At our conference at the Congress in Toronto, Ontario, at Ryerson University May 30 – June 1, 2017, we had 42 registered delegates as well as several guests, and we had the opportunity to hear 27 well-researched presentations in plenary format.
Minutes of our AGM are available here, and below are the highlights.
The executive team passed a revised constitution this year, making executive roles more flexible, allowing members to be nominated for positions that suit their skills for 2 year terms.
During elections based on the revised constitution, I was voted in as President for a second term of two years. David Beard will serve as VP although he expressed he has no interest in succeeding to the President role in future. John Moffatt will serve as Secretary-Treasurer, although he has expressed that he prefers mainly the Treasurer role by itself. Pierre Zoberman will still provide advice to the Executive as past-president. Now that Past President and Editor roles are separate, we have elected a new journal editor, Tracy Whalen, who has previously served as this society’s journal editor. We also have a new Webmaster (Bruce Dadey), and this is now an elected 2 year position on the executive. M. Shivaun Corry, who has been helping with CSSR’s Facebook presence, has volunteered to be a “Social Media Coordinator” within our team of website & social media assistants.
We are putting together a working group on membership development to assist in retaining and recruiting members and promoting our conference and journal. We still have one position vacant on the Advisory committee, as Whalen should be replaced since she is now editor. We will call for nominations and hold an online vote.
As part of our constitutional revisions, we approved an official “alias” name for our organization, RhetCanada / RhétCanada. I will explain in a separate news post so that it gets emphasized.
At the end of the conference, we held a vote for the special theme of the 2018 conference. The winning theme is “That’s not rhetoric!” “Yes, it is.”
