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.