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RhetCanada 2020 Conference Postponed

RhetCanada’s 2020 conference is postponed due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Here are some important things to note about this postponement:

  • Proposals that have been accepted for this year’s RhetCanada meeting are also accepted for the 2021 meeting at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. If a significant number of people with accepted proposals cannot attend the 2021 meeting, we will re-issue a call for proposals to bring in new presenters.
  • The RhetCanada membership dues paid last year for 2019-2020 will be extended to 2021, so members who paid dues in June 2019 will remain RhetCanada members without paying additional dues until our meeting in June 2021. If you did not pay dues last year but wish to become a member of RhetCanada, we encourage you to visit our Join Us page.
  • We will still be holding the 2020 RhetCanada annual general meeting, but as a live (synchronous) online event. The 2020 RhetCanada AGM will take place on Thursday, June 4 from 4:00-5:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Our annual meeting is important to the ongoing functioning of our association, so we cordially invite all members to attend. Instructions for attending the meeting online, along with an agenda, reports, and early notices of motions will be distributed to members over the coming weeks.
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RhetCanada 2020 Call for Proposals Now Available

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!

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RhetCanada 2019 Graduate Student Prize Winner: Nicolas Noble

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!

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RhetCanada 2019 Keynote Speaker: Dr. Roderick Hart

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. 

 

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RhetCanada Conference 2019 CFP Now Available

The call for papers for the 2019 RhetCanada conference is now available! The conference will take place June 4-6 at the University of British Columbia, and our conference theme is “Rhetorics of Hope.” The deadline for paper proposal submissions is December 12, 2019.

See our RhetCanada 2019 Conference page for more details on the conference.

Keep updated on the conference by visiting our new website, following us on Twitter (@rhetcan), or joining our Facebook group. Also see our Facebook page (soon to be re-branded as RhetCanada) for more rhetoric-related items.

We look forward to receiving your proposals!

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RhetCanada 2018 Graduate Student Prize Winner: Monique Kampherm

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!