rhetoric and composition

This session proposes a re-examination of the undergraduate student writer's concept of agency during times of crisis. We aim to expand our critical understanding of what it means to teach students in a way that empowers, offers agency, and acknowledges the voice of the student during times of crisis, whether such crisis is a result of a global pandemic such as Covid-19, national issues such as police brutality, or the result of a personal struggle such as anxiety or loss and, thus, we welcome contributions that address agency, empowerment, and voice from a variety of academic perspectives.

Today, many thousands of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people are crossing borders and building bridges between communities as they fight against injustice and for alternatives to mass incarceration. This volume, edited by a collective of Northeastern Illinois University faculty and students, some either currently or formerly incarcerated, will tell the stories of these justice leaders.

The global COVID-19 crisis, and its economic fallout, have re-established two facts - that the economy is a fictive category, and that its inimitable centrality derives essentially from the power of its narratives. Prior to actual policies of austerity or re-openings of the economy, there exist narratives of weathering storms as character-building or the inalienable connection between economic and individual freedom. These narratives help us imagine the economy as a system; most often it becomes palpable because we have learned to tell stories about its origins, maintenance, purity, precarity, and futures. These stories acquire unique characteristics in the global south, a geopolitical category itself that narrativizes economic agon.

Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal

an open-access, online, peer-reviewed journal on activism in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies

Spark 2020 Call: Volume 3, April 2021

Call for Submissions

The National institute of Technology, Silchar is organizing a symposium on ''Digital Expressions of the Self'' during 7-8 Dec 2020. We are interested in how people experiment with creative expressions of the self. Constructing the self in the digital sphere may involve processes of experimentation that in turn allow one to experience the self in multiple ways. This is mediated of course by the apparatus of the digital-codes and algorithms. We are interested in the nuances of these processes and the aesthetics of the expressions. The deadline for abstract submission is 22 May. Details available here:

 http://www.nits.ac.in/NewsUpdates/DES2020.pdf.

The next issue of 'Archives of emotions' aims to explore the interactions between language and emotions. By 'language', we generally mean a system of signs. Since ancient times, rhetorical strategies of emotions have been known and practiced. We will, therefore, ask ourselves how literature, in each age, manages to represent, simulate, reproduce and arouse, through written and oral language, the experience of emotion and its cognitive, physiological and psychological bases. Possible subjects for the essays collected in this issue could also concern the performing and visual arts, dance, cinema, and theater and their respective languages.

Chapter proposals are invited for an edited book examining global portrayals of the coronavirus in diverse print, broadcast, and online media, including but not limited to newspapers, magazines, social media, television, podcasts, and popular culture.

A sampling of confirmed chapters follows:

South Atlantic Modern Language Association

November 13-15, 2020

Jacksonville, Florida

“Rhetoric and the Public University”

This panel welcomes any and all papers related to the general topic of rhetoric and the public university. Some guiding questions include, but are not limited, to the following:

• What is the relationship between rhetoric and the public university? What should that relationship be or become?

The Politics of Escapism

Panel at the 2021 MLA Convention

TOronto, DC, January 7-10, 2021

Co-Organizers:

Greg Sharzer, University of Toronto (gsharzer@gmail.com); Keith O'Regan, York
University (keith.oregan@gmail.com)

Escapism, the desire to abandon a difficult present for an ideal alternative,

This panel, sponsored by the College English Association, explores how the concept of alienation can be applied to a field in which it has not received very much attention: composition pedagogy. Generally meaning an undesirable separation between self and world (i.e., other human beings, nature, and social roles, norms, and institutions), alienation has been analyzed in various contexts by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, theologians, and critical theorists. While it came to be viewed as problematic and outmoded with the rise of postmodernism, the concept is far from obsolete today. On the contrary, alienation remains both a widely experienced psychosocial issue and a vital theoretical and diagnostic tool.

(with apologizes for cross posting)

Dear all,

The Research Training Group 1808: Ambiguity - Production and Perception of the Eberhard Karls Univeristät Tübingen is delighted to announce the CfP for the interdisciplinary and diachronic Workshop

Ambiguity and Narratology

Tübingen, November 5-7 2020

“Narrating Lives” - International Conference on Storytelling, (Auto)Biography and (Auto)Ethnography28-29 August 2020 - Malta

organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Life-history approach occupies the central place in conducting and producing  (auto)biographical and (auto)ethnographic studies through the understanding of self, other, and culture. We construct and develop conceptions and practices by engaging with memory through narrative, in order to negotiate ambivalences and uncertainties of the world and to represent (often traumatic) experiences.

Panel submissions for the East Texas Writing Festival may be creative writing or craft-related essays. Work should be submitted as an attachment on the registration form. Visit www.letu.edu/writingfest for more information on the festival. Guidelines are provided below for each genre:

• Fiction/Nonfiction – Submissions are not to exceed 2500 words in total and should be submitted in a single document.
• Poetry – Submit up to five poems in a single document.

All submissions should include your name and email address located on the first page.

The Paper Shell Review, the University of Maryland's only undergraduate journal of essays on literary topics, is now accepting submissions. The introductions to our past journals have been written by notable faculty members, including Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, and Michael Olmert, a three-time Primetime Emmy winner.