The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric
We’re happy to announce that a special issue of our journal, Rhetor 8.1, is now available. The issue, guest edited by David Beard, focuses on the role of national identity in rhetoric scholarship and features articles from a wide variety of Canadian and international rhetoricians.
Previous issues of Rhetor can be accessed from our Rhetor Volumes page.
As an association, RhetCanada would like to express our support for the Black Canadian Studies Association and to urge the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences to concretely re-commit to a Congress on the theme of colonialism and anti-Black racism as soon as possible, given both the current urgency and ongoing importance of the theme. We also urge the Federation to implement strategies to better support the work of scholars who are Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, and we commit to finding ways to better include and support these scholars and their communities within our own association.
RhetCanada will hold its 2021 annual conference as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Both the Congress and RhetCanada’s conference will be held online in 2021.
The conference will take place June 2-4, 2021. Our conference theme, which is carried over from last year’s postponed conference, is “Bridging Divides.”
Presenters whose papers were accepted for last year’s conference can present them at this year’s conference, and we are also accepting new proposals for papers. See our 2021 Call for Proposals for further information.
The deadline for new paper proposal submissions is January 15, 2021.
Keep updated on the conference by following the news on our website, following us on Twitter (@rhetcan), or joining our Facebook group.
We look forward to hearing your accepted papers and receiving your new proposals!
RhetCanada’s 2020 conference is postponed due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Here are some important things to note about this postponement:
The call for proposals for RhetCanada’s 2020 conference is now available!
The conference will take place June 3-5, 2020 at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which will be held at Western University in London, Ontario. Our conference theme, which echoes the Congress theme, is “Bridging Divides.” The deadline for paper proposal submissions is January 10, 2020.
Keep updated on the conference by following the news on our website, following us on Twitter (@rhetcan), or joining our Facebook group.
We look forward to receiving your proposals!
Attendees at RhetCanada’s 2019 annual meeting in Vancouver heard papers from senior scholars and emerging graduate students for the RhetCanada Graduate Student Prize. Judging the grad student prize was challenging once again. Judges David Beard, incoming RhetCanada President Bruce Dadey, and outgoing RhetCanada President Tania Smith awarded this year’s prize to Nicolas Noble for his paper “Myths of Community: Legal Fictions and Rhetoric in Canadian Religious Freedom.” Noble focused on the provincial and federal hearings related to Trinity Western University’s recent legal bid to open a law school. The presentation explored the rhetorical strategies formulated by Trinity Western’s leadership in advancing their legal case.
Congratulations Nicolas.
RhetCanada looks forward to next year’s grad student presentations in London, Ontario!
The rhetoric of a rhetoric society must adapt to its situation. We may also need to consider playing a role in reshaping our own rhetorical situation by using our rhetoric in the public sphere as public intellectuals. If we are truly experts in rhetoric, I suggest we adapt to and reshape our situation at the same time.
Rhetoric is as alive as ever, and more relevant than ever, but it has been decentralized. The role of the communicator is less visible — in universities and colleges, in politics, in public communication, and in workplaces.
Why?
Many workers have embedded communications tasks within their roles. Therefore, a lot of communication occurs without supportive mentoring and instruction, and a lot of reasoning occurs without knowledge of good rhetorical theory. People do their best. Many desperately need rhetoric and are flummoxed by the rhetorical demands placed on them. They don’t know that they need rhetoric, because people are baffled by the word “rhetoric” and don’t know what it means.
What could we do better?
Abstract definitions can only go so far. As a rhetoric society, we can offer “free samples” of rhetorical thought and practice in public, not just in the databases and cloisters of academia. Performing what we do is more powerful than just talking about what we do and claiming it is important.
Many of us do have the talents to move, inform, and inspire within today’s online public forums. Not every rhetorician is a public intellectual, but if we care to make our value known, we may occasionally appear briefly in public as a theorist, critic, teacher, journalist or essayist.
Our journal continues to be an important pillar for our society. I am very grateful to Tracey Whalen. We must consider how to keep our journal alive with rich submissions and a network of able reviewers without overloading the work of the editor.
I thank Bruce Dadey for the design and structure of our new website, Shivaun Corry for sharing relevant content on our RhetCanada Facebook page and group, and David Beard and other members for posting, liking and sharing.
Our website, social media, and graphic design costs are money well spent, especially for a society that believes in the power of effective and ethical public rhetoric. Our blog is our newsletter and a primary way in which we engage members between conferences, but it takes a village to run a good blog.
I propose we create a blogging team that would write posts, design images and memes. We can recruit guest bloggers. Ideally, we should not just be sharing other’s content but sharing our own content, like an online magazine, every few weeks at minimum. Think “Conversation dot com” by rhetoricians, for rhetoricians and students and the public.
Without that, we have nothing to say in the public forum, which is paradoxical. Is the role of a rhetoric society merely to share others’ public events and publicly articulated ideas? Are we only good at writing journal articles, books, and dissertations? Our members can write rhetorical commentary on current events and issues, we can interview each other about our careers and recent publications, and we can feature Canadian rhetoric courses and programs.
This year we had a membership development task force. I look forward to their report. It is not an easy task to raise our member numbers in the environment I’ve just described. I believe we can’t afford to have a narrowly Canadian focus nor focus only on full time academics. We must continue to reach out and welcome our international members and presenters as well as student members and part-time scholar-practitioners. These offer growth and sustainability at a time when stable academic positions that include rhetorical study are relatively rare in Canada and academics face increasing workloads.
RhetCanada has a very limited income at present. We generate little from memberships due to our small numbers, low-cost student memberships, and affordable association fees at congress. Our journal royalties are modest.
Just as publishing companies, news organizations, and universities must think innovatively about their income, so must we. Let’s ponder how we as a group offer value to each other and our society and what we can reasonably ask for in exchange. What members do we want to attract and what activities and services add value to them? What is a reasonable fee for each level or type of activity or service?
At congress, the cost of rooms and AV is minimal, but catering is far too luxurious for a small, low-income organization like ours, especially if we want to fund a student prize and a small honorarium for a keynote speaker. I learned this lesson too late, and then I cut down our catering order as much as I could. Next year we should try no catering, just AudioVisual costs, and we may be able to recoup some of our finances from the experiments of 2019. In our colleges and universities, we don’t provide free food to students, but our students still come to class.
This AGM concludes my fourth year as president. In 2017 I was re-elected for a second two-year term. I have in the Executive since 2012, and before that I served in various other roles.
I see these as my greatest contributions to RhetCanada/CSSR over the years:
It’s time for leadership renewal.
In 2019, I am calling on RhetCanada to help me transition out of this role. I desire to move on to other roles in my life.
As you can see, I am by nature a blogger, converser, thinker, and innovator. I want to use more of my rhetorical skills in public activism for the causes I care about, and I want to publish books and articles as a rhetoric scholar. I can still be a good contributing member of our society.
I’m not very good at persuading people to do tasks or managing an executive (it feels like nagging), or planning conferences step by step according to Congress deadlines (it feels like being managed by a machine), so when I drop the ball, that’s where it gets dropped.
We currently have no nominee for President after my term ends, unless we discover a nominee in the next few days who has the qualifications. Our constitution requires the president to have two years of prior experience as an executive member, usually as vice-president. Our VP David Beard has expressed his intention not to succeed as president. We are thin on qualified people who are ready and willing to take on a presidential role.
To prevent our organization from harm, I am willing to stay on as president for a transition year. BUT it needs to be a year in which I transition out while I mentor others in. We truly require others to plan next year’s conference, we need others to help move along tasks and roles within the executive, and we need a leadership development group to work on nominations, mentoring, succession planning for our committees and the executive.
Here is my president’s report for this year’s Annual General Meeting (AGM), delivered in a document and as a series of two social media posts.
It has been an honour to serve our society once again as President this year. Our society plays an important role nationally and globally, bringing together scholars and students in the field of rhetoric.
Conference planning and leadership
Other leadership tasks
In Regina (2018), I instituted roundtable discussions, and this year at UBC I enhanced them. I see the roundtable genre as an important bridging genre between the formal conference paper and the informal dialogue over coffee. It’s a space for envisioning our shifting field(s). This year, I issued email invitations so that the roundtable speakers earn academic credit for being panelists, respondents and facilitators.
Every three years our association must pay for website hosting renewal, and 2018 was such a year. Renewal of hosting was going to cost a fortune compared to finding a new host, so I shopped around and I saved us at least $300 CAD. Compared to the fees our association pays yearly to Congress for membership, AV and catering, our website is cheap.
Instead of printing posters, I subscribed to Canva.com’s pro service. This is a “drag and drop” user-friendly graphic design platform that saves a lot of design time, offers a huge library of licensed professional content, and makes a professional finished product. It can be used for engaging social media memes. Others can collaborate with a Pro user by using the free version.
Print materials can be a waste if they are merely given to people who didn’t ask for them. Too often beautiful printed materials from organizations end up sitting in a pile of papers or falling into the recycle bin. If members want a poster, I recommend they print one. If members want high quality print materials, perhaps we can pool our print orders and share costs.
The RhetCanada 2019 Programme is now available on the RhetCanada website, including both the presentation schedule and abstracts. A link to a PDF version of the schedule will be posted shortly. For general information about the conference, see the RhetCanada Conference 2019 page.
We are excited to announce that Roderick P. Hart is our Keynote speaker for RhetCanada 2019.
Dr. Hart holds the Allan Shivers Centennial Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of over a dozen books on rhetoric, media studies, and civic discourse. His works include Political Keywords: Using Language that Uses Us (2005), Political Tone: What Leaders Say and Why (2013), Modern Rhetorical Criticism (4th ed. 2017), and most recently, Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive. His latter work in particular is pertinent to this year’s conference theme, Rhetorics of Hope.
Keynote Description
The world is now beset with new forms of tribalism and old forms of nationalism. New and angry voices abound, with political leaders often appealing to the churlishness within us. What to do? This address presents the concept of civic hope, an expectation (1) that enlightened leadership is possible despite human foibles, (2) that productive forms of citizenship will result from cultural pluralism, (3) that democratic traditions will yield prudent governance, but (4) that none of this can happen without vigorous forms of argument at the grassroots level.
The address draws on my recent book, Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive (Cambridge, 2018) that asks (1) Who believes in political hope? (2) Have such feelings changed over the years? and (3) What does political hope sounds like when expressed? Drawing on a twenty-year research project, I focus on what people say about politics, what they say but do not mean, and what they mean but do not say.
My core argument is that the strength of a democracy lies in its weaknesses and in the willingness of its people to address those weaknesses without surcease. If democracies were not shot-through with unstable premises and unsteady compacts, its citizens would remain quiet, removed from one another. Disagreements – endless, raucous disagreements – draw them in, or at least enough of them to have a debate. Political already hope exists. We just need to learn how to recognize it and, after doing so, how to applaud it.