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2017 CSSR Late proposals accepted until Jan. 21 (for members only)

Did you miss the deadline to submit your 2017 CSSR proposal?

It was Sunday, January 15th.

The good news is that we’ve got a wealth of proposals from new people! However, I am somewhat dismayed that some of our regulars haven’t submitted proposals.

Therefore, IF you are a currently paid CSSR member, OR you are a past paid CSSR member, and you would still like to submit a proposal for the 2017 conference,

  1. Please email me (Tania Smith) ASAP to declare your intention to submit a proposal. I would like to know how many are coming late so I can start preparing peer review now.
  2. I would be willing to receive your late proposal by end of day, Saturday, January 21 if you are a current paid member or a past member.  Consider this a bonus “membership benefit” this year!  See the 2017 conference page for information and the CFP.

I’m sorry we cannot afford an extended deadline of longer than 1 week for members. We must start reviewing right away. Several people who submitted proposals need early review results in order to obtain travel funding.

I also aim to give results in time for every presenter to register while Congress still offers a reduced “early bird” registration fee and to plan their accommodations before rooms are not sold out at conference hotels nearby.

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Prepare your CSSR 2017 proposal

Dear rhetoric scholars, please plan ahead some time to draft your proposal to present at the CSSR 2017 conference.  The deadline is coming in one month.

You’re welcome to consult with me (Tania S. Smith) about your proposal ideas in advance.  It’s also nice to know some more proposals are likely to come in by the deadline.

Please distribute our call for papers to individual colleagues and offer a personal note to encourage them to submit a proposal. I’ve already sent the CFP to a number of distribution lists. I’ve also distributed it internationally. We may be a society based in Canada, but our presentation topics and membership reach far beyond Canada.

Encourage your best students of rhetoric (graduate and undergraduate) to submit a proposal and/or attend our conference and become a member. We offer a prize for the best student paper, and we have positions on committees earmarked for students.

Unlike several other rhetoric societies that meet biennially, we host annual conferences. Your regular participation in our conferences can sustain and deepen your collegial relationships and networks of academic support (and perhaps even collaboration) beyond your own institution and region.

Rhetoricians may currently be a rare breed (at least outside of the US), but good rhetoric and good rhetorical scholarship is crucially important today. Rhetoric can be a growing (inter)disciplinary area if we continue to demonstrate the field’s breadth, relevance and usefulness.

I’m looking forward to many high-quality submissions for an invigorating conference in 2017 in Toronto.

Dr Tania S. Smith, President, CSSR/SCER

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CSSR/SCÉR 2017 Conference Call for Proposals due Jan 15, 2017

CSSR / SCÉR Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric / Société Canadienne pour l’Étude de la RhétoriqueThe Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (CSSR / SCÉR) invites scholars and students to submit proposals for presentations in English or French. Our next annual conference will be held at the Canadian Federation of Social Sciences and Humanities’ Congress 2017 (www.congress2017.ca) at Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada, May 30 – June 1, 2017.

Our special theme this year is “Rhetoric and interdisciplinarity/disciplinarity.” However, proposals are not limited to the special theme.

The society welcomes papers on all aspects of rhetoric:

  • rhetorical theory, criticism, and/or history
  • rhetoric in popular culture and everyday life
  • rhetoric and the media, film, gaming, and visual culture
  • rhetoric and the physical environment
  • rhetoric and the body, sports or performance
  • rhetoric in the fine arts and literature
  • rhetoric and identity, women’s/gender studies
  • rhetoric in various disciplines and professions
  • rhetorical discourse analysis and genre studies
  • rhetoric of political, legal or public discourse
  • biographical research on rhetors or rhetoricians
  • rhetorical aspects of sociolinguistics and semiotics

We foster dialogue among scholars from diverse disciplines and professions who are interested in rhetoric. We welcome not only mainstream rhetorical scholarship, but also “rhetoric in/and” a wide variety of domains or disciplines and through interdisciplinary frameworks.

Please distribute this call among your networks.  I look forward to receiving your proposal.

Sincerely,

Dr. Tania S. Smith, CSSR / SCÉR President

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CSSR 2017 Call for Papers coming soon

The CSSR 2017 Call for Papers is currently in review & translation.

Please start to plan your presentation proposal. It is due January 15, 2017.

Consider your travel plans to attend the conference at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, from May 30 to June 1, 2017.  Congress usually offers low-cost campus accommodation as well as hotel and airline discounts. Congress registration fees will be available at reduced early-bird rates until March 31. 

More information is on our Conference page.

 

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CFP: Special Issue on Rhetoric and Peace Studies (English and French)

[copied from H-Rhetor announcement]

Call for Papers for volume 10, n° 1(19)/ 2017

ESSACHESS – Journal for Communication Studies[1]

www.essachess.com

Rhetoric and Peace at Crossroads: Public and Civic Discourse, Culture and Communication Perspectives

http://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/announcement/view/19

Guest editors:

Dr. Noemi Marin, Professor, School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, Florida Atlantic University, USA (nmarin@fau.edu)

Dr. Lara  Martin Lengel, Department of Communication, School of Media and Communication,  Bowling Green State University, USA (lengell@bgsu.edu)

This special issue examines rhetorical and/or cultural-critical perspectives on peace, non-violence, and the role of civic discourse in contemporary times. The issue intends to cover scholarship that focuses mainly on the last 30 years, including the historic period following 1989 that created a democratization of discourse throughout the world, yet engaged even more peace and conflict as paradigmatic perspectives on migration, terrorism, communism, and political and social change. Accordingly, some areas of scholarship pertinent to this special issue are: geopolitics and discourse of peace; historical public arguments for non-violence; theoretical approaches to communication and conflict as cultures of peace; migration and its peace-related consequences in the 21st century; nationalism as cultural or political paradigm of national identity; international contexts for rhetoric of peace, to name a few. Of note that this issue intends to present an interdisciplinary set of scholarly articles open to all disciplines such as but not limited to political communication, rhetorical studies, intercultural and/or international communication, and peace and conflict studies.

Important Deadlines

– December 20, 2016: submission of the proposal in the form of an abstract of maximum 2 pages. The proposal must include a list of recent references;

– January 5, 2017: acceptance of the proposal;

– April 30, 2017: full paper submission;

– June 15, 2017: full paper acceptance.

Full papers should be between 6,000-8,000 words in length. Papers can be submitted in English or French. The abstracts should be in English and French, max. 2 pages followed by 5 keywords. Please provide the full names, affiliations, and e-mail addresses of all authors, indicating the contact author. Papers, and any queries, should be sent to:

essachess@gmail.com

Authors of the accepted papers will be notified by e-mail. The journal will be published in July 2017.

[1] The journal ESSACHESS is covered in Scopus Elsevier, ProQuest CSA, EBSCO Publishing, Index Copernicus, DOAJ, Ulrich’s, Gale, J-Gate, CEEOL, Genamics Journal Seek, SSRN, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR), MLA Directory, and DRJI (Directory of Research Journal Indexing) databases. The journal is also recognized by AERES – French Evaluation Agency for Research and higher Education and sustained by the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie.

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CSSR/SCÉR 2017 in Toronto: Dates and more Plans

SCÉR 2017 à Toronto: 30, 31 mai et 1er juin

Dates

Our association’s meeting dates at the 2017 Congress in Toronto are as follows: / Nous avons été informés que les dates de notre colloque au Congrès de 2017 à Toronto sont :

  • May 30, May 31, June 1 (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday). /  les 30, 31 mai et 1er juin (mardi, mercredi, jeudi)
  • Our president’s reception is scheduled for Wednesday. / la réception du président pour nous est programmée  le mercredi. 

The Congress as a whole starts May 26 and ends on Friday June 2. / Le congrès dans son ensemble commence le 26 mai et s’achève le vendredi 2 juin. 

You can see the dates for all the Congress associations here: / Vous trouverez les dates pour toutes les sociétés du congrès ici : http://www.congress2017.ca/sites/default/files/sites/default/uploads/conference-schedule-2017-en.pdf

Our Brief Description

Our CSSR/SCÉR association and 2017 conference will be described thus on the Congress website:

Rhetoric is the study of strategic communication through the lens of “rhetorical” theories and perspectives. Rhetorical theory, criticism, and pedagogy provide insight and instruction into how people communicate effectively (or ineffectively) and ethically (or unethically) in order to inform, persuade or delight their audiences. Rhetoric is actively performed in all media and situations, all cultures and languages, whether or not rhetors (communicators) are conscious of using rhetoric. Rhetoric is not limited to “public discourse,” although much of rhetorical study has focused on public discourse.

Our conference at the Congress in 2017 will have some sessions focused on the topic of “Rhetoric and Interdisciplinarity / Disciplinarity.” We have chosen this theme because we are well aware that rhetoric and rhetoricians find their home in a wide variety of academic disciplines and institutions in Canada and beyond. We would like to understand how disciplinarity or interdisciplinarity affects the study and teaching of various kinds of rhetoric in various institutional locations, both historically and today.

(Sorry, no French translation yet)

Call for Proposals

The CSSR/SCÉR 2017 Call for Proposals (CFP) is currently in development, and it will need to be translated into French before circulation, hopefully by November.

Submissions will be due by January 15, 2017.

The CFP will be very similar to the 2016 (last year’s) call for proposals, except for the more detailed description of the year’s theme for special sessions and the keynote speaker info.

We always welcome topics on any theme in rhetorical studies, not just presentations that fit our theme for the year.

Students are always welcome to present.

We hope you will start planning your presentation proposal soon!

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CSSR Social Media update, August 2016

I’d like to introduce our CSSR-SCÉR Website & Social Media team and explain what’s going on in the world of our CSSR Social Media forums.

First, join me in giving sincere thanks to our current Website & Social Media team!

  • Tania Smith, CSSR Webmaster and Social Media admin since 2012
  • Ryan McGuckin, CSSR webmaster assistant, and CSSR-SCÉR Google+ co-admin since 2015
  • Brandon Katzir, CSSR social media assistant, and Twitter co-admin since 2015
  • Bruce Dadey, CSSR Webmaster co-assistant, and Twitter co-admin since 2016
  • M. Shivaun Corry, CSSR Facebook, since 2016
  • David Beard, our current CSSR-SCÉR Secretary, also holds the webmaster’s backup & password files just in case the webmaster becomes unavailable to do her work.

With the help of this team, our association has a greater ability to publicly engage those who choose to “follow” us on social media.

CSSR-SCÉR Social media is intended to complement, not replace, our website. Although our website is restricted to more “official” executive announcements and “academic” information (such as Job Ads and Calls for Papers for rhetorical studies), our social media posts can cast a wider net by also sharing articles and media that are broadly relevant to discussion of “rhetoric” or “eloquence” in the public forum and rhetorical studies in general.

Our pages on Google+ and Twitter are also publicly accessible to people without login, thus increasing our association’s reach and relevance.  This is one way our association stays engaged with our people and the public.

Currently, our social media is integrated in a “chain” of forwarding and accumulating posts from one forum to the next:

  1. All our CSSR blog posts (news) get automatically posted to CSSR Google+ and CSSR Facebook.
  2. On our CSSR Google+ page, we share additional material that may be relevant to our followers on G+.  We also post on two interactive “community” pages that we host, where members can also post material:
  3. All our official Google+ posts made by our Google+ assistants (including posts forwarded to G+ from our website blog) get automatically fed to our CSSR Twitter page.
  4. Our CSSR Twitter assistants add more material to our feed and keep it active and relevant to our Twitter followers
  5. Our CSSR Facebook assistants add material to the Facebook page. (Due to technical difficulty and settings, Facebook cannot easily accept an automatic feed from our Twitter page, but it does mirror our CSSR website posts.)
  6. Our CSSR Twitter feed is publicly accessible online and in a “widget” in the left-hand sidebar of our CSSR website.

Therefore, even if you are not a user of any of these social media outlets, you can view our Social Media activity on our website. Just scroll down on any CSSR website page and look in the left sidebar under the menu.  There, you’ll see our public Twitter feed, which includes all the posts that have s accumulated on Google+ as well as Twitter.

If you use Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, we encourage you to join or follow us there!

Sincerely,

Tania Smith,
CSSR-SCÉR Webmaster, and President 2015-2017

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Plans for CSSR 2017 in Toronto

Plan pour la SCER 2017 à Toronto

The 2017 conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric / Société Canadienne pour l’Étude de la Rhétorique will once again be held as part of the Canadian Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. / La conférence 2017 de la Société Canadienne pour l’Étude de la Rhétorique / Canadian Society for the Study of Rhétorique se déroulera, une nouvelle fois, dans le cadre du Congrès des sciences humaines du Canada.

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Ryerson University. / Lieu: Toronto, Ontario, Université Ryerson

Date: TBA (on 3 DAYS between May 27-June 2) / Dates: à préciser (3 JOURS entre le 27 mai et le 2 juin)

Theme: “Rhetoric and Interdisciplinarity / Disciplinarity”

This year, we are especially interested in presentations that explore through research and scholarship how “rhetorical studies” has been located within or among various disciplines in Canada and abroad, historically, today, and perhaps potentially in the future. In what contexts is/was rhetoric a discipline, and/or to what degree is/was it seen as innately interdisciplinary? How is rhetoric’s inter/disciplinarity defined not only by academic politics and structures, but by broader social contexts and ideologies? What kinds of rhetorical strategies are used to articulate the relation of rhetorical studies to various other fields of study? And ultimately, why or how does its inter/disciplinarity matter? — How have certain professions, roles, communities, and projects benefited from, or suffered with or without a disciplinary/interdisciplinary study of rhetoric? How does rhetoric’s inter/disciplinarity potentially strengthen or weaken the quality, diversity, identity and visibility of “rhetorical” scholarship, education, and practice, in Canada and beyond?

Thème : « Rhétorique et Interdisciplinarité / disciplinarité »

Cette année, nous sommes particulièrement intéressés par les communications qui font état de la recherche sur la manière dont les « études rhétoriques » se situent au sein et au travers de différentes disciplines au Canada et à l’étranger, et ce, historiquement, aujourd’hui, et potentiellement dans le futur. Dans quels contextes la rhétorique a été/est toujours une discipline et/ou dans quelle mesure elle est/était considérée comme intrinsèquement interdisciplinaire ? Comment l’interdisciplinarité de la rhétorique est-elle envisagée, non seulement par les politiques et structures académiques, mais également dans des contextes sociaux et dans des idéologies plus larges ? Quels types de stratégies rhétoriques sont mises en œuvre pour articuler la relation entre les études rhétoriques et d’autres champs d’étude ? Et enfin, pourquoi cette inter/disciplinarité est-elle importante, et comment cette importance se manifeste-t-elle ? – Comment certaines professions, postes, communautés et projets ont pu tirer bénéfice d’une approche disciplinaire/interdisciplinaire de la rhétorique ? Comment ont-ils été fragilisés par cette approche ou, au contraire, par l’absence d’une telle approche ? Comment l’inter/disciplinarité de la rhétorique peut renforcer ou affaiblir la qualité, la diversité, l’identité et la visibilité des études, de l’éducation et de la pratique de la « rhétorique », au Canada et ailleurs ?

As usual, we will also welcome presentations on all topics, themes and aspects of rhetorical studies. / Les propositions relatives à tous les aspects de la rhétorique restent, comme toujours, bienvenues, et ceci, quel que soit le champ d’étude envisagé.

Call for Proposals:  to be distributed in Fall 2016, with proposals due by January 15, 2017 / Appel à propositions : diffusion prévue à l’automne 2016 ; les propositions de communications seront attendues pour le 15 janvier 2017.

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CSSR 2016 Student Prize Awarded

Prix de la meilleure communication présentée par un/e étudiant/e au Colloque de la SCÉR 2016

The award this year went to / Le prix est décerné cette année à

Lyuba Encheva, Ryerson University 

“The Grammar and Rhetoric of Gamification”

Abstract: This paper examines the political implications of the “mechanization of work” within games and the concept of “work” as the end result of a game. I engage in a close reading of Michael Hugos’ 2013 book Enterprise Games through Burkean dramatism. The examination of rhetorical devices in the book unveils a contradiction at the core of the “gamification” concept: it rests on the presumption that players’ engagement or “intrinsic motivation” can be externally stimulated.

Résumé : Cet article analyse, d’une part, les implications politiques de la « mécanisation du travail » eu égard à la problématique des jeux, et, d’autre part, le concept de « travail » en tant que résultat final d’un jeu. Pour ce faire, l’auteur conduit une lecture suivie de l’ouvrage de Michael Hugos, Enterprise Games, paru en 2013, à travers le « dramatisme » propre à Kenneth Burke. L’examen des dispositifs rhétoriques exposés dans le livre dévoile une contradiction au cœur de la notion de « ludification » (gamification) : elle repose sur la présomption suivant laquelle l’engagement ou la « motivation intrinsèque » des joueurs peuvent être stimulés de l’extérieur.

We welcome Lyuba Encheva to submit her complete, revised paper for publication in Rhetor, the Society’s journal. / Nous serons heureux d’accueillir la version révisée de l’article de Lyuba Encheva pour publication dans un prochain numéro de Rhetor, la revue électronique de notre Société.

Congratulations! / Félicitations! 

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President’s Message, 2017-2019

CSSR President’s message

by Dr. Tania S. Smith, President 2015-2019

We at CSSR (also known as RhetCanada) are an international, bilingual scholarly society based in Canada, dedicated to the study of rhetoric–its theory, practice, criticism, history, and pedagogy.

We adhere to a broad understanding of rhetoric as the art and study of acts of communication: their forms, strategies, ethics, and effects on various audiences.

We study rhetoric in all genres of writing, speech, performance, physical artifacts, and media, and in all cultures, languages, and eras.

We welcome scholars who engage in rhetorical studies within a wide range of disciplines such as communication, literature, the fine arts, history, political science, philosophy, writing studies, as well as the sciences and professions.

We believe the study, teaching, and practice of rhetoric should aim to enrich human understanding and inquiry, culture, mutual respect, and social cooperation. …

Message de la Présidente de la SCÉR

par Dr. Tania S. Smith, Présidente 2015-2019

La SCÉR (également connue sous le nom « RhetCanada ») est une société savante internationale, bilingue (anglais / français), établie au Canada, et dédiée à l’étude de la rhétorique – sa théorie, sa pratique, sa critique, son histoire et sa pédagogie.

Nous adhérons à une définition large de la rhétorique entendue comme art et comme étude des actes de la communication: leurs formes, leurs stratégies, leur dimension éthique et leurs effets auprès d’une grande variété d’auditoires.

Nous étudions la rhétorique dans tous les genres d’écriture, de discours, de performances, sur tous les supports et dans les médias, dans toutes les cultures, toutes les langues, et à toutes les époques.

Nous accueillons des chercheurs qui se consacrent aux études rhétoriques depuis un très large spectre de disciplines comme la communication, la littérature, les beaux-arts, l’histoire, la science politique, la philosophie, la rédactologie, dans les sciencesautant que dans les professions.

Nous croyons que l’étude, l’enseignement et la pratique de la rhétorique peuvent aider à enrichir notre compréhension de l’être humain, ainsi que l’enquête menée sur le fait culturel, le respect mutuel et l’entente sociale. …

Continue reading “President’s Message, 2017-2019”