Join us for our 4C17 Event: Building Sustainable, Capable Lives, or Tilting at Windmills?

Simple drawing of windmillHow many of us lament our busy lives, and wonder how we can possibly balance the demands of family, work, and even maybe self?  This year’s Coalition session arose from conversations and frustrations that Coalition members have expressed over the years—how do we do all that we do and still (maybe) even stay sane?

The Coalition is hosting its annual Wednesday night meeting: 6:30 pm, on Wednesday, March 15 in The Portland Ballroom 252Read more

Changing the Landscape: Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies Five Years Later

Five years ago, Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Jones Royster published Feminist Rhetorical Practices:  New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies.  Met with much critical acclaim, Feminist Rhetorical Practices offered historians of rhetoric and composition a way to read, interpret, and analyze historical texts through the lenses of social circulation, critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and globalization. An immediate success, the text had—and continues to have—a major impact on the historical feminist thinking in our field.

To that end, the Coalition’s 2018 Wednesday evening session* will revisit Kirsch and Royster’s work and how it has changed (and continues to change) our discipline.  Read more

CFSHRC Goes To Washington

purple background with CFSHRC and a red heart around the F. with the text Jan 21st, #teamfemrhet, @cfshrc @femrhet

The Women’s March on Washington is shaping up to be a historic show of feminist solidarity and collective action. We know that many of the CFSHRC are going to be attending, either in DC or in one of the many sister marches. As your professional organization, the CFSHRC wants to help you connect with fellow members of #teamfemrhet and also document our community’s participation in this historic event.

Read more

Coalition of Feminist Scholars Statement of Solidarity

In 2016, the Coalition changed its name to reinforce the organization’s longstanding commitment to critical feminist work and to better reflect the diversity of its membership, where “diversity” is not always marked by stark or traditional distinctions.  After the 2016 general U.S. election, we wish to reaffirm our commitment to the values of inclusion and gender justice on which our organization was founded; to recognize and bring attention to the unique challenges involved in feminist writing, teaching, scholarship, and leadership in the current political climate; and to reiterate our support for our members.   Read more

Join Us at FemRhet 2017

final-banner

Greetings!

We, the members of the planning committee, are thrilled to host the 2017 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference.   Read more

Feminisms and Rhetorics 2017: Call for Reviewers

The site host committee at the University of Dayton invites scholars to review paper and panel proposals for the 2017 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference.  Reviewers will be responsible for: evaluating the potential quality of conference papers, panels, roundtables, and other presentations; evaluating the relevance of the proposed work according to the conference themes; and should be committed to the timely review for acceptance to the conference.  

There are several opportunities for review.  The committee asks for reviewers to commit by November 15, 2016 and to be available for review between January 1 and February 15, 2017.  

Reviewers will be asked to return their comments on proposals within two weeks of receiving proposals.  

Reviewers must be past or current members of Feminisms and Rhetorics or Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, or attendees of previous Feminisms and Rhetorics Conferences. Interested persons should submit the following: name, contact information (email and/or phone), and areas of interest or expertise.  Please send details and inquiries to feminismsandrhetorics@gmail.com.   

The conference is scheduled for Oct 4-7, 2017 in Dayton OH. See you there!

Become the Next Web Coordinator for the CFSHRC

The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Composition and Rhetoric seeks its next Web Coordinator to maintain, monitor, and update the organization’s website. The Web Coordinator typically collaborates with CFSHRC Executive and Advisory Board members as needed. Approximate time on task averages 5-10 hours per month, with some periods of the year being slower or busier (e.g., prior to CCCC or FemRhet). Proficiency with WordPress is required.

Position Details

The CFSHRC Web Coordinator performs the following activities:

  • Filtering and responding to user questions as well as general questions about the website;
  • Working with Peitho editors to upload each issue of the semi-annually published journal, overseeing the process of archiving past issues, and liaising with the Peitho editorial team as needed;
  • Coordinating the PayPal portion of the site (e.g., radio buttons, membership information) in collaboration with the Treasurer;
  • Working with the CFSHRC Archivist to maintain the group’s administrative archive;
  • Maintaining and (as needed) updating website style guidelines.

Timeframe and Remuneration

The web coordinator serves a two-year term, typically starting on May 1 and ending on April 30, although an earlier start date is both possible and preferable this term in advance of some of the new initiatives at 4Cs.

There are no geographical restrictions on this position, as the role can be performed remotely at the Web Coordinator’s convenience.

Compensation is $500 over a two-year term, plus complementary registration for one conference each year, either to attend CCCC or FemRhet.

Qualifications

We seek applications from graduate students, faculty, and/or independent scholars committed to helping the Coalition maintain and expand its strong presence in the field through digital means. All applications will be considered, but strong candidates will have the following qualifications:

  • Academic training and/or scholarly interest in one of several fields, including rhetoric, composition, feminist historiography, data design, or technical and professional writing;
  • Demonstrated experience managing and maintaining websites with shopping carts and PayPal connections;
  • Strong English language skills;
  • Strong collaborative and interpersonal skills both on and offline;
  • Commitment to serving the CFSHRC, which is the intellectual home of a diverse and growing group of scholars whose interests span histories of studies in gender and sexuality and feminist research in rhetoric and composition.

To Apply

Coalition members are encouraged to apply, but applicants need not be current members. Interested candidates should submit a brief letter of interest and current resume or CV. The latter should include URLs to sites designed or maintained, or access to other digital projects representing the candidate’s range of interests and abilities. Materials should be emailed to Lisa Mastrangelo (lmastrangelo919@gmail.com) and Tarez Graban (tarez.graban@gmail.com) by December 15, 2016.

Job Seekers, Be Like the Willow Tree

Guest post by Erin Costello Wecker, Ph.D. 
Assistant Professor of English
Director of Composition
The University of Montana

At the 4C16 CFSHRC event, Lydia McDermott, Letizia Guglielmo and I co-hosted a mentoring table on preparing for the job market. Now that the job hunt season is gearing up, we are going to use the coalition blog to sum up a few of the key points to help prepare and empower job seekers in rhet/comp. This blog post offers some insight that was shared with me while I was on the job market and things that I learned while going through the process two years ago. Be on the lookout for additional advice from Lydia and Letizia in upcoming blog posts on this topic.

Willow tree with sun beams shining through the leaves

Willow tree with sun beams shining through the leaves

Be Flexible

Be flexible and open to different kinds of academic settings and positions, this includes TYC, WPA, small Liberal Arts Colleges, and larger state Universities. Sometimes when looking at all of the job openings it is daunting to envision which type of school or position you are looking for, especially if you are just finishing graduate school.

Begin by making a list of schools and then take time to visit their website. What is their mission statement? Who would be your colleagues and what type of research are they doing? Would your position be teaching focused, research focused, a combination of the two? What type of students attend this institution (i.e. focus on STEM fields, thriving Business School, loads of English majors)? Would you be working with graduate students?

Think About Fit

From this preliminary search you can get a sense of what type of work seems exciting. It is helpful to think of your own schooling background. What type of institutions did you attend? Generate a list of things you enjoyed and things you felt did not foster your academic development.

From that list a clearer picture of what contributions you would like to make to a school will become more evident, which will in turn help to refine your list of places to apply. Let your list guide you, but do not let it rule your search–remember where we started, be flexible and open to different kinds of academic settings. To that point, generate honest and focused documents for your teaching statement, research statement, and administrative statement and tailor your CV for two-three different types of positions.

Start getting ready soon. The job ads are already coming out. You can check them out here on the handy-dandy rhet map.

Be Like the Willow

A job search is demanding, but it is also exhilarating as there is promise in each new adventure. As the title suggests, willow trees are adaptive to climate and soil, grow fast, and have a distinctive shape with strong, well-developed roots. When I went on the job market I could not imagine leaving the city I loved, especially after calling it home for fifteen years; to my mind I had roots and I was not sure I wanted to uproot them. Yet as I begin year number two in my new job, in my new home, in a new time zone, with a new climate, and new people, I am reminded that possibility is what led me to this location.

A final bit of advice, to help wrap your mind around the changes that accompany a job search, take time to read your documents over and allow yourself to enjoy, for at least a moment or two, the accomplishments that have led you to a job search in the first place. When teaching writing we often stress the importance of process vs. product, yet when on the job market it is so easy to develop tunnel vision where landing a job is the only destination in sight. So, trust your talents and embrace the opposite actions of the willow tree: reaching skyward for light and remaining earthbound for rootedness, and when a gust of wind approaches just sway; I promise you will not break.

Let’s Celebrate and Share Our Work!

Members of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition are busy publishing, researching, teaching, designing, leading, and mentoring. And in the process we’re shaping the future of our field.  In this blog post series, let’s celebrate Coalition Feminists Getting Sh*t Done! As the series continues, we will celebrate the accomplishments of different groups of members within the CFSHRC. To get things started, this post features recent publications, ongoing research and pedagogical projects by members of the Advisory Board, including several Executive Board members. Let’s take the time to read their work, connect with possible mentors and collaborators, and celebrate their accomplishments!

Check out this quick list of their research projects. For more detail, feel free to reach out to these Advisory Board members through their web profiles included below.

Publications and Research

Lynée Lewis Gaillet is the coeditor of the recently published book Landmark Essays on Archival Research  (Eds. Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Diana Eidson, and Donald Gammill).

Review the important essays included in this collection here. The Landmark Essays Series, edited by James J. Murphy and Coalition feminist member Krista Ratcliffe, with contributions by several other Coalition scholars, including Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford. And congrats to all of the authors included in the collection.

Charlotte Hogg published “Including Conservative Women’s Rhetorics in an ‘Ethics of Hope and Care” in Rhetoric Review 34.4.

Download the article here.

In May, after 10 years of hard, if off-again, on-again labor, Jenn Fishman, Joan Mullin, and Glenn Blalock, launched REx: The Research Exchange Index and published REx 1, which is a searchable database of peer-reviewed information about writing research conducted between 2000 and the present. As Jenn writes: “Distinct from scholarship about writing research, which tends to feature completed studies and be written by a limit set of researchers, REx was designed to capture (in brief form) information about everyone’s research activity, whether it’s ongoing, completed or stalled. There’s so much we can learn from each other, and this project represents an attempt to facilitate that. Anyone interested in getting involved or contributing to REx 2 should be in touch with Joan. She and her colleagues at UNC-Charlotte are leading the next charge.”

Explore this important resource here.

Mariana Grohowski co-authored the chapter “Subverting Virtual Hierarchies: A Cyberfeminist Critique of Course-Management Spaces” in the digital book Making Space, edited by James P. Purdy and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss.

Check out this chapter and the rest of this engaging e-book here.

Pamela VanHaitsma, with support from a 2016 Summer Research Fellowship from the Office of Research, and the 2015-2016 Robin L. Hixon Fellowship from the Department of English, both at Old Dominion University, is conducting archival research for a new project on the rhetorical practices of 19th-century women teachers in romantic friendships. Contact Dr. VanHaitsma to learn more about her ongoing research and read her recent publication “Gossip as Rhetorical Methodology for Queer and Feminist Historiography” in Rhetoric Review 35.2.

Read the article here.

Tarez Samra Graban published Women’s Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories with SIUP in July 2015.  Tarez is now serving as a non-residential research fellow through the University of South Africa in Pretoria, South Africa, until 2018, and has begun a new project at the intersection of rhetoric, archives, and transnational feminism.  

Learn more about her research or reach out to Tarez through her online portfolio http://tsgfolio.com

Awards and Grants

Cristina Devereaux Ramirez‘s monograph Occupying Our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875-1942 (UAP, 2015) was awarded the 2016 Winifred Bryan Horner Book Award.

Get your copy here!

Risa Applegarth’s book, Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science, received the CCCC 2016 Outstanding Book Award this year.

Read a book review in RSQ.

Jenn Fishman, Jane Greer, and  Dominic DelliCarpini were awarded a CCCC Research Initiative Grant for their work on the Undergraduate Research Impact. 

Contact Jenn for updates on this important collaborative research.

Teaching

Pamela VanHaitsma is designing a graduate seminar in Women’s & Feminist Rhetorics for this fall. Check out her course website https://feministrhetoricsblog.wordpress.com/.

In Spring 2017, Tarez Samra Graban will be conducting an undergraduate seminar called “Women in the Archives, Vandals in the Stacks,” where students will study and work at the intersections of feminist rhetoric, archival theory, and institutional history. In partnership with FSU’s Director of Special Collections, Graban will have students process and identify archival materials related to some of FSU’s former women faculty members.

The this list is just a small selection of what our advisory board has been doing. We hope to continue sharing and celebrating the work of coalition members more regularly on this blog. What are you working on? Let us know in the comments section or contact Trish Fancher (fancher.patricia at gmail dot com) to be included in the future blog posts.

Introducing the Coalition’s 1st Archivist & Historian

Greeting Coalition Members! My name is Alexis Ramsey-Tobienne and I am the Coalition’s first Archivist and Historian. My task is two-fold: to help capture, preserve, and share the Coalition’s rich history through the expansion of our current archive (now freely available to all users and accessed by the “archive” link in the resources section of our homepage) and to think about if and how we should create a physical archival space.

Currently, our archive houses mainly the administrative papers of the Coalition including, but not limited to: various types of planning documents for all the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conferences; minutes, emails, and proposals from Annual Meetings; various correspondence among members from 2006 to present; Treasurer Reports; and Videos celebrating the Coalition.

While there are many detailed, informative documents already stored in our archive, I would like to add to our holdings.

Specifically, I would like to ask you, Coalition members, to share with me:

  • Photographs and Videos related to the Coalition such as photographs and videos taken during Femisms and Rhetorics Conferences, photographs and videos taken at mentoring tables during our C’s Workshops, and photographs and videos taken during panels featuring feminist scholars and scholarship.
  • Documents related to:
    • C’s Mentoring Workshops
    • Feminisms and Rhetorics Planning
    • Any other documents you feel belong in the archive and that help provide more information about the Coalition’s history.

Please send documents and photographs to me at: ramseyae@eckerd.edu. Please provide some context for the photographs and videos and please make sure photographs are .jpg and that individuals pictured within are identified.

If you are interested in joining me on an archive-building adventure, I would like to convene a task force to explore possible physical locations for our archive and to consider what we would need from that space. Please email me at ramseyae@eckerd.edu to share your interest and ideas.

I encourage you to explore our archive!

post by  Alexis Ramsey-Tobienne