rhetoric and composition

Despite an increasingly grim job market outlook, the humanities continues to produce PhDs in large numbers. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of available Assistant Professor positions in the field of English dropped from 879 to 320. During the same time period, the number of non-tenure-track positions increased from 21% to 34%. Yet in 2016, 5,500 doctorates were still awarded despite the massive post-2008 decrease in obtainable positions. As Vimal Patel wrote in a Chronicle article from September 2018, “The mirage has vanished.

This panel examines the teaching of college writing, rhetoric, and composition in the digital age by exploring rhetorical situations, genres, and technologies in both the professional and academic realms, with particular attention to digital rhetoric, pedagogy, information and media literacy, and literary and cultural studies. This panel engages deeply with NeMLA’s conference theme of “shared spaces and places” online and in the classroom, and focuses on the cutting-edge of “shaping languages and cultures” in the digital sphere.

Throughout the past decades, gamification has become an increasing part of training experiences. To define the term quickly, gamification involves the application of game play mechanics to normally non-game-based activities to increase successful activity and performance. Gamification can involve the use of popular video games, adaptations of game shows like Jeopardy, simple chalkboard games like Hangman, or a variety of rhetorical approaches that introduce gaming components into another field.

The fifteenth annual meeting of the Georgia Philological Association (GPA) will convene at the Middle Georgia State University Conference Center at 100 University Parkway, Macon, Georgia on Friday, May 15, 2020. We invite proposals for session topics, panel discussions, and scholarly papers in English on any subjects relating to literature, language, composition, philosophy, history, translation, the general humanities, interdisciplinary studies, and pedagogy. Reading times for individual paper presentations are limited to 15 minutes. Presenters may submit longer or more complex versions (8,000 words maximum) to be considered for publication in the Journal of the Georgia Philological Association.

The history of mankind/humanities is marked by intercultural contacts among different societies, be it in development contexts such as trades, business, religious encounters, diplomatic and academic exchanges, or be in conflictual contexts such as war incarceration, human trafficking, forced migration, and annexations.

Propelled by globalization, the first decades of the 21st century witness a growing trend of old (i.e. face to face interactions) and new (i.e. digital/online interactions) forms of intercultural contacts in both development and conflictual contexts. Intercultural contacts consist of an interplay of interlocutors’ interactions, languages, communications, behaviours, and emotions that are dynamic, non-linear, and emergent.