Workshops

New for 2025, the Institute Workshops will be offered virtually. Most of these workshops will take place for a total of 8 hours across two days in June. Workshop titles, leaders, and descriptions are listed below. The leaders of three of the eight workshops will review applications for acceptance into their sessions. Workshops requiring application are now accepting applications here. Applications are due no later than February 1, 2025.

For the other workshops, participants will be accepted first-come first served as they register, until capacity is reached. You may apply and/or register for more than one workshop if the dates do not conflict. Registration is open now here.

Pricing for this inaugural slate of workshops will be $100 for Faculty, $75 for Grad Students, and $50 for K-12 Teachers so that we can offer a small honorarium to all of our leaders. As we are offering this as a benefit of membership, participants must be RSA members (K-12 teachers can join during their workshop) to apply and register once registration opens in December. You can join at any time here.

Schedule, Topics, and Leaders (Session Descriptions below):

SESSION DESCIPTIONS

TV Rhetoric (June 9-10) – Sarah Kornfield and Kristen Hoerl – Television is an important cultural forum, and its status has expanded in the streaming era. Rhetoricians often want to write about television but are under-equipped to account for the production contexts and viewing practices that give meaning to the televisual text. Likewise, the scholarship in TV studies routinely ignores rhetorical contributions to this multidisciplinary field. This workshop is designed to deepen the rhetorical scholarship on television. We will consider a variety of approaches to television as an object of analysis, including the socio-political contexts that ground critical inquiry about televisual texts, and the unique contexts (industry norms, distribution channels, genres, and cycles) that impact television’s cultural status and social roles. We will also consider the role of viewers and fandom, noting how TV texts, contexts, and viewers interact, cumulatively constructing the rhetoricity of television. We hope you’ll join us to workshop the rhetoric of TV together!

Historiography and Rhetoric: Working in Institutional Archives (June 11-12) – Kelly Ritter – In our current sociopolitical climate that has led to academic programs, as well as entire colleges and universities, coming under political and economic attack, it’s critically important to recover institutional histories of higher education that both inform and respond to national conversations on literacy, writing, and rhetoric and the value of humanistic inquiry. Conducting research on such histories in institutional archives can be pleasantly efficient when engaging with larger, better-organized collections at well-funded universities. But this research can also be difficult, especially at smaller, less robust archives, where archival contents may not present themselves a manner that readily addresses our research questions. Archival work also takes time, whereas institutional conditions can change fast. Such creates the paradox of building historiographic narratives of higher education.

In this two-day virtual workshop, we will discuss both these vexing processes and ample benefits of historiographic, archive-based work on US institutions of higher education. We will examine how this research reveals distinctive rhetorics present that have developed across institutions over time, sometimes in conflict with one another, and often poorly translated in ways that fuel our public discourse. Our time in the workshop will be divided between a discussion of existing scholarship on archival research methods, and a conversation about the design, methodology and feasibility of participants’ own archival work. Participants should have an archival project in development or in progress to share in advance with the facilitator, and to bring to the workshop for peer input. As a group, we will aim to come away from our time together with new ideas for emerging questions about archival research; for refining and improving our own archival investigations; and for advancing historiographic work in rhetoric and writing studies by situating it within, against, or beside the past and present narratives of postsecondary institutions.

Rhetoric before Closure: Exploring Possibilities Beyond the Dialectic (June 16-17) – Rubén Casas and Meg Marquardt – In these fraught times, scholars often seek dialectic closure as quickly as possible (Graham and Walsh), especially when studying bad faith actors (i.e. fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists, dis/misinformation spreaders ). As a result, argumentation frameworks are often entrenched in a scarcity mindset, a mindset which moves scholars to too quickly label one side as “good” and one as “bad.” Recognizing that it is sometimes and often necessary to label things as “good” and “bad” as a matter of ethics and justice, it still seems rhetorically useful and productive to spend time in rhetorical world building that is happening in these contexts in order to see and understand the strategies at work, especially if we mean, as scholars, to reveal the ways bad-faith actors and their arguments gain traction. In an increasingly divisive world, scholars must also seek new ways to talk about our case studies while purposefully pushing back against the impulse to seek dialectic closure.

Building on scholarship by Ratcliffe, Rice, Marquardt, and Olson and Easter, this workshop traces a thread in rhetorical and writing studies that asks for a “yes, and” approach to didactic, controversial, or otherwise fraught rhetorical spaces. Rather than presuming one side of an argument is inherently lesser in terms of education, expertise, or rhetorical ability, this workshop will ask participants to reexamine opportunities for understanding the myriad ways expertise and education are created/dismantled in rhetorically significant ways.

Those working with contested case studies — such as bad-faith actors in science and medicine, conspiracy theorists, religious or political fundamentalists, or other such contexts — can use this workshop to learn new strategies to approach their work. The workshop will focus on rhetorical criticism and argumentation that is grounded in curiosity, ethics, and sensing in order to more fully understand the dynamics and hierarchies that govern the worlds of bad-faith actors, not uphold them but to illuminate how to more effectively engage them.

Violence & Care in Higher Education (June 16-17) – Bryan McCann and Ersula Ore – For many of us, the pursuit of a PhD and work in academia is driven by our own curiosities about how the world works, ethical and political commitments about how it ought to work, and an investment in the capacity of ideas to transform minds, lives, and, even if in modest ways, the world. Often, we have embraced an understanding of the academy that casts it as an alternative to the drudgery of nine-to-five labor or the cruelties of the corporate world–a space where we have the freedom to connect, build, and create. But the assumed distinction between academia and the spaces outside it ignores both the ways these worlds are interconnected and the scale of violence academia inflicts on so many of us.

In this workshop, participants will survey work from communication, rhetoric, and writing studies that openly discusses the often-ignored aspects of the academy—evaluation, gatekeeping, professionalism, mentorship vs. sponsorship, patronage–and the physical and psychological impact these and other structures have on the well-being of academics. In a professional context that often characterizes such topics as taboo, we seek to normalize such discussions and collaboratively work toward concrete ways of navigating such violence.

Writing + Mental Health (June 12-13) – Josh Miller and Liz Wright – A cursory glance at the statistics on mental health and academia reveal a serious concern: many scholars complete their work in mental states characterized by severe depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other serious mental health concerns. As rhetoricians, we know that rhetoric shapes how we think about mental health. Concepts like “imposter syndrome” frame structural exclusion and toxic environments as an issue with an individual not valuing their work and worth. Yet, our mental health also influences how we might interpret texts and produce works of rhetorical criticism. More so, mental health challenges can affect whether critics can even write or produce scholarship. In this workshop, we take up questions about how mental health relates to rhetoric and academic work. As a participant in this workshop, you can expect conversations about how rhetoric shapes mental health, how mental health shapes academic work, and how scholars can navigate mental health challenges while working in the field of rhetoric and academia.

Rhetorics of Education Policy Controversy (June 23-24) – Michael Steudeman, Mark Hlavacik and Carolyn Commer – Over the past decade, public education has reemerged as a battlefield in the culture wars. At the K-12 level, local school boards and state policymakers have enacted policies that ostracize
queer students and faculty, censor historical discussions about racial injustice, and require Bible
reading and the Ten Commandments in classrooms. At the collegiate level, multiple state
governments have passed policies that have dismantled gender studies programs, dissolved
campus diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, facilitated police violence against student
activists, and corroded faculty members’ academic freedom and tenure protections. Across all
levels, these ideological campaigns have aligned with wider policy efforts to destabilize and
defund public education.

In this workshop, we aim to bring rhetorical perspectives to deepen our shared understanding of
recent education controversies. Workshop participants will explore questions such as:
*Why do educational institutions recur as sites of conflict over wider civic visions?
*What can rhetorical scholars gain by familiarizing ourselves with schools and universities
as sites of struggle over meaning and identity?
*How are recent clashes over K-12 and higher education policy interrelated? (And how
are they different?)
*How can our understanding of rhetorical forms, genres, arguments, and tropes
complement other disciplines’ perspectives on education?
*How might the wider rhetorical insights we have about education policy inform better
messaging and policy responses as we seek to defend the public good?

Through our readings and discussion, we have two goals: (1) to introduce participants to recent
scholarship in the field that addresses recurring issues in the rhetoric of education policy; and
(2) to learn how critical ideas from scholars outside the field of rhetoric (education historians,
curriculum theorists, critical university studies scholars, etc.) can complement work on rhetoric
and education controversy. Additionally, we hope this workshop creates a forum for participants
to give and receive feedback on in-progress works.

Consuming Rhetorics (June 24-25) – Jennifer LeMesurier – Eating together is often presented as an easy way to bridge cultural divides. The assumption behind this belief is that food, or more specifically, how one eats, is a synecdochical extension of one’s identity. Rather than considering eating primarily in terms of nutrition or survival, in most cases, what we eat is considered to be who we are. The furor surrounding ‘foreign’ and sickening eating practices as the possible origin of COVID-19 is but a recent example of how the conflation of food, eating, and identity emerges in more explicit rhetoric. In this workshop, we will read a range of interdisciplinary scholarship on where food and eating intersect with the representational and ontological. Participants are encouraged to submit a primary ‘text’ that they find connected to the broader theme of food, consumption, and or identity. Together, we will draw on the readings and submitted texts in order to better understand where such implicit feelings about food influence broader rhetorical arcs and affective atmospheres.

Rhetoric and Pedagogy (K-12; June 26-27) – David Grant and Liz Wright – Many instructors who teach in high school, community colleges, and four-year institutions have little to no training in rhetoric. Yet, increasingly, instructors are realizing the importance of a rhetorical perspective to teach both writing and reading. This workshop aims to provide secondary instructors with the fundamentals of rhetorical theory, beginning with Aristotle’s “available means of persuasion” and its twenty-first century applications.

This workshop discusses theories and practices of invention, arrangement, and style and presents the canons of rhetoric as a calculus between writer or speaker and their social audience.. Attention will also be given to rhetoric’s development in the early democracy of Athens and how modern theories of rhetoric have used and modified these approaches to make them more relevant to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.