KEWOAA!

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Coalition scholars had even made up a secret code name . . . a name admired around the world: KEWOAA, the Outstanding Feminist Scholar!*

Every other year, the CWSHRC invites nominations for the Kathleen Ethel Welch Outstanding Article Award (KEWOAA), and the time has come. From now through January 1st, 2005, we are accepting nominations for the journal article or book chapter that demonstrates outstanding scholarship in the areas of feminist pedagogy, practice, history, and/or theory within the field of composition and rhetoric.

What works are eligible? Articles and book chapters published in the last two years (2013-2014) and composed by current CWSHRC members, whether  individually or collaboratively authored. In addition works should:

  • be broadly situated within and relevant to feminist research in rhetoric and composition;
  • address a research problem clearly couched within existing scholarship of the field;
  • demonstrate a fair and balanced research agenda in the form of feminist inquiry (i.e., archival, historical, classroom-based, community based, empirical, or theoretical);
  • fill a clear and compelling need;
  • provide a framework that can be advanced by other researchers;
  • make a substantial contribution to the field. 

Nominations must be received by January 1, 2015. All must include a brief nominating statement. Electronic nominations should also include a complete, unannotated PDF copy of the nominated work. Hardcopy nominations should include three complete, unannotated photocopies of the nominated work.

Please send submissions to : 

Elizabeth Tasker Davis, Past President and Chair of the Awards Committee
Department of English
Stephen F. Austin State University
PO Box 13007, SFA Station
Nacogdoches, TX 75962-3007
taskerea at sfasu dot edu

*The original passage reads, “Evelyn had even made up a secret code name for herself . . . a name feared around the world: TOWANDA, THE AVENGER!” Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe

Volunteer to Mentor a CWSHRC Scholar

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Mentoring is an activity and ethos fundamental to the CWSHRC, and this year Coalition members have a unique opportunity to mentor scholars who are knee-deep in important new work. Read on for details, including the 9/21 deadline for volunteering. 

As you may recall, our Wednesday night session  at the CCCC in Tampa will begin with an hour-long New Work Showcase featuring 12 scholars’ simultaneous, showcase-style presentations of new work. This group will also remediate their presentations for inclusion in the Spring 2015 issue of Peitho.

To prepare, we are matching each scholar with a mentor. Specifically, are pairing presenters with Coalition members

  1. whose scholarly interests and expertise overlap,
  2. who can offer suggestions and feedback on presenters’ mediation plans for the conference;
  3. who can also offer suggestions and feedback on presenters’ remediation plans for Peitho.

Nota bene: Conference presentations include posters, audio-visual laptop displays, brief activities, and so on. Peitho remediations will translate face-to-face presentations into formats that will be meaningful and accessible to online journal readers. The latter are *not* meant to extend conference presentations into full-length articles.

To become a mentor, review the list of Showcase presentations below and email me your request no later than Sunday, September 21st.

Best and looking forward!
Jenn, CWSHRC President (2014-2016)

2015 CCCC/CWSHRC New Work Showcase Presentations

1. From Research to Archive Building: A Model for Feminist Scholars Working with and for “Participants—This project is a prototype for a digital archive I hope to make with and for former unwed mothers. A StoryCorps-style interview will capture two mothers’ memories of being shamed and silenced, hiding their pregnancies, and relinquishing their children for adoption.

2. “Making the Most and Best Use of Eggs”: Producer-Consumers, Modernist Labor Periodicals, and the Rhetoric of The Farmer’s Wife—The Farmer’s Wife (c. 1906) is a periodical as unique as its intended audience. But should it remain a “ladies’ magazine” in scholarship? Or can connections be made to rhetorics of labor? This speaker will confront these questions, exploring 1916 issues of TFW & other magazines.

3. Recasting Aurora in a New Light: Rhetorical Agency, Genocide, and Cinema—The subject of this project is Aurora Mardaganian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide and a historical figure in American silent-cinema. As a historiographical recovery effort, it will examine the rhetorics Mardaganian deployed in order to understand what has not been considered or has yet to be theorized about Mardaganian’s rhetorical agency.

4. Madams, Memory, and Myth in a Wide-Open Mining Town—This project examines rhetorical patterns of historic discourse that enabled the open secret presence of brothel-based sex work in a rural northern Idaho mining town from 1894-1991. How do community values negotiated through gossip impact the way we create and change culture?

5. “I Apologize”: Promiscuous Audiences, Surveillance, and the Risks of Televised and Online Black Feminist Discourse—Ironically, successful shows like MSNBC’s “Nerdland” seem to amplify threats against Black women after verbal missteps. By analyzing recent controversies through a reimagining of the “promiscuous audience” (Zaeske 1995), this paper considers how to reduce risks of public activism.

6. Introducing the Digital Archive of the Colored State Normal School of Elizabeth State University, Elizabeth City, North Carolina—Resisting an essentialist view of the New England normal school and southern black industrial school, this presentation employs strategic listening to the journalist writings of young female teachers committed to literacy and community uplift despite legal disenfranchisement.

7. A Decade of Growth: An Overview of Feminist Research Methods and Methodologies—This presentation reports on feminist studies published in six leading journals in rhetoric and composition. This overview presents the types of feminist work valued in the discipline, and it identifies sites of intervention that feminist scholars should attune to in the future.

8. Middle Eastern Feminist Rhetorics—To challenge the persistent silencing of Middle Eastern women and address their exclusion from histories of rhetoric, this presentation reads contributions of Lebanese and Arab feminists to Al-Raida (1976-present) as integral to understanding contemporary transnational rhetorics.

9. Doing it All the Time: A Queer Consent Workshop—In queer and pro-sex feminist communities, sexual consent is an embodied process and a set of teachable practices. This mini-workshop uses the methodology of peer education to teach consent. Participants will learn consent practices and get consent zines as takeaways.

10. Black Feminists Make Online Community not War over Beyoncé and Feminism—In 2013, singer Beyoncé asserted herself as a feminist in her self-titled visual album. This project uses computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring 2004) of blog responses to the album to demonstrate how Black female bloggers build community through both assent and dissent.

11. Conscious Cleansing: Rhetorics of Reconciliation and Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries—This showcase will examine the impact of the Irish government’s apology to Magdalen laundry survivors as an act that alters the rhetorical space afforded to victims. As a way forward, a rhetoric of reconciliation is offered in conjunction with the work of Christine de Pizan.

12. Cross(dress)ing the Mason-Dixon Line: Recovering Rhetorical Histories that Disrupt Normative Notions of Gender—Featuring two memoirs that portray women’s experiences as crossdressing spies and soldiers in the American Civil War, this presentation advocates for recovery and study of histories that illuminate and disrupt assumptions about gender within rhetoric and composition scholarship.

Help Make Coalition History

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Dear Coalition Friends and Colleagues,

This blog post is an invitation. It’s addressed not only to current Coalition members, but also to past and future members as well as allied scholars and teachers who have contributed to Coalition events over the past 25 years.

We invite you to help make Coalition history by sharing your CWSHRC media.

What’s the occasion? As you may remember, Alexandra Hidalgo is currently producing a documentary about the first quarter century of the Coalition. She filmed our 25th Anniversary Gala, and she conducted a series of interviews at CCCC 2014. Of course, she could not talk with everyone, nor could she travel back in time to collect footage of past events.

But who needs time machines when you have rhetoric and composition historians?

To contribute to Alex’s efforts as well as the Coalition’s archives, we ask you to share your media (i.e., still images, video, document scans), including but not limited to mementos from:

  • CCCC Coalition meetings and related sessions;
  • Feminisms and Rhetorics conferences;
  •  and informal meet-ups with Coalition colleagues.
To support Alex’s work, upload still pictures and other media over the next 2 weeks: by Friday, September 12th.

This invitation is open to all, and the resulting archive will be available to Coalition members for both scholarly and organizational purposes. If you have any questions, please contact Coalition President Jenn Fishman.

 

[fu-upload-form title=”Upload Coalition Media Here:” suppress_default_fields=”true”][input type=”text” name=”author_name” class=”required” description=”Enter your name if/as you wish to be credited for your contribution:”][textarea name=”post_content” description=”Please indicate the title(s) of the media you are uploading (if any) and offer a brief description of the person(s)/object(s)/occasion(s) represented:” class=”required”][input type=”file” name=”photo”  id=”ug_photo” description=”Your Media” multiple=”true”][checkboxes name=”permissions” class=”checkboxes required” description=”By checking this box I give my permission for the file(s) I upload to be included by Alexandra Hidalgo in her documentary about the Coalition and in related scholarly publications and presentations. I also give permission for my file(s) to be archived in perpetuity by the Coalition of Women Scholars and to be used by Coalition members for organizational/educational/scholarly purposes including public presentations and both print and electronic publications.” values= “value:I agree for my images to be used.”] [input type=”submit” value=”Submit”] [/fu-upload-form]

Feminism and Rhetoric – 2013 CFP

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CFP Feminisms and Rhetorics 2013

Linked:  Rhetorics, Feminisms, and Global Communities

The Program in Writing and Rhetoric and the Hume Writing Center invite proposals for the Ninth Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, to be held at Stanford University September 25-28, 2013. Our emphasis this year is on links, the connections between people, between places, between times, between movements. The conference theme—Linked: Rhetorics, Feminisms, and Global Communities—reflects Stanford’s setting in the heart of Silicon Valley, a real as well as virtual space with links to every corner of the globe. We aim for a conference that will be multi-vocal, multi-modal, multi-lingual, and inter-disciplinary, one in which we will work together to articulate the contours of feminist rhetorics.

Building on the 2011 conference, with its focus on the challenges and opportunities of feminism, the 2013 conference will seek to explore links between and among local and global, academic and nonacademic, past and present, public and private, and online and offline communities. In particular, we invite conversations about cross-cultural and global rhetorics, science and technology, entrepreneurship, outreach, or intersections among these.

We invite proposals (panels or individual submissions) treating any links between feminisms and rhetorics. The following questions are of particular interest:

  • What links do we make or fail/neglect to make in the work we do (in communities, in our field(s), in the classroom setting, across cultures)?
  • How are cross-cultural rhetorics embodied?
  • How do feminist rhetorics intersect with/operate in global, social, financial, activist, and communication networks?  How can we use these links for productive outreach?
  • How does or can writing link multimedia worlds?
  • What are the specific spaces (geographical, virtual, etc.) where solidarities (strategic, impermanent, etc.) are formed? How do new audiences, contexts, ideas, movements emerge in these spaces? How are the feminisms of the 21st century “linked in”?
  • What kind of genderings/racings/classings happen in the rhetorical situations of internet-based social networks?
  • How does the link between feminism and rhetoric help us interrogate nationalism, fundamentalism, violence, and/or war?
  • What can feminist theory/ies bring to cross/intercultural communication?  How can entrepreneurial or social-entrepreneurial efforts help us redefine or improve cross/intercultural communication and outreach?
  • How might the study of intercultural rhetorics enrich and complicate accepted narratives of feminisms, western rhetoric and science?

Deadline for submission: February 1, 2013

Questions or comments?      femrhet2013@stanford.edu

Call for Peitho Editor

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Call for Peitho Editor

The Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CWSHRC) is seeking an editor for Peitho, our biannual peer-reviewed online journal, beginning spring 2013.

In supporting the Coalition’s mission as “a learned society composed of women scholars who are committed to research in the history of rhetoric and composition,” Peitho seeks to publish research that advances the feminist study of our profession.

In cooperation with an associate editor (Lisa Mastrangelo will hold this position until 2015), Peitho’s editor has full purview over the editorial content and production process of the journal, including managing the editorial board, issuing calls for papers, refining the journal’s submission process, and publishing the journal. The editor has the support of the Coalition’s Publication Committee and Executive Board for all matters requiring approval.

Qualifications:

The ideal candidate will hold a position at an institution willing to contribute support/release time for this position, and she will have a solid publication record in the areas of feminist rhetoric and/or composition history and pedagogy, as well as a significant record of service work relevant to the field. The position also requires outstanding planning, communication, and editorial skills and strong technical/digital skills.

Responsibilities:

  • Shadow Barb L’Eplanttenier, Peitho’s current editor, through production of the spring 2013 issue and then assume full responsibility for the fall 2013 issue.
  • Serve as editor for four years, from 2013-2017.
  • Manage the submission, editorial, and online publication process for two issues of Peitho per year (Fall and Spring)—with the support of Lisa Mastrangelo, the associate editor.
  • Participate in the search for a new associate editor who will start in 2015 and become editor in 2017.
  • Hire a student intern, if desired.
  • Serve as ex officio (nonvoting) member of the CWSHRC advisory board.

Compensation:

The Coalition will pay for the editor to take a training workshop on InDesign (the publishing program), and the editor may also hire a student intern for 15-20 hours per issue at a total cost of $500 per year. The editor will also receive a stipend of $200 after the successful completion of each issue. Finally, the Coalition will pay the editor’s registration fee for the Feminisms and Rhetorics biennial conference.

Please note that  a letter of support from Coalition president Elizabeth Tasker, detailing how the position can be of benefit to the editor’s home institution, is available upon request.

Applicants should email a CV and cover letter, describing their qualifications and detailing how their institution will support their editorship, to Lindal Buchanan, ljbuchan [at] odu.edu, by Oct. 1, 2012.