on June 8 and June 12-14 in-person at McGill University and Concordia University in Montreal, is now available. We hope to see you there, virtually or in-person!