With real regret, the CFSHRC is cancelling this year’s Action Hour event, ahead of official announcements from the CCCC. We especially regret any inconvenience this announcement may cause for our members in timing or otherwise, we thank you for your support and your kind messages this week and prior, and we hope for clear pathways forward for all your institutions and communities.
Although the evening is cancelled, the Coalition’s work continues. The Exec Officers and Advisory Board will hold their annual March meeting as scheduled on March 25, but remotely. We will vote, approve, and announce a new slate, among other things. Please watch for more announcements in the days following, particularly regarding how we will either remediate or reschedule “Art in the Times of Chaos” and mentoring tables, how we will celebrate our award and scholarship winners, and how plans are shaping for FemRhet 2021 and 2023.
Between now and then, please be well. -Tarez Graban CFSHRC President 2018-2020 On Behalf of the Coalition
/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.png00CFSHRC President/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.pngCFSHRC President2020-03-11 20:58:182020-11-09 12:47:43Cancellation of Coalition at CCCC 2020
Currently, many Coalition members are weighing a difficult choice regarding travel to CCCC. While we are heartened by CCCC’s close monitoring of the situation [https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/cccc-2020-and-the-coronavirus], we are weighing those choices with you. We encourage all members to assess their situations and err on the side of their own and others’ safety and well-being. The Coalition is still scheduled to host its annual Wednesday “Action Hour,” featuring a keynote presentation by Dr. Alexandra Hidalgo: “Art in the Times of Chaos: Creative Collaborations Between Venezuelan Women Across Continents,” with interactive lecture, film clips, and Q&A, followed by conferral of awards and participation in mentoring tables. However, we will follow the lead of CCCC officers as they work to keep us updated on the coronavirus and any possibility of cancellation. We will circulate announcements should anything change. In addition, we are currently considering alternative options for enacting at least part of the evening, in the event of cancellation, and for disseminating results of the evening for those who could not attend. Those discussions are in the early stages and quite contingent; when more details are in place, we will share them.
With gratitude for you and your involvement, CFSHRC Executive Board
/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.png00CFSHRC President/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.pngCFSHRC President2020-03-09 00:26:072020-11-09 12:47:43Coalition at CCCC 2020
Please join the Coalition for our annual SIG event before CCCC’s! Wednesday, March 25, 2020, from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. Crystal Ballroom, Wisconsin Center
Keynote by Dr. Alexandra Hidalgo
This year’s two-part session will focus on making critical connections between filmic and other arts and the various kinds of teaching and activism we strive for in the contemporary classroom. The first part of the session features a keynote presentation by Dr. Alexandra Hidalgo: “Art in the Times of Chaos: Creative Collaborations Between Venezuelan Women Across Continents” with lecture, film clips, and traditional Q&A.
In this presentation, Alexandra Hidalgo will use film scenes and crew interviews in order to discuss not only her in-production feature documentary The Weeping Season, but also the cross-continental collaborative process she used in order to make the film. The Weeping Season is a first-person documentary in which the filmmaker investigates the mystery of her father’s 1983 disappearance in the Venezuelan Amazon. Hidalgo began filming this documentary in Venezuela in 2004. Since then, she has filmed in the United States, Portugal, and Spain. She was last able to film in Venezuela in 2016. However, her Venezuelan passport expired and due to the current political crisis in her homeland, she has been unable to renew it. In order to complete the film, she is collaborating with Venezuelan producer Natalia Machado and a group of local filmmakers, with whom she communicates through Skype and WhatsApp, in order to direct their filming. She is also working with Cristina Carrasco, a Venezuelan editor who lives in Argentina and Spain, and with whom she collaborates through Skype, Google docs, and WhatsApp to craft the story together.
Hidalgo holding a camera and young child.
As cofounder of the online publication agnès films and author of Cámara Retórica, Hidalgo has spent several years articulating a feminist filmmaking methodology for rhetoric and composition. As such, the making of the film itself mirrors the documentary’s themes of loss and crisis. There are the personal and national losses that occur through the filmmaker’s storyline, and there is the collaboration that occurs among three Venezuelan women who must find ways to work across borders given the country’s current crisis. The presentation will both demonstrate and argue for how Hidalgo, Carrasco, and Machado come together through digital technologies and apps in order to co-create a memorable piece of art in a unique enactment of the Venezuelan diaspora. Over three million Venezuelans have escaped their homeland’s crisis since the middle 2000s and the collaborative work on this film offers one model for remaining close to each other in spite of being geographically spread.
Mentoring Tables
The second part of our session will feature one hour of semi-structured mentoring tables on topics ranging from contingent labor to globalizing feminist historical work to developing new research methodologies to finding or maintaining a work-life balance, among other topics.
Continuing the Conversation through Lateral Mentoring and Sustained Collaboration
While our mentoring tables typically offer graduate students and junior scholars the opportunity to learn from senior colleagues in the field on various topics, several of this year’s mentoring tables will be co-hosted by affiliated group and/or organization leaders, with the goal of leading discussion about how to make knowledge from—or how to take rhetorical action on—the topics reflected in Hidalgo’s keynote presentation. Please stay for the mentoring tables and engage with any of the following topics:
Table 1:CCCC Latinx Member Caucus, with Christina V. Cedillo & Cruz Medina
Table 2:CCCC Transnational Composition SIG, with Thomas LaVelle & Ligia Mihut
Table 3: Feminist Rhetorics of Written Argument, with Kathleen E. Welch
Table 4: Giving and Receiving Reader Feedback, with Risa Applegarth & David Gold
Table 5: Globalizing Feminist Historical Study, with Karrieann Soto Vega & Bo Wang
Table 6: Graduate School and the Job Market, with Hui Wu
Table 7: History and Historical Methodologies, with Suzanne Bordelon
Table 8: Preparing for Publishing, with Lynee Lewis Gaillet
Table 9: Strategies for Research and Writing, with Jessica Enoch and Charlotte Hogg
Table 10: Writing about Community Writing, with Jenn Fishman & Sarah Moon
/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.png00CFSHRC President/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.pngCFSHRC President2020-02-28 05:38:192020-11-09 12:47:43Event: Connecting Coalitions, Arts, and Pedagogies of Human Rights at #4C20
January through April, in an even year, mark “moving” days for the Coalition, in more ways than one. But this year began with a unique kind of movement: Peitho journal’s moving to a fully online format. If you haven’t already, please do check out Issue 22.1 (Fall/Winter 2019). Jen Wingard, Jen England, and Peitho‘s editorial team worked diligently to put out this beautiful issue, in and around constraints caused by our decision to redesign the Coalition website.
Guest Blog by Rachel Chapman Daugherty, Texas Christian University; Lydia McDermott, Whitman College; and Patty Wilde, Washington State University Tri-Cities
Greetings from the 2019 Feminist Workshop co-chairs! This year’s workshop, sponsored by the Feminist Caucus, “Living Feminist Lives: Materialities, Methodologies, and Practices” continues a conversation that we started in Kansas City last year on intersectionality. Both a tool for “critical inquiry and praxis” (Collins and Bilge 31), intersectionality calls us to recognize intragroup differences in experiences of oppression and work to dismantle the systems that create such inequities. Using this lens to consider both professional and personal issues, we began to explore ways that intersectionality can help us recognize, challenge, and change the inequities that we encounter in the everyday labors that we conduct as feminist teachers, administrators, scholars, and rhetors. This year, we turn this intersectional lens onto our lives as feminists. Echoing Sarah Ahmed, we urge panelists and participants to ask:
ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world…how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls. (1)
/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.png00CFSHRC DMOD/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.pngCFSHRC DMOD2019-02-24 21:48:582020-11-09 12:47:46Living Feminist Lives: Looking Forward & Reflecting Back on the Feminist Workshop at CCCC
Conversations I have had with Coalition members tell me that members of this group for any length of time hold one particular trait in common: a strong conviction that, while it is hard work to position oneself at school or in the profession, we cannot risk leaving that positioning up to others. For most of us (if not all of us), it is only through long, tedious and recurring processes of articulating our identities and negotiating others’ perceptions of them that we begin to fit well in any given context. Even then, our fittedness occurs incrementally through extant classifications (i.e., we might be identified as multi-ethnic for purposes of institutional data-gathering, touted as “the rhetorician/writing specialist in the literature department” as a way of proving intellectual diversity, or otherwise engendered to help fulfill a quotient for national ranking or standing).
/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.png00CFSHRC President/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.pngCFSHRC President2019-02-01 01:08:522020-11-09 12:47:46No easy resolution to problems of diversification: showing up on March 13, 2019
Two-thousand and nineteen will mark the Coalition’s 30th year, and what better way to do so than through a critical re-examination of intersectional work? As usual, our two-part session will be open to all 4C19 conference-goers.
/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.png00CFSHRC President/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.pngCFSHRC President2018-09-01 07:49:062020-11-09 12:47:47Re-Examining Intersectionality in our 30th Year
As we polish our presentations, print our posters, and pack our bags, CFSHRC has prepared a list of sessions that may be of particular interest to feminists and to CFSHRC members. This is just a sampling of the feminist sessions. Let us know what we should add by commending on facebook or twitter!
Before the conference, follow our facebook and twitter pages for updates and reminders. We will also highlight a few sessions. During the conference, you can also follow along to the #CFSHRC hashtag on twitter. And after the conference, check our website for summaries of feminist presentations at the conference. We will see you in just a few weeks! #TheFeministsAreComing!
In advance of 4C18, we would like to acknowledge some of the many ways that CFSHRC members have been responding to the NAACP Travel Advisory, the CCCC Statement about it, and subsequent discussions. We also want to underscore our support for all Coalition members and the various choices they have made in relation to the upcoming convention.
In October, the Advisory Board met and voted to cancel the Coalition’s annual Wednesday SIG. We chose not to call colleagues to meet at 4C18 both in protest of the convention location and to signal our solidarity with colleagues of color under threat in Missouri due to the circumstances that led the NAACP to issue their travel advisory. Simultaneously, we began discussions with and among various ad-hoc committees, the CCCC Task Force on Social Justice and Activism at the Convention, the KC Local Arrangements Committee, and the Coalition membership at large. Throughout, we sought concrete strategies for supporting one another, including ways of mobilizing both on- and off-site in Missouri for the annual convention.
Twenty-five years ago, in “Mapping the Margins,” Kimberlé Crenshaw provided feminist academics and activists with the critical vocabulary they needed to define identity politics at various intersections of sexism and racism, in turn equipping us with structural, political, and representational “frameworks” for thinking about the fraught or hybrid spaces we occupy. Emphasizing frameworks over “totalizing theor[ies] of identity” (Crenshaw 1244), the Coalition’s 2019 Wednesday evening session dedicates itself to an interrogation and exploration of how those intersections look today, and of where intersectionality has led us as a Coalition, and as a field.
We invite proposals for brief critical talks to form the basis of a roundtable discussion on any of the following questions:Read more
/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.png00CFSHRC President/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CFSHRC-header-with-tagline.pngCFSHRC President2018-01-21 14:00:122020-11-09 12:47:494C19 Coalition SIG CFP: Building Out From ‘The Margins’: New Directions in Intersectionality
