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.
2024 RhetCanada Annual General Meeting
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.
Sarah Casey Wins the 2024 Michael Purves-Smith Paper Award
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.
Member News April 2024
Welcome to our 2024 Member News post, in which we share news about the activities of RhetCanada members over the past year with the goal of helping us keep in touch with one another’s work. As usual, people have been busy!
We hope to see you at the 2024 RhetCanada Conference, which takes place online on June 8 and in person June 12-14 in association with the 2024 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at McGill University in Montreal. The conference program will be available in May.
New Positions/Promotions
Jonathan Doering is now an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in the Department of Literature, Folklore, and the Arts at Cape Breton University.
Shannon Lodoen has been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, beginning in August 2024.
Pierre Zoberman is professor emeritus, Université Sorbonne-Paris-Nord.
Awards and Honours
Sheila Batacharya received the University of Toronto Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy 2023-2024 ISUP Faculty Teaching Excellence Award.
Jocelyn Peltier-Huntley was awarded a $5,000 research grant from Women in Mining Canada.
Zhaozhe Wang received the University of Toronto Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy 2023-2024 ISUP Faculty Research Excellence Award.
New and Forthcoming Publications
David Beard
“Rethinking the three origin stories for communication studies in North America.” Media Ecology. (forthcoming)
Editor [with E. Wright]. A Charge for Change. Parlor Press, 2023.
[with L. Horton, P. Soulen, A. Propes, C. Ford, and J. Ford] “From Television to Videotape and Back Again: Intellectual Property in Doctor Who.” Televisual Shared Universes: Expanded and Converged Storyworlds, Lexington Books, 2023.
Editor, special issue of Survive and Thrive, a Journal of Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine: Health, Illness and Injury in Professional Wrestling, Vol. 8, no. 2, 2022.
Shivaun Corry
“How to Talk so that Doctors Will Listen.” Survive and Thrive. (forthcoming, and based on her talk at last year’s RhetCanada conference).
Jocelyn Peltier-Huntley
“Responding to the Kairotic Moment: Advancing Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion through Allyship in Canadian Mining.” The Journal of Leadership Accountability and Ethics, vol. 20, no. 1, 2023, https://doi.org/10.33423/jlae.v20i1.5986.
[with Jovita Dias] “Insights from Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Allies: Results from the Second Phase of an Interdisciplinary Study on the Retention of Underrepresented People in Mining.” 26th World Mining Congress Conference Proceedings, 2023, https://tinyurl.com/ymxyfypz.
“Leading DEI Transformations: What HR Needs to Know.” CPHR Saskatchewan Magazine, vol. 16, no. 2, 2023, https://www.hrsaskatchewan-digital.com/sahb/0223_fall_winter_2023/MobilePagedArticle.action?articleId=1916135#articleId1916135.
“World Mining Congress Raises Awareness of Gender Inequity from the Mine Face to the Main Stage.” Mining Your Business, no. 2, 2023, p. 22, https://issuu.com/delcomminc/docs/mining_your_business_-_issue_2_2023_4b33cf931e1694.
Ryan James McGuckin
“E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View.” Journal of Modern Literature. (forthcoming)
“Temporal Limits: Modernist Refrain, Modern Disruption in the Music of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.” Music in World Literature: From Tolstoy to Manga, edited by David Racker and Julia Titus, Palgrave Macmillan. (forthcoming)
Zhaozhe Wang
“Transnational Rhetorical Circulation in the Splinternet Age.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 5, 2023, pp. 670-684.
“Rhetorical Economy: Affect, Labor, and Capital in Transnational Digital Circulation.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 108, no. 4, 2022, pp. 382-401.
“The Switched-Off Circulation: A Rhetoric of Disconnect.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 40, no. 4, 2021, pp. 395-411.
“Activist Rhetoric in Transnational Cyber-Public Spaces: Toward a Comparative Materialist Approach.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 4, 2020, pp. 240-253.
Pierre Zoberman
Editor, special Issue of Intertexts : (Re-en)Gendering Intertexuality: Queer Pasts and Futures. (forthcoming)
“Proust and the Intertextual Construction of Identity.” Intertexts. (forthcoming)
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translation edited by Pierre Zoberman, with an introduction by David Wetsel and notes by David Wetsel and Pierre Zoberman. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2023.
Projects
Jocelyn Peltier-Huntley is completing her final data collection phase of her PhD project (Activating Allies) and drafting her manuscript dissertation. She hopes to defend before the summer. The Active Allies course trailer video and summary articles for each study phase of her dissertation are available on her research website, and public reports/guidlines co-published with clients are available on the website of her consulting company, Prairie Catalyst.
Ryan James McGuckin is working with Joshua Myers (Ball State U.), on a co-edited critical anthology tentatively titled New Brave New World: Memory, Technology, and the Word in Kazuo Ishiguro.
Pierre Zoberman was co-organizer of the panel of the ICLA (International Comparative Literature Association) research committee for Comparative Gender Studies: Queer Contemporaneities: Anachronism and Gender (Annual Congress of the American Comparative Literature Association, Montreal, March 2024), and will co-organize a two-day international seminar on the same topic in Paris (11-12 October 2024). He will also be presenting a paper, “Being in the Pink and Seeing Red: Topoi and the Intertextual Construction / Subversion of Gender Identity from Saint-Simon to Proust,” at the International Society for the History of Rhetoric in July 2024.
Sean Zwagerman is organizing the Kenneth Burke panel at the International Society for the History of Rhetoric Conference in July and will be presenting a paper entitled “Indigenous Justice and the Social Status of the Uninvited Guest” at RSA in May.
Other News
Shivaun Corry is living in Mexico this semester, and like many of us is adjusting to the presence of GenAI in her courses. “I’ve taken inspiration from my grandpa who owned a movie theatre in the 1950s. When televisions became popular, and movie theatre attendance declined, he didn’t rage and rail against televisions; instead, he shut down the theatre and opened up a TV repair shop. Following Grandpa’s ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ attitude; I’ve adjusted my syllabi to include lessons on prompt engineering and the ethical use A.I.”
RhetCan 2024 Call for Proposals Now Available
RhetCanada’s 2024 conference will be a joint event that takes place online on June 8 and in person from June 12-14 in association with the 2024 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at McGill University, Montreal. The 2024 RhetCanada conference theme is “Where’s the Rhetoric?” See our Call for Proposals.
Kyle Gerber Wins 2023 Michael Purves-Smith Paper Award
Kyle Gerber has received RhetCanada’s Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award for his paper, “Re-imagining the Rhetorical Powers of Prayer,” presented at the 2023 RhetCanada conference. The committee offered the following comments:
Kyle’s study of prayer as devotional practice and theological site (with reference to Amish programs of spiritual formation and attitude) was interesting and demonstrated a sustained engagement with the thinking of Kenneth Burke. His paper provided a sustained, textured rhetorical treatment, and his delivery was engaged, confident, and invested in his topic. The work had a depth and maturity and commitment.
Congratulations Kyle!
RhetCanada 2023 Programme Available
The programme for RhetCanada’s 2023 conference, which will be held May 30-June 1 at York University in association with the 2023 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, is now available. We hope to see you there, either in person or online!
Member News, March 2023
This is the first in a series of semi-annual posts sharing news about the activities of RhetCanada members, with the goal of helping us keep in touch with one another’s work. This post is a catch-up post, covering news from over the course of the pandemic. People have been busy!
We’ll be sending out an email requesting news items from current members about a month ahead of the next member news post in October.
We hope to see you (either in-person or virtually) at our annual conference May 30-June 1 at York University in Toronto. The program will be available in April.
New Positions/Promotions
Jonathan Doering started a two-year contract as Assistant Professor of English (Department of Literature, Folklore, and The Arts) at Cape Breton University.
Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher became the Canada Research Chair in Science, Health, and Technology Communication.
Sigrid Streit was recently tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy.
Graduations
Monique Kampherm earned her Ph.D. in English-Rhetoric from the University of Waterloo in December 2022. Her dissertation, Masks and Caricatures: Prosopopoeia, Ethopoeia, and the Effect of Social Media on Canadian Political Leaders’ Debates (2023), reveals how political leaders’ debates that were once a pivotal pillar to democracy are being (re)shaped in real time through social media, which is distorting information for voters, affecting the consciousness of political leaders, and disrupting the platform on which our democracy is built. Monique publishes on the effect of rhetoric and social media on Canadian political elections.
[Note: Arguments from Monique’s dissertation have been developed in the RhetCanada incubator over the years, including her prize-winning essay, “Democratic Prosopopoeia: The Rhetorical Influence Of The I-Will-Vote Image Filter On Social Media Profile Pictures During The 2015 Canadian Federal Election,” published in Rhetor 8.]
Awards and Honours
Randy Harris was elected Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada in 2022.
Shannon Lodoen received a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship in 2022.
Sigrid Streit received the University of Detroit Mercy 2021/2022 Faculty Achievement Award.
New Publications
Jonathan Doering
“The Rhetorical Apprenticeship of Roland Barthes.” Barthes Studies, vol. 7, 2021, pp. 110-39.
“The Linguistic Terror in France according to Jean Paulhan and Jean-Paul Sartre.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 83, no. 4, Oct. 2022, pp. 555-578.
Randy Harris
Fahnestock, Jeanne, and Randy Allen Harris, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion, Routledge, 2022.
“The Tropes: Metaphor and its Friends.” The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion, edited by Jeanne Fahnestock and Randy Allen Harris, Routledge, 2022, pp. 227-45.
“Rules Are Rules: Rhetorical Figures as Algorithms.” Logic and Algorithms in Computational Linguistics, edited by Roussanka Loukanova, Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine, and Reinhard Muskens, Springer, 2023, pp. 217-259.
“Jagmeet’s Kairotic Challenge: Darkface, Turbans, and Hypocrisy Upwards.” Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture vol. 1, no. 2, 2022, pp. 171–204. [NOTE: Randy presented a version of this analysis at RhetCanada 2021]
“Grammatical Constructions and Rhetorical Figures: The Case of Chiasmus.” LACUS Forum vol. 46, no. 1, 2022, pp. 35-61.
“Chiastic Iconicity: Refiguring Symmetry.” Iconicity in Cognition and across Semiotic Systems, edited by Sara Lenninger, Olga Fischer, Christina Ljungberg, and Elzbieta Tabakowska, John Benjamins), 2022, pp. 103-134.
Kara-Yakoubian, Mane, Alexander C. Walker, Konstantyn Sharpinskyi, Garni Assadourian, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, and Randy Allen Harris. 2022. “Beauty and Truth, Truth and Beauty: Chiastic Structure Increases the Subjective Accuracy of Statements.” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale vol. 76, no. 2, 2022, pp. 144–155. [NOTE: Mane presented these experimental results at RhetCanada 2021]
Shannon Lodoen
“Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and the Limits of Optimism: A Pessimistic Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 64, no. 1, 2023, pp. 85-97.
“Progress and Power in the First, Second, and Third Universities: A Case Study of the University of Waterloo”.” Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics vol. 2, no. 1, winter 2021.
Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher
On Expertise: Cultivating Character, Goodwill, and Practical Wisdom, Penn State UP, 2022.
Paula Nuñez de Villavicencio
Jeremy Packer, Paula Nuñez de Villavicencio, Alexander Monea, Kathleen Oswald, Kate Maddalena, and Joshua Reeves. The Prison House of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to Digital. U of Minnesota P, 2023.
Tania Smith
Sigrid Streit
“Mapping the Conversation: A Graphic Organizer Tool for Synthesis Assignments.” Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments, vol. 6, no. 22, 2022.
Newman, Sara, and Sigrid Streit. Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia Revisited: Sympathy, Science, and the Representation of Movement. Southern Illinois UP, 2020.
Pierre Zoberman
Translator, Blaise Pascal, Pensées. Catholic University of America Press, 2023.
Projects
Shannon Lodoen participated in conferences in Rome, Edmonton, and cyberspace on topics ranging from critical theory to poetry-reading. Since then, Shannon has been lucky enough to receive two independent teaching roles in composition and engineering communications courses, and is looking forward to teaching a course on her dissertation research entitled “The Rhetoric of Smartphones” in Fall 2023.
Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher is the inaugural Co-Director, with Nobel Prize recipient Donna Strickland, for the Trust in Research Undertaken in Science and Technology (TRuST).
Sigrid Streit was awarded a research leave for the upcoming academic year and is working on her monograph project, exploring kneeling as a rhetorical gesture, of which she will be discussing her early research at this year’s RhetCanada conference. Sigrid is also excited about her current engagement with Detroit Mercy’s Institute of Leadership and Service, where she is working with Fr. Tim Hipskind on developing Detroit Mercy’s service learning courses into community engaged learning initiatives.
Other News
Shannon Lodoen got married in summer 2022. Congratulations!
Pierre Zoberman retired in October 2021. [But, fortunately for us, he is still an active scholar!]
RhetCanada 2023 Conference CFP
RhetCanada will be holding its 2023 annual conference from May 30-June 1 at York University in Toronto, in association with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Our conference theme this year is Rhetoric, Reckonings, and Re-imaginings, and we welcome paper proposals in both English and French on a broad range of rhetoric-related topics. See our Call for Proposals for more information on the conference and how to submit a proposal. The deadline for submissions is Jan. 20. If you have any questions related to the conference, contact RhetCanada president Bruce Dadey.
RhetCanada Student Paper Award Winners 2022
We’re pleased to announce the RhetCanada student paper award winners for 2022. The quality of the graduate and undergraduate presentations this year was outstanding, so congratulations to the winners and thanks to all those who presented!
Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award
The winner of the Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award for an outstanding paper by a graduate student was Máire Slater, for her paper “The Rhetoric of Reconciliation in the Music of Ubu and the Truth Commission”:
It is with great pleasure that the Student Prize Committee congratulates Máire Slater of the University of Waterloo on winning this year’s Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award, for her paper and presentation entitled “The Rhetoric of Reconciliation in the Music of Ubu and the Truth Commission.” The committee was unanimous in its decision, agreeing that Máire’s paper was not only of excellent quality in its written and presented forms, but also applied a very high standard of rhetorical scholarship to the analysis of a significant artefact. The clarity of the integration of musical theory in a manner accessible to non-specialists, and the attentiveness to the rhetorical dimensions of composition and performance were outstanding.
This award is given in honour of the late Michael Purves-Smith, and the Committee also wishes to acknowledge how Michael, with his deep commitment to the rhetorical possibilities of music, would have appreciated Máire’s paper and presentation. Máire’s engaged and nuanced investigation of music as a site of and vehicle for rhetorical action would reassure Michael that RhetCanada continues to attract a breadth of scholarship of the highest calibre.
RhetCanada Undergraduate Paper Award
The winners of the RhetCanada Undergraduate Paper Award are Queenie Chen and Romina Hashemi for their paper “‘im gonna destroy the world before it destroys me’: Rhetoric and Construction Grammar”:
The RhetCanada Student Prize Committee is very pleased to announce that Queenie Chen and Romina Hashemi of the University of Waterloo are the 2022 winners of the RhetCanada Student Paper Award, for their paper “‘im gonna destroy the world before it destroys me’: Rhetoric and Construction Grammar.”
This well-prepared and engagingly presented paper offered a thought-provoking introduction to the role of grammatical structure in the construction and deployment of rhetorical figures. Queenie and Romina were attentive to the needs of an audience whose approach to rhetorical theory and criticism is diverse; they grounded their discussion of construction grammar as an approach and of the rhetorical figures such as chiasmus, antimetalepsis, and mesodiplosis in accessible terms which pointed the audience to exciting new directions for rhetorical inquiry.
We congratulate Queenie and Romina on their fine work and hope they will continue to share their important scholarship with RhetCanada in the future.