RhetCanada 2024 Conference Programme
Held in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences online and at McGill University, Montréal, Quebec.
Note: If you are registered for RhetCanada 2024, you should have received an email with instructions to access the Online Conference Programme. If you have not received an email, please contact Jonathan Doering (Jonathan_Doering@cbu.ca) for instructions.
RhetCanada 2024 Conference Room at McGill: Burnside Hall, (BURN 1214) [Map]
Note: All times EDT (Montreal/Toronto) Time. Adjust for your time zone: -3 BC | -2 AB/SK | -1 MB | +1 Maritimes (+1.5 NL)
Day 1 (online): Saturday, June 8
Day 2 (in-person): Wednesday, June 12
Day 3 (in-person): Thursday, June 13
Day 4: (in-person): Friday, June 14
Saturday, June 8
Online Conference (All Times EST/Montreal)
To access the online sessions, go to the Online Conference Programme.
(L) = Lightning paper
Wednesday, June 12
Montreal (All Times EST/Montreal)
Building: Burnside Hall, McGill (BURN 1214)
| Time | Session |
| 9:30AM | Welcome |
| 9:45AM | Space, Place, Memory (chair: Jonathan Doering)
|
| 10:45 AM | Break |
| 11:00 AM | Encounters with Philosophy and History (chair: David Beard) |
| 12:00 AM | Lunch Break |
| 1:15 PM | Rhetorical Analysis of Contemporary Issues (chair: Shannon Lodoen) |
| 2:15 PM | Break |
| 2:30 PM | Literary and Sermonic Adaptation (chair: Bruce Dadey)
|
| 3:30 PM | Break |
| 3:45 PM | The Rhetoric of Risks (chair: David Beard) |
| 6 PM | Banquet at Weinstein and Gavinos |
Thursday, June 13
Montreal (All Times EST/Montreal)
Building: Burnside Hall, McGill (BURN 1214) in the morning, and then the J.W. McConnell Building, Concordia in the afternoon (1400 de Maisonneuve W)
| 9:30 AM | Contemporary Rhetorical Insights (chair David Beard) |
| 10:30 AM | Break |
| 10:45 AM | Ethos (chair: Kyle Gerber)
|
| 12:15 PM | Lunch Break After lunch, go to the J.W. McConnell Building at Concordia (1400 de Maisonneuve W) |
| 2:15 PM | (L) Digital Visual Rhetorics of Feminist Pleasure (chair: Shannon Lodoen) Room: LB 659.04 |
| 3:30-5 PM | Caroline Levine keynote, in partnership with ACCUTE LB 125 in the McConnell Building at 1400 de Maisonneuve W. |
Friday, June 14
Montreal (All Times EST/Montreal)
Building: Burnside Hall, McGill (BURN 1214)
| 9:00AM | Intimacy (chair: Jonathan Doering)
|
| 10:00 AM | Break |
| 10:15 AM | (L) Rhetorical Analysis (chair: Shannon Lodoen) |
| 10:55 AM | Break |
| 11:10 AM | AI Interventions (chair: David Beard) |
| 12:10 PM | Lunch |
| 1:15 PM | (L) Nonverbal Dimensions (chair: Kyle Gerber)
|
| 1:55 PM | Break |
| 2:05 PM | (L) Indigenous Issues (chair: Bruce Dadey) |
| 2:45 PM | Break |
| 3:00 PM | (L) Belief and the Believable (chair: Shannon Lodoen) |
| 3:40 PM | Open Forum and AGM Preview. |
Descriptions
Disability Rhetoric in Welcome Communications on Nigerian Universities’ Websites: Gorgias’ and Dolmage’s approaches.
Sunday Adegbenro
This study explores how Nigerian universities portray disability in their online welcome messages. Using Gorgias’ ancient rhetoric principles and Dolmage’s modern disability studies, it analyzes communicative strategies within these academic communities. We seek to understand how digital rhetoric reflects inclusivity and perceptions toward persons living with disabilities.
AI & AI: Academic Integrity, Ethos, and Artificial Intelligence
Monique Kampherm
In examining the use of generative AI through the rhetorical lens of ethos, this paper explores how the prohibition of AI in assignment design and evaluation rubrics may place undue pressure on educators to maintain academic integrity, while also inadvertently encouraging students to construct a deceptive ethos, characterized by perfectly scripted prose and a polished rhetorical presence that may not reflect their true capabilities.
Iachimo: The Foolish Man Speaking Well
Maab Al-Rashdan
My paper explores Shakespeare’s Cymbeline to cast a light on Iachimo’s rhetoric and explore his uniqueness in handling his arguments. His eloquence merely stems from the witty ways he adjusts his very arguments to fit the new situations he finds himself in rather than from virtuousness in character.
Measured Response: University Leaders, Non-Performative Rhetoric, and Covering Allyship
Mali Barker
Using Connors and McCoy’s framework of Critical Race Discourse Analysis in combination with Twigg’s “covering allyship,” this presentation will examine university leaders’ public statements regarding the Supreme Court’s SFFA v. Harvard ruling to theorize how these and future statements might more productively discuss race, enacting allyship rather than covering it.
A Rhetorical Analysis of Artist-Led, Indigenous Campaigns for Vaccination during the Covid-19 Pandemic
David Beard
While public health campaigns in Minnesota during the pandemic swerved toward the “”generic”” (e.g., a blue stick figure) to demonstrate social distancing and vaccinations, this rhetorical analysis demonstrates the value of artist-led, culturally-grounded campaigns from indigenous communities.
Artless Suasion: Stand-up comedy and an appeal to the intimate
Ian Brodie
Rhetorical studies of stand-up comedy often emphasize the semantic intent of suasion over the more mercenary intent of audience cultivation. This paper considers stand-up comedy through an emphasis on audience expectations, among which the comedian-cum-rhetor is but one possible facet.
Risk as a Common Topos
Sarah Casey
Risk communication and scholarship often treat risk as an idion topos for discussing uncertainty and hazards. I argue 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.
Only Connect: The Rhetorical Implications of Belief Networks
Bruce Dadey
Much contemporary research frames beliefs as dynamic elements that exist within complex systems. This paper examines how belief network analysis might contribute to rhetorical practice and theory, and outlines ways in which rhetorical theory could augment current work on belief systems.
Rhetoric versus Eloquence in the Generative Age: Ethotic Erosion and Other Perils
Jonathan Doering
In our new “generative age” epitomized by the explosive popularity of ChatGPT, this paper considers the ancient pairing of rhetoric and eloquence to explore the rhetorical affordances, but numerous risks to eloquence, that LLMs entail within and beyond academia.
Pandemic Rhetorics: Punctuated Ethos in Canada’s COVID-19 Crisis – the First Global Pandemic of the Digital Age
Carloyn Eckert
Trust is hard to win in a crisis. In May 2020, the WHO declared an “infodemic” with the spread of science and health mis/dis-information, alongside the COVID-19 global pandemic (WHO, 2020). Researchers found that 46 percent of Canadians believed in at least one of four COVID-19 conspiracy myths eroding collective trust and public action (Everts and Greenberg 2020). Further, social media is linked to spreading misinformation and conspiracy stories, resulting in behaviours that undermine efforts to curb the pandemic (Bridgman et al. 2020). Attacks on trust damage our sense of community and social well-being and, in times of crisis and a global pandemic, result in higher illnesses, deaths, and economic losses (CCA, 2023).
An Aristotelian Rhetorical Analysis of Addressing Unintentional Falsehoods in Resumes with AI Intervention
Tharwat El-Sakran
This study investigates the application of the Aristotelian rhetorical framework to address the inadvertent inclusion of falsehoods in resumes. It advocates for the adoption of ChatGPT as a pragmatic solution to mitigate any inaccuracies and enhance the quality of the resumes.
An Analysis of Gilmore Girls’s Contribution to Discourse about Body and Health Standards
Maria Ferrato
This study seeks to understand if Gilmore Girls—through a contemporary, Health At Every Size® (HAES) lens—reifies or rejects both weight stigma and diet-culture, using discourse analysis tools to assess how these attitudes are communicated. Though limited, it contributes to conversations about shows’ impacts on social discourse about body image and health.
The Impact of Nonverbal Communication on the Ethos of Educators
Jeffrey Genter
This paper explores the profound influence of nonverbal communication, specifically gestures, facial expressions, and body language, on the credibility of public speakers in educational settings. It examines how strategic use of nonverbal cues enhances educators’ effectiveness, credibility, and student learning outcomes.
Hey Preacher, Where’s the Rhetoric?
Kyle Gerber
Preaching as rhetorical art has an established place in the rhetorical tradition, but the rhetorical dimensions have been much reduced in modern sermonic training. Rhetoric, too, tends to disregard this major form of public discourse. This paper addresses this rift by illuminating the rhetorical dimensions of some popular contemporary preaching handbooks and theorizing their position within the tradition.
Critical analysis of social media discourse and rhetoric in a socio-politically fragile context: the case of Facebook in Ethiopia
Kibrom Gessesse
This study aims to investigate how ethno-political narratives and discourse on Facebook contribute to the promotion of violent conflicts among Ethiopian communities. By taking into account the country’s historical and current socio-political context, it critically analyses the form and production of rhetoric and discourse on Facebook during times of unrest.
Reconfiguring Spatial Realities: Examining Discursive Strategies in Reporting on the 2020s Black Lives Matter Protests
Kiera Gilbert
Using rhetorical discourse analysis, this paper seeks to understand how the city and the suburb are represented and evaluated through protest reporting by the Detroit Free Press regarding the Black Lives Matter Protests that occurred in and around Detroit from May 2020 to June 2020.
Melting into Air: Rhetorics of Ecology in Marxist Historiography
Thomas Hanson
My paper combines Hayden White’s (1973) theory of tropes and rhetorician Ralph Cintron’s (2020) conception of the “deep commons” to re-read the figuration of the human/nature relation in Karl Marx’s writing.
Protestant Pedagogy and Erasmian Style in Nice Wanton
Douglas Hayes
Erasmus’s ideas of abundant style are used in a mid-16th century school play to promote Protestant pedagogy and to show the dangers of deviation from it.
A Rhetoric of Benevolence: Denying Care to the Invisibly Ill “For Their Own Good”
Melissa Johnson
In an analysis of a series of op-eds, I examine how a rhetoric of benevolence functions to justify the denial of appropriate healthcare and treatment to individuals with contested illnesses under the guise that this is for the individual’s own good and in the best interests of society.
No Haunting Without Permission: Mapping Empathy and Appropriation in a Therapeutic Rhetoric of Commemorating Injustice in Canadian Public Space
Tess Laidlaw (presenting) and John Moffatt
Filmmakers Erik Paulsson and Julien Cadieux deploy tropes of literal haunting in their documentaries Island of Shadows: The D’Arcy Island Leper Colony, 1891-1924 (2000) and Sheldrake (2018). Understanding engagement with troubled history as being haunted creates a chōric space for epideictic rhetorics of atonement in commemorative public space.
An Altered Sense of Consequence: How Procedures Around Smartphone Usage are Reshaping Social Relations
Shannon Lodoen
This presentation uses the complementary lenses of captology and procedural rhetoric to demonstrate how design logics (of interfaces, hardware, circuits, and systems) can alter the sense of consequence associated with smartphone-facilitated actions and interactions, and thus exert persuasive power in the everyday lives of smartphone users.
A (Re)contextualization of the Female Body: Agency, Power, and the Material-Discursive Through the Iconography of Barbie
Rency Luan
Do you remember America Ferrara’s rousing monologue in Barbie? How patriarchal forces continue to govern the lives of women? This paper crochets together the thematic threads of rhetoric, feminism, and media, examining the persuasive effects of language and emotion in Hollywood blockbuster hit, Barbie.
Material Rhetoric and Memory: The Case of Cape Breton Lighthouses
Shauna MacDonald
This paper applies frameworks of public memory and material rhetoric(s) to Cape Breton lighthouses to illuminate their meaning(s) as vibrant, material cultural signs. The question at stake here is: how and through what means have lighthouses influenced Cape Bretoners (and the stories we tell ourselves) throughout their histories?
Pleasure Activism of Joyscrolling
Shana MacDonald
This paper looks at meme activism through the lens of joyscrolling, an inverse practice of doomscrolling, to argue that such memetic content elicits joy as a countercultural discourse to encourage new forms of coalitional resistance.
How to Make a Cult: A Rhetorical Analysis of Charles Manson’s Manipulative Web
Morgan MacInnis
This paper explores the diverse strategies Charles Manson used to build his cult, analyzing his efforts from the vantage of Burkean identification, Cialdini’s principles of influence, rhetorical figures, and nonverbal behaviour.
Silent Speakers: Nonverbal Autism as Rhetoric, and Rhetoric as everywhere
Iain MacPherson
I argue for recognizing nonverbally autistic folk as ‘communicatively competent’ rhetors—and, ipso facto, for recognizing autism as thoroughgoingly rhetorical. This conceptual expansion bears salutary implications for the field, such as compelling attention to rhetorical listening and silence, and it answers everywhere to RhetCanada 2024’s thematic inquiry, “Where’s the Rhetoric?”
Flavorful Rhetorics and Digital Horizons: Blending Epicurean Insights with Technological Innovations in Rhetoric
Bailey McAlister
Exploring the intersection of food and drink rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, this study blends epicurean insights with technological innovations to revolutionize teaching in rhetoric and composition, emphasizing AI’s role in enhancing narrative understanding and integrating Indigenous pedagogical concepts for a holistic learning experience.
We Have to Laugh: The Subversive Potential of Queer Memeification
Anna McWebb
This paper explores how the memeification of queer and feminist experiences functions as networked activist resistance through the visual rhetoricity of memes. Through conducting a visual rhetorical analysis of queer meme examples, I demonstrate how activist resistance occurs through the subversion of power structures within meme culture on the Internet.
Are We the Bimbos From Hell?
Anna McWebb and Rency Luan
This paper explores how the viral economy of social media has distorted understandings of feminism, suggesting that bimboism reclaims hyper-femininity and frivolity as powerful and subversive joy-filled expressions of feminism, while untangling the multifaceted dimensions of heteronormative power structures
On Blame in Public Science
Ashley and Brad Mehlenbacher
Focusing on the contemporary targeting of scientists, we draw on the ad Herennium and update classical vituperations to account for challenges of the ethotic construction and challenges of public scientists, health officials, and other technical experts.
Unveiling the Rhetorical Artistry in Garry Wills’s Portrayal of the Monstrosity of Guns
Houman Mehrabian
In “The Rights of Guns,” Garry Wills, following the sophistic practice of dissoi logoi, employs various rhetorical figures to ironically defend guns. By personifying and then deifying the gun in “the American way,” Wills aims to challenge his readers to question and re-evaluate this emblematic association and its sustainability.
Understanding Race Through a Rhetorical Burkean Lens
Alaa Mohktar
The word race remains to be an elusive term to identify–evident in contesting disciplines attempting to establish its premise. However, a purely rhetorical approach allows us to explore how the concept of race, before even manifesting in the material world, is enshrined in the mind which is in turn informed by our surroundings. Kenneth Burke provides a means to understand this through his notion of recalcitrance and dramitism.
Nelson Mandela as a Hypocrite’s Fool: When Two Worlds Collide
Patricia Ofili
This paper examines the ways in which Nelson Mandela deploys the ethos he imbibed from the traditions of the Xhosa tribe in the South African region of Transkei for a successful anti-apartheid struggle as opposed to other Black South African leaders who betrayed the cause and threatened to derail the anti-apartheid movement.
Becoming Human: How companies use meme-based advertising to garner emotional support
Maibell Ong
This paper analyses meme-based advertisements and how they function on social media platforms like Instagram. Through this medium, advertisers are humanised and relatable under the guise that their advertisements are organic, user-generated social media posts, garnering solidarity and emotional support from their target audience.
Rhetorical ethos and self presentation at the Canada-US Border
Jeffrey Orr
This paper considers how border-crossers in in British Columbia’s lower mainland region use self-presentation performance to gain trust, negotiate personal identity and demonstrate ideas of national identity while interacting with the CBSA.
The rhetoric of AI Adoption: How ‘shock and awe’ operates to instigate cultural adoption and adaptation to emergent AI technologies
Isabel Pedersen
The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT was a dramatic event making generative artificial intelligence a mainstream phenomenon. This article interprets how Generative AI’s emergence delegitimizes and destabilizes value systems concerning human-computer interaction through language instantiated in mainstream news contexts. It introduces a rhetorical framework to help re-orient AI adoption and adaptation to constructive ends.
Provoking the Redemption of Rhetoric: Plato’s Gorgias as a Meta-Dialogue
Daniel Raines
This presentation will explore an interpretation of Plato’s dialogue “”Gorgias”” as the beginning of a conversation between text and reader in which Plato provokes his rhetorical contemporaries to define and account for their practice.
Locating Recuperative Ethos: Students with Disabilities Navigate University Accommodations
Rachel Roy
This presentation identifies the rhetorical moves that students make as they access the university, and argues that students perform “recuperative ethos” and “agile epistemologies” (Molloy) as they reconstruct these rhetorical moves.
Placing the past before the eyes: enargeia as a critical tool from Antiquity to modern historical representations
Benoît Sans
In this paper, I would like to show how the ancient rhetorical concept of enargeia can be used as a critical tool to approach ancient historiography (esp. contemporary to our best sources on rhetorical training, i.e. first centuries AD), but also for modern historical representations using other media or forms of expression (like movies or video games).
Rhetoric for Branding and Counter-Branding: A Study of Identification and Division in Science Branding
Humaira Shoaib
Expanding on existing scholarship that describes states or countries as brands (Kalpokas), I argue in this paper the discipline of science and scientific knowledge is a corporate brand whose reputation is built and torn down, internally and externally, through rhetorical identification and division (Burke).
The Rhetoric of Adaptation
Oliver Spilsbury
My paper explores the ways that adaptations are uniquely well-positioned to persuade their audiences to believe certain things about both the work that is being adapted and the world outside of the work.
Is the tide turning in synecdoche’s favor? Revisiting Todorov’s theory of synecdoche.
Fanfan Chen and Cheng-En Tsai
The long-neglected synecdoche seems to resume its status in rhetoric. Nonetheless, little research studied Todorov’s treatise on synecdoche, the first arguing it as the one dominant figure, including metonymy and metaphor. This paper attempts to revisit Todorov’s theory of synecdoche to examine the figure’s resurgence in our times.
NEW Rhetorical Figures?!
Cathal Twomey and Randy Harris
For 2,500+ years, scholars have investigated rhetorical patterns in language. Could they possibly have missed a few? Yes, and more than a few. Working from basic cognitive foundations (repetition, position), and leveraging established figures (antanaclasis, anacoluthon, anadiplosis, polyptoton), we argue that there are significant gaps in the catalogue of figures.
Where’s the Rhetoric in Playing? Embodied Experiences and Symbolic Meanings in Contagio.
Andrea Valente
This presentation explores the embodied rhetoric of playing as seen in a short video (Contagio, 2021) which shows a group of children playing tag in a rural village in Mexico during the coronavirus pandemic. It discusses the concept of playing through Burke’s rhetorical theory and Winnicott’s work on play.
“O’Canada”: Indigenizing and Problematizing the Rhetoric of Canadian Nationalism
Blaze Welling
This paper scrutinizes the rhetoricity of ‘O’Canada’ in the context of its colonial histories and ongoing Indigenous resistance to this national narrative. The focus examines how we might turn to Indigenous poetics to negotiate the rhetoric of nation and nuanced understandings of identity, power, and resistance.
The Siren Song of Feminist Rhetorical Refusal
Brianna Wiens
This paper argues that the resurgence of the monstrous feminine within digital feminist and queer culture, specifically through rhetorical framings of femmes as witches, sirens, and leviathans, enact joy through ‘utopic refusals,’ even as such framings employ red herring arguments to harm.
The Behavioral Model of Holy Foolishness in Radicalism’s Rhetorical Genealogy
Kerith Woodyard
Arguing that contemporary rhetoric theory inadequately accounts for non-discursive, performative modes of rhetorical rebellion, this paper encourages rhetorical scholars to take greater note of the influence of the Holy Fool, a behavioral paradigm derived from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, in/on radicalism’s rhetorical genealogy.
“The (Computational) Rhetorical Situation”: Reconceptualizing Exigences, Audiences, and Constraints in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Fatima Zohra
Given the wide-ranging integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in ranking, sorting, and evaluating public discourse via Natural Language Processing (NLP), this study offers an extension of Lloyd F. Bitzer’s “The Rhetorical Situation” via a computational rhetoric approach to include computerized, algorithmic, and artificially intelligent exigences, audiences, and constraints.
The Place of Rhetoric in the Intimacy of Dialogue
Sean Zwagerman
As a compliment to the tendency of contemporary rhetorical scholarship to identify social problems as ideological and the needed social changes as systemic, I argue for locating change in the potentiality of the rhetorical act, and locating the rhetorical act at the micro-level of conscious beliefs and interpersonal conversation. This is where rhetorical engagement begins.
Cixous’s Approach to Women’s Liberation and Empowerment
Omnia Elsakran
This paper examines feminist rhetoric’s transformative impact, spotlighting Hélène Cixous. It explores how their voices dismantle patriarchal discourse, liberate the feminine, and contribute to a more inclusive and diverse linguistic and social framework within the study of rhetoric.