Event: Connecting Coalitions, Arts, and Pedagogies of Human Rights at #4C20

/in , , ,

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

“Moving” Days

/in , , , ,

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.

Read more

Living Feminist Lives: Looking Forward & Reflecting Back on the Feminist Workshop at CCCC

/in ,

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)

Read more

No easy resolution to problems of diversification: showing up on March 13, 2019

/in , ,

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).

Read more

Re-Examining Intersectionality in our 30th Year

/in , ,

Dear All,

With CCCC 2019 notifications having gone out, we are pleased to share early details of the Coalition-sponsored session on Wednesday evening, March 13 (2019) in Pittsburgh!

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.

Read more

Coalition Curated Guide to #4C18!

/in ,

2016 CCCC Annual Conference The Feminists Are coming

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!

Read more

CFSHRC & 4C18: Mobilizing in Several Directions

/in , ,
2016 CCCC Annual Conference The Feminists Are coming
 
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.

Read more

4C19 Coalition SIG CFP: Building Out From ‘The Margins’: New Directions in Intersectionality

/in , , ,

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

CFSHRC Regarding #4C18

/in , ,

Since we last wrote you to you, the Coalition Advisory Board has met and conducted a thorough and thoughtful discussion regarding concerns surrounding the travel advisory for Kansas City, Missouri. As a result of our discussion, and informed by the decisions made by the Queer Caucus to hold an event virtually and the Latinx Caucus to boycott the conference, the Coalition Advisory Board has voted to officially cancel the Wednesday night SIG for 2018.

This has been a difficult and painful decision for the Coalition. We have a long and engaged relationship with the Cs convention, which will continue in the future.

We encourage members to make their own decisions about attending the larger Cs conference and fully respect individual decisions.

Currently our plans to move forward include:

1. Investigating the possibility of a Coalition presence at RSA in May 2018,

2. Publishing this year’s intended Cs talks as a special edition of Peitho,

3. Identifying actions that we can take to support people of color on the ground in Missouri, specifically graduate students, faculty members, local organizations or workers

We are writing today to not only inform you of this decision, but also to ask for your suggestions, comments, and concerns for moving forward. Responses can be anonymous; if you would like feedback, please leave your contact information. Click here to leave comments: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScOSiJaDZhhDiM8aWK7VLjKlZFiwAisl-sSWfqV6dZQhilLJQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Yours in solidarity,

The Executive Board, Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition

C’s and the Coalition

/in , ,

As most of you know, the Executive Committee of CCCC has made the decision to keep the annual conference in Kansas City, Missouri.  As you also know, the Coalition hosts their annual SIG on Wednesday night of the Cs.  The Coalition has been and remains committed to feminist principles and practices of social justice, and we work to ensure the safety, dignity, and equity of our membership.  We realize that it seems as if we have been quiet in response to the Cs Executive Committee decision of September 11.  In reality, we have been organizing spaces to hear your voices on the issue.

 Moving forward:

Read more