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RhetCanada President’s Report Part 1: Tasks and Key Accomplishments

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.

Part 1: Tasks and key accomplishments

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.

2018-2019 Presidential Tasks

Conference planning and leadership

  • Developed our Call for Proposals for the 2019 conference and accepted submissions
  • Made arrangements with keynote speaker Roderick Hart (who first approached me)
  • Chaired the advisory committee’s review of 2019 proposals
  • Sent acceptance / rejection emails to those who sent in proposals
  • Acted as our Congress Local Arrangements Coordinator (LAC)
  • Planned this year’s conference sessions and developed the programme
  • Invited roundtable panelists, respondents, and facilitators for our 2 roundtables
  • Consulted with Congress 2019 organizers to reduce our catering costs
  • Planned to speak the welcome, attend all sessions and chair the AGM

Other leadership tasks

  • Assisted the Webmaster in the transition to the new RhetCanada website and domain
  • Encouraged our Membership Working Group to make progress
  • Liaised with our Student Prize review committee Bruce Dadey and David Beard
  • Consulted with our Editor regarding our journal’s progress and challenges
  • Developed graphic designs for our new identity as RhetCanada

Key contributions

Roundtables

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.

Website hosting transition

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.

Graphic design

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.

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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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New RhetCanada (CSSR/SCER) Website and Media

RhetCanada (the Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric/La Société Canadienne pour l’Étude de la Rhétorique), has a shiny new website and new media. Our old website has been retired.

Come visit our new site and see the preliminary information on the 2019 RhetCanada conference at Congress in Vancouver. Our Twitter feed is now named @RhetCan, and our Facebook names will soon be updated as well.

The CFP for our 2019 meeting will be posted shortly, and will be publicized through our mailing list and social media.

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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!

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Rhetor 8 (2019) Call for Papers

The editor and editorial committee of Rhetor: the Journal of the Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric invite submissions for its eighth volume, scheduled for 2019 publication. Rhetor is a bilingual, refereed, online journal published biennially by RhetCanada, a scholarly society dedicated to the study of rhetorical theories, practices, and history.

L’éditeur et le comité éditorial de Rhetor : Le Journal de la Société Canadienne pour l’Étude de la Rhétorique, vous invite à soumettre vos articles pour son huitième volume, à paraître en 2019. Rhetor est un semestriel bilingue, référencé et publié par RhetCanada, une société savante dédiée à l’étude de la théorie, de la pratique et de l’histoire de la rhétorique.

CALL FOR PAPERS: RHETOR 8