Grad students were out in force at this year’s annual RhetCanada meeting at Congress 2018. Members were treated to grad presentations on a wide variety of topics, including papers on the rhetorics of social media rankings, utopias and dystopias, and science advocacy on Reddit. Judging the grad student prize was particularly challenging. Four students qualified after submitting the draft and final versions by the pre-conference deadlines. The entrants were impressive, both in terms of their papers, whose subjects ranged from from Mennonite martyrology to gender-focused media analysis to the recruitment of women in Canadian mining, and in terms of the polish of their presentations, which often showed evidence of students’ previous work as professional communicators.
In the end, judges John Moffat and Bruce Dadey and advisor Tania Smith awarded this year’s prize to Monique Kampherm for her paper “Democratic Prosopopoeia: The Rhetorical Influence of Embodying a Political Statement Online.” Monique’s paper drew from a wide variety of rhetorical critics and adroitly integrated figurative analysis, digital technology studies, and political studies to examine the rhetorical effects of image filter use on social media during the 2015 Canadian election. While her paper drew on a specific case, it also spoke more generally to the rhetorical implications of how text and image are integrated on social media. Congratulations Monique, and we look forward to next year’s crop of grad student presentations in Vancouver!
