Program

Preconference Information:

RSA Affiliates ASHR, ISHR and ARSTM will be having Preconference Sessions at RSA 2024. You can peruse them below. Contact each affiliate for more information about its respective preconference. 

American Society for the History of Rhetoric

The American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) invites you to attend the biennial ASHR Symposium (held as a pre-conference prior to RSA) and the organization’s two affiliate panels. This year’s Symposium explores a key term in rhetoric’s historical development: uncertainty. As historians of rhetoric, we recognize the critical role that ambiguity, doubt, contingency, and indeterminacy have played in the history of communication. Join us for 5 panels of presentations exploring uncertainty in a variety of contexts, from ancient rhetorical theory to contemporary politics. Additionally, ASHR will be hosting two affiliate panels on May 25th: “Re-Thinking Rhetoric’s Platonic Relationships” and “From Folly to Infinity: New Approaches to Early Modern Rhetorics.” We hope to see you at some of these events. Please contact ASHR President Dr. Jordan Loveridge (j.t.loveridge@msmary.edu) with any questions.

Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine

The Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM) will be sponsoring a preconference and roundtable discussion during RSA. The preconference, held Thursday, May 23, and themed “Fail/Safe,” invites participants and presenters to Denver, Colorado, to explore the intersections of rhetoric, science, technology, and medicine against the backdrop of the former Rocky Flats nuclear arsenal site. The pre-conference will host discussions on civic and personal issues related to technological optimism, environmental challenges, and the societal impacts of scientific advancements. ARSTM will also sponsor a roundtable on Friday, May 24 titled “The Impact of State Censorship on the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine.” This session brings together scholars from across the United States to address issues surrounding academic freedom in the post-Covid era, examining the effects of state censorship on teaching, research, and public discourse for scholar-teachers invested in the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine.

Digital Black Lit and Composition

Digital Black Lit and Composition (DBLAC) is holding a session at RSA 2024 on Saturday at 9:30 am in Directors I. The session, Just Futures: Exploring DBLAC ‘s Rhetorical History, is made up of members of the DBLAC community, including one of the co-founders and will overview theory, engagement, and evidence-based research connected to the learning networks program. The panel will function as an invitation to be in conversation about DBLAC’s past and future, and how our rhetorical history’s attention to concepts like collective memory and narrative can help us imagine just futures within rhetorical studies.

DBLAC is a learning community and an intellectual project committed to Black knowledge-making and sharing. DBLAC operates from a multilayered understanding and enactment of community that exists within the academy, across institutions, and with communities beyond institutions directly connected to DBLAC. In every space, the support of Black scholarship is central. Through signature programs that offer writing support, mentorship, networking, and resource-pooling, DBLAC creates public spaces that promote undisciplined communication, resisting academic legibility, using Black feminist and communal practices.

This year the DBLAC community has come together in a collaborative project to trace the history and archive important moments for DBLAC. Through a wholistic approach we seek to overview what DBLAC has accomplished in the past 7 years in an organization effort and accounting of DBLAC’s sphere of influence through interviewing participants and centrally recording multimedia artifacts. In this panel/discussion overview DBLAC’s timeline and preview future engagements in effort to understand what (in)justices rhetoric allows us to address within networked learning communities.  

Global Society of Online Literacy Educators

The Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) will sponsor two panel sessions focusing on digital literacy and online rhetoric pedagogy at the RSA 2024 conference. The first, “Just Teach it Online! Advancing Online Rhetorical Pedagogy Post-Pandemic,” is scheduled for 2:00-3:15pm on Thursday, May 23, and will feature presentations on teaching speech communication courses in online modalities, using social annotation tools to teach rhetorical theory, using feminist pedagogy in online courses, and managing online course interfaces to suit students’ information-seeking needs. The second panel, “Fostering Access and Inclusion through Digital Literacies,” is scheduled for 8:00-9:15am on Friday, May 24, and will provide insights from four recent studies in the teaching of digital literacy with an eye toward supporting accessibility, social justice, and student wellness.

International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR)

The International Society for the History of Rhetoric is grateful to RSA for the opportunity to offer two events for enthusiasts for the history of rhetoric. The first is a pre-conference in the form of a (by-application-only) seminar on “The Relation Between ‘Things’ (Res) and ‘Words’ (Verba) in Early Modern Rhetorical Theory,” to be led by Dr. Anna Vind, an experienced church historian and international Luther scholar residing at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. Since her dissertation (2002, translated and published by V&R, 2019), she has worked specifically with the importance of classical rhetoric for Martin Luther’s thought, and generally with understandings of language and art in medieval, renaissance, and early modern times. In 2019, she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz, in 2022 she was elected Chair of the Continuation Committee for the International Congresses of Luther Research, and likewise, in 2022, she was awarded a monograph fellowship from the Carlsberg Foundation for her upcoming book, Modus Loquendi: Word and Communication in Martin Luther.

ISHR also has one panel in the RSA program, “Words and Things in the History of Rhetoric,” on Friday, May 24, from 2:00-3:15, in Governor’s 9, and it follows the thematic lead of the 2024 ISHR preconference. The panelists attend to words as things in Aristotle’s rhetorical theory and its early Christian uptake (David Mirhady) and in ancient inscriptions and medieval manuscripts (Debra Hawhee), and to words and things in Byzantine (Vessela Valiavitcharska) and early modern rhetorical and dialectical theory (Anna Vind).

National Consortium of Environmental Rhetoric & Writing

The following three panels sponsored by National Consortium of Environmental Rhetoric & Writing examine the discursive work of public rhetoric in local and global environmental climate change contexts from diverse cultural, socioeconomic, and geopolitical positions. Panelists engage issues of environmental justice, local activism, and eco-rhetoric from transdisciplinary scholarly perspectives and public-facing locations regionally, nationally, and internationally.

C11 – EcoRhetorics, Intersectional Environmental Justice, and Land Ethics.

D11 – Environmental Rhetoric and the Southwest: Then and Now.

E11 – Environmental Rhetorics of Climate Change: Local Action, Global Impacts.

Rhetoric Society of Europe (RSE)

The Rhetoric Society of Europe will host two RSE@RSA panels at the upcoming RSA conference. These panels aim to continue the fruitful discussion between European and American Rhetorical Scholars that was started with the first RSE@RSA in 2018 and continued in 2022. The first panel – Traditions – will bring together representatives from various rhetoric traditions who will introduce founding stories of departments and research groups of rhetoric in Europe and beyond. Understanding each other’s scholarly emphases and cultural differences also requires us to understand each other’s traditions. The second panel – Rhetorical Praxis & Orientations Across the Atlantic – will provide a space to explore and discuss together the emerging need to reinforce our cross-Atlantic disciplinary connections, and the mutual engagement between the American side of the discipline and the multi-national European one. Fostering a deeper culture of mutual scholarly engagement between RSE and RSA is one way to cultivate intercultural understanding to facilitate envisioning more connected disciplinary futures for rhetoric as a field, more interrelated and innovative approaches to praxis, and overall a globally-oriented field of rhetorical studies.

Panel I: Friday, 24 May, 2024 – 2:00-3:15pm – Plaza Court 2

Panel II: Saturday, 25 May, 2024 – 11:00am-12:15pm – Plaza Court 2