You might believe, and still you feel The chase has just begun That you must reach that horizon before The setting of the sun. You chase the light in front of you Nightfall close behind If you stop to catch your breath You know what you will find.
Dear Coalition Friends and Colleagues:
As co-editors of a proposed collection, Rhetorics of Reproduction: Rights, Health, and Justice, we wanted to let you know why we’re looking forward to this year’s Feminisms and Rhetorics conference.
It is with great sadness that we post the following obituary, sent only moments ago by Andrea Lunsford. Andrea was the first to notify the Coalition membership of Nan’s passing, and has been in Columbus, Ohio with Nan’s family, attending to the news. – Tarez Graban
Nan Johnson, professor of English emerita at The Ohio State University, passed away peacefully on August 31, 2019, surrounded by her family and dear friends. Nan was born in Greeley, Colorado in 1951. At just one month old, she found herself aboard an Army transport aircraft headed to Germany where she, her mother Jean, and her older brother Robb joined dad Hugh who was assigned to a U.S. Army post-WW II EOD (Explosive Ordinance Division). After being posted all over the world, the family settled in Leavenworth, Kansas where Nan graduated from high school and later received a BA and MA from Kansas State University. Her growing interest in the field of rhetoric and literacy coupled with her not-so-hidden desire to become a rock star took her to California where she received a second MA and a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, studying with the legendary Ross Winterowd and Marjorie Perloff. In 1981, she joined Andrea Lunsford in the University of British Columbia English Department, where she taught courses in the history of rhetoric and advanced writing. From 1990 until her retirement in 2018, she was professor of English at The Ohio State University, helping to build one of the most distinguished graduate programs in rhetoric and composition in the country.
Historically, the term mentor has carried with it expectations of relationality, longevity, and politics—not necessarily identical to but not completely unlike the “elder” distinction that marks some cultural contexts as distinct. The term has also carried with it bona fide positive and negative associations. In western antiquity, Mentor (Μέντωρ) was not always cast as a favored figure, though he enjoyed positive notoriety in the Odyssey in part because the goddess Athena disguised herself as him on a diplomatic mission to Telemachus, son of Odysseus, at the end of the Trojan War. Various heroic and less heroic archetypes followed Mentor into modernity as the Odyssey itself underwent various tellings and retellings, eventually becoming a cultural trope on which to base assumptions about how authority should equate to wisdom and how future generations should be trained. In contemporary higher-education contexts, mentoring is more often than not used to commodify unmet needs, For these reasons and more, not everyone loves the idea of mentoring, or the term itself.
Read moreThe Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CFSHRC) seeks an Associate Editor for Peitho, its quarterly peer-reviewed online journal. The Associate Editor holds primary responsibility for book reviews (identifying new titles for review, soliciting reviewers, working with reviews to revise and edit reviews prior to publication, etc.) in each issue and for the annual “Recoveries and Reconsiderations” feature of the journal.
Read moreThe CFSHRC and FemRhet conference team are genuinely excited about welcoming you to James Madison University in November for Feminisms and Rhetorics 2019, for what promises to be an exceptional conference due in no small measure to the extraordinary efforts of this year’s conference hosts. At the same time, we are acutely aware of the real problem that conference costs pose for a growing number of us – graduate students, contingent faculty, and academic workers of all ranks and roles who have experienced recent furloughs and/or ongoing salary compression.
Read moreI’m being inaccurate in selecting today’s date to mark the Suffrage Centennial, when the event that we know as ratification occurred in several phases over a year’s time and, like many other aspects of global and U.S. suffrage, only after periods of regression, paradigmatic shifting, and strategic political repositioning. But today, one-hundred years ago, the U.S. House of Representatives passed what we know as Amendment XIX, signaling a first step in its political reception, and serving as a reminder of the historically significant role that localized (municipal and state) bodies would play either as conduits for vital policy discussions or as stalwarts for certain kinds of progress around amendments and bills whose reception was mixed.
Read moreThe social media accounts and email listserv of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition exist to support the mission of the Coalition, which includes “advancement of feminist research and pedagogy across histories, locales, identities, materialities, and media; and the education and mentoring of feminist faculty and graduate students in scholarship, research methods, praxis, and the politics of the profession.”
Towards this shared mission, the listserv and social media administrators use Twitter and Facebook to:
1. Feature feminist rhetorical practices in scholarly, public, and pedagogical contexts.
2. Amplify the work of coalition members and feminist scholars in rhetoric and composition.
3. Share opportunities for further feminist research, teaching, action, and leadership.
Dear Coalition Friends and Colleagues,
As organizer of the 2019 Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference, I invite you to submit your proposal(s) in response to our CFP, if you haven’t already done so. This year, we’d love you to join us on October 25-26 at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, to explore our theme of “Contemplative Rhetorics and Literacies.” While there is always a chance that we’ll have inches of snow on the ground by late October, it is more likely that our weather will be crisp, sunny and beautiful, providing an unmatched natural backdrop for the conference.
Read moreGuest 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:
Read moreethical 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)
