Glenn Advancing the Agenda Webinar: Generative AI Refusal as a Feminist Methodology 

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Flyer for Glenn AtA Webinar on AI refusal with profile photos of presenters. All the information on this flyer is in the body of this post.

 

Please join us at 1 PM (EST) on November 17th for “Generative AI as Feminist Methodology,” a Cheryl Glenn Advancing the Agenda webinar. You can register with the following Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/IPzbisxnQgmrlXTBrCozSw

In this webinar, Jennifer Sano-Franchini (West Virginia University), Megan McIntyre (University of Arkansas), and Maggie Fernandes (University of Arkansas) present generative AI refusal as a feminist methodology that responds to the present harmful implications of generative AI, rather than its speculative risks or potential benefits. Refusal builds on feminist and postcolonial methodologies to center the voices and lived experiences of communities most impacted by the expansion of AI Empire (Hao, Tacheva and Ramasubramanian) and to imagine better futures and more ethical relations among humans and with the planet itself. In this session, the speakers will discuss the intersections across generative AI refusal and feminist methodologies. For instance, how do existing conversations about consent, bodily autonomy, and access resonate with ongoing deliberations about generative AI in higher education and beyond? How might video and image generation technologies like Sora operate as a manifestation and affirmation of rape culture? And what can refusal as a feminist methodology offer as we consider the anti-democratic imposition of data centers, such as xAI’s Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee and its implications for environmental, disability, racial, and reproductive justice?

Here is more about our webinar presenters:

Jennifer Sano-Franchini (she, her) is the Gaziano Family Legacy Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and an associate professor of English at West Virginia University where she teaches courses on professional writing theory, multimedia writing, and cultural rhetorics. She also serves as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Megan McIntyre (she/her) is the Director of the Program in Rhetoric and Composition and an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas, where she teaches courses on writing pedagogy, research methods, and digital rhetorics. Her most recent work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Composition Forum, Peitho, and The Journal of Writing Assessment.

Maggie Fernandes (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Arkansas. Her scholarly expertise is in digital/cultural rhetorics, writing assessment, institutional oppression, and user experience design. Her work has been published in Computers and Composition, Composition Studies, Enculturation, Peitho, Kairos, and Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric. 

 

Listening Sessions on Supporting Feminist Scholarship, Nov 6 and Nov 7

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We Want to Listen to You.


The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition ad hoc Scholarly Support Committee invites you to join us for two upcoming listening sessions. The purpose of these synchronous online sessions is to gather qualitative data which will help us imagine how the Coalition can support feminist scholars in our current political climate. Our listening events will be held on Zoom and are scheduled for:

  • Thursday, November 6, 10:00 AM (EST)
  • Friday, November 7, 3:00 PM (EST)

During these listening sessions we want to focus our attention on the following questions:

  1. How can we build relationships to support one another’s work in a hostile political climate?
  2. What sort of support do feminist scholars need beyond their local university/college?
  3. Who would Coalition members like to hear from about our current political climate (legal experts, upper administrators, etc.)?
  4. What are other professional organizations doing to respond to this moment?

Your insights are vital for ensuring that we provide meaningful, actionable support for feminist scholars. If you are interested in attending either or both of these listening sessions, please register by Nov 2 via Zoom.

To register for the November 6 event at 10:00 am, please visit https://jmu-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/2vkzD3l1SnqhJv417iP2_A

To register for the November 7 event at 3:00 pm, please visit https://jmu-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/oFg4Dq7TRgCEe9HSFUvkRA

For inquiries about the event, please direct your questions to Jen Almjeld at almjeljm@jmu.edu. We hope you will join us in this collaborative effort to sustain and support feminist scholarship in rhetoric and composition.

In solidarity,

The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition ad hoc Scholarly Support Committee

Coalition Graduate Student Open House and Survey

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Dear Graduate Students,

Please join us for a Halloween Edition of the Coalition’s Graduate Student Engagement Committee Open House on Friday, October 31 at 1:00 pm ET/12:00 pm CT/11:00 am MT/10:00am PT.

The one-hour session is informal and designed to let you meet members of the Coalition and other graduate students interested in intersectional feminist work across Writing and Rhetoric Studies, as well as to learn about the Coalition’s resources, opportunities, and emphases. All are welcome (graduate student or not), but the session will focus on graduate student needs and interests.

There is nothing to prepare! Just rsvp for the zoom link: https://mtsu.zoom.us/meeting/register/Xg6FVee8QfSaRFKazZ82zA

and we’ll look forward to seeing you. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our co-chairs, Erin Green (emgreen5@uncg.edu) or Kate Pantelides (kate.pantelides@mtsu.edu). Costumes encouraged!

Whether or not you can attend the Open House, please fill out our Graduate Student Survey to help us design opportunities throughout the academic year related to your needs.

Spookily Yours,

The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition’s Graduate Student Engagement Committee

 

Open House flyer with Halloween decorations.

Call for Proposals: Feminist Pedagogies “In These Times”—A Teach-In

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Calling all feminist teachers! Do you have an impactful teaching praxis that you’d like to share with the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CFSHRC) at CCCC 2026 in Cleveland? If so, we want to hear from you! 

During the CFSHRC Wednesday Night CCCCs 2025 event, many attendees wanted to talk about how to do feminist teaching “in these times,” meaning how to build classrooms, assignments, and structures to encourage students to think about inclusion, justice, and writing in the face of so many obstacles. Feminist teaching comprises a wide-range of practices that include: collaboration, community-building, decentering power, engaging the knowledge of students and marginalized people, dialogue, and reflection. The goal of these diverse praxes, according to Dale M. Bauer, is that “The feminist agenda offers a goal toward our students’ conversions to emancipatory social action” (389).

Moreover, as bell hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (12). At this moment of political and financial uncertainty, as we witness challenges to academic freedom and declines in federal funding, we propose to use our collaborative space as we gather in Cleveland to share strategies for our classrooms so that we may bring these conversations about emancipatory social action back to our home campuses.

To that end, we invite you to submit proposals for a 7-10-minute hands-on demonstration of a feminist praxis that you use in their classrooms, to be presented during the first part of our annual CFSHRC Wednesday Night Event at Cs (March 4, 2026 6-8pm). A committee of three members will evaluate proposals and select a group of teach-in facilitators (3-5 presentations total) that represents the diversity of our membership.

Please complete the form below and include a short proposal (750 words or less) of your teach-in praxis that you’d like to share. Collaborative presentations welcome! Grad students welcome! All teaching-levels welcome!

Here’s the link to the form: https://forms.gle/UytM65A3eDYhqFHr8

Applications are due Friday, November 21, 2025. Notifications of decisions will go out in late 2025 so that presenters have time to make travel arrangements. Presenters must be current CFSHRC members. If you have questions about this opportunity, please contact CFSHRC President, Becca Richards (rebecca_richards@uml.edu).

Thanks everyone! I hope to see many of you in Cleveland at our Wednesday Night Event (March 4, 2026 6-8pm) for this teach in and annual mentoring tables.

Best,
Becca Richards

2025-2026 Award Announcements

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Dear Coalition Colleagues, 

I hope this email finds you well. I’m writing with the happy news of announcing the award announcements for the Presidents’ Dissertation Award, the Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award, and the Nancy A Myers Feminist Research Grant. Please see descriptions online and on our webpage. Please consider nominating and applying! See more information on our awards on the Coalition’s web page.

Presidents’ Dissertation Award:

In recognition of the close relationship between scholarly excellence and professional leadership, the CFSHRC Presidents Dissertation Award is given to the author(s) of a recently completed doctoral dissertation that makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of feminist histories, theories, and pedagogies of rhetoric and composition. This award is adjudicated every year and carries a $200.00 honorarium. 

Eligibility: Any doctoral dissertation that engages feminist histories, theories, and/or pedagogies of rhetoric and composition and is completed within appropriate time frames (see below) is eligible for this award.

  • For the 2025 Award: Any PhD dissertation completed (defended and filed/deposited with the institution) between 6/1/2024 and 5/31/2025 is eligible.

Review Criteria: The doctoral dissertations that receive this award will not only rigorously engage extant feminist research and scholarship in rhetoric and composition, reflective of the many cultural and intellectual traditions that comprise our field; they will also enhance our understanding of feminist academic work in rhetoric and composition through the methods and methodologies they employ, the critical praxes they model, and the conclusions they draw along with the invitations they offer for subsequent inquiry and exchange.

Submission Procedures: The deadline for nominations for the next award cycle (the 2025 Award), including self-nomination, is October 15, 2025. Nominees should submit an electronic copy of the completed dissertation in its final form, as it was submitted to the author’s (or authors’) home institution to Jess Enoch, Immediate Past President, at jenoch1@umd.edu. Please also provide documentation of completion, including date of submission/deposit to the institution.

The 2025 award recipient(s) will be invited to receive their awards at the 2026 Conference on College Composition and Communication.

The Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award

Description: The Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award is presented biennially in even years for work in the field of composition and rhetoric to recognize outstanding scholarship and research in the areas of feminist pedagogy, practice, history, and theory. The award carries a $200.00 honorarium and is presented at the Wednesday evening meeting of the Coalition at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Eligibility: An eligible work must have been published in the two years previous to the year of the award. Work eligible for the 2026 award will have been published in calendar year 2024 or 2025.) Single or multiple authored books, as well as edited volumes, are eligible. We welcome nominations from authors, editors, publishers, or readers. To be eligible for the award, a nominee must be a member of Coalition at the time of nomination.

Review Criteria

  • Is the work relevant to and may it be situated within the broadly defined fields of feminist research in Composition and Rhetoric?
  • Does the work demonstrate a fair and balanced research agenda in the form of feminist inquiry: archival, historical, classroom-based, community based, empirical, or theoretical work?
  • Is the need for this research within the field clear and compelling?
  • Is this research problem couched within existing scholarship of the field?
  • Does the scholarship provide a framework by which the field may be advanced by other researchers?
  • Does the work make a substantial contribution to the field?

Nominations and Contact: The nomination deadline for the 2026 award is October 15, 2025. Nominations must include five (5) copies of the book and a brief (500 words) nominating statement. Electronic submissions are accepted. Alternatively, please send all materials to:

Jess Enoch,

Immediate Past President, CFSHRC
Department of English

University of Maryland

2119 Tawes Hall
College Park, MD 20742

Contact Jess Enoch (jenoch1@umd.edu) to submit nomination materials for the award or for additional information.

The Nancy A Myers Feminist Research Grant

Description: The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition offers a biennial research grant of up to $700 for researchers to pursue or continue feminist projects that require funding to conduct such activities. These include but should not be limited to archival research, translation, interview transcription, and digital archivization and/or digital project development. The award is announced at the annual Coalition event at the Conference of College Composition and Communication in even years.

Eligibility

  1. Applicants must show evidence of a solid project/proposed project that relates to the mission of the Coalition (see below) and necessitates this additional research support activity.
  2. Preference will be given to scholars with no other documented source of funding
  3. Applicants may be at any stage of a research project that necessitates the supporting activity the grant would propose.
  4. Applicants must be members of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.

How to Apply: The submission date for applications is January 9, 2026. Applicants should submit a completed application form and two confidential letters of recommendation to Jess Enoch, Immediate Past President (jenoch1@umd.edu). Questions should be directed to this address as well.

[Download research grant application]

CFSHRC Online Mentoring Program Sign Up

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Greetings!

In response to continued interest, the Coalition is pleased to offer our online mentoring program again this year! Whether you are new to the program or are returning to it, the online mentoring arrangement is a way for us to share knowledge about research, teaching, activism, and professional development by matching mentor-mentee pairs who will collaboratively establish a schedule whereby the mentee can make good progress on an agreed-upon project (i.e., job market/prepping application materials; planning research projects/fieldwork; writing/revising materials for publication; developing a syllabus; applying for grants; etc.) within six months or less. Mentors and mentees may continue to work together beyond one six-month cycle if desired.

We are seeking both mentors and mentees. If you are interested in participating either as a mentor, a mentee, or both, please fill out this registration form by FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, indicating your interest. There is a spot on the form to indicate whether you want to continue with last year’s arrangement, as well.

We want to be as flexible as possible so that mentoring pairs can figure out what works best for them, but we do offer some suggestions for getting started:

  • Determine which specific project you would like to work on with a mentor, or whether you would like help with less tangible things, such as gaining confidence in coursework or dealing with challenges in your workplace.

  • Determine how long you plan to commit. You may wish to start with a six-month commitment, and see how it goes.

  • Determine how often you would like to check-in with your mentor/mentee. Do you want to engage weekly, bi-weekly, monthly? What makes the most sense for your goals and schedules?

  • Determine which medium works best for your relationship (Zoom, WebEx,  Facetime, email, phone, etc.).

Feel free to direct any questions to jenoch1@umd.edu

All best,
Jess Enoch
Immediate Past President

Peitho Summer 2025 Issue: Menstrual Rhetorics and Girlhood Culture

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The Peitho Editorial Team is proud to announce the publication of the summer 2025 issue, guest-edited by Jen Almjeld and Sarah Hagelin. The topic of the issue is Menstrual Rhetorics and Girlhood Culture, and Almjeld and Hagelin write:
This issue is a scholarly contribution to these sorts of discussions centered on girls and periods. The issue features eight articles that consider girlhood and menstruation from a variety of perspectives: in young adult literature, in online teen magazines, in healthcare, in activism, and as deeply personal, embodied experience. We see this issue creating space to talk seriously, critically, and from multiple perspectives about an experience steeped in cultural and political misunderstanding and misrepresentation.
The articles in this issue blend personal reflection with scholarly analysis to discuss menstruation among trans youth, in Gaza, among youth with eating disorders, representations of menstruation in media, and more
Cover Art: At the top is a black bar with the following text in a serif font: “Summer 2025,” “Peitho,” and “Vol. 27.4.” Underneath that are the words “Menstrual Rhetorics” in a large handwriting font (white with light turquoise offset), and under that, “and Girlhood Culture” in a light orange font. On the right side of the image is an assemblage of red flowers on a menstrual pad. On the left side, a circle with two dark coral drops in the middle and a # sign at the top of the circle. Toward the bottom of the image is a calendar with drops on specific dates indicating a menstrual period. At the bottom of the image are the words “PERIOD power,” and “Talking periods for and with all bodies that menstruate.”

Cover Art: At the top is a black bar with the following text in a serif font: “Summer 2025,” “Peitho,” and “Vol. 27.4.” Underneath that are the words “Menstrual Rhetorics” in a large handwriting font (white with light turquoise offset), and under that, “and Girlhood Culture” in a light orange font. On the right side of the image is an assemblage of red flowers on a menstrual pad. On the left side, a circle with two dark coral drops in the middle and a # sign at the top of the circle. Toward the bottom of the image is a calendar with drops on specific dates indicating a menstrual period. At the bottom of the image are the words “PERIOD power,” and “Talking periods for and with all bodies that menstruate.”

Sustaining the Coalition and Funding Programming

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Dear Coalition Members,

What a wonderful FemRhets at UNH this month! Being together at conferences is critical to our professional lives and our Coalition. But we have other structures of support to like: Glenn AtA webinars, virtual mentoring partnerships, Peitho, our awards and grants, and our annual Cs events. Many of you have supported the Coalition with your time and energy as volunteers—thank you! But someone of you asked if you can help in other ways, and indeed you can. Here’s how:

The Coalition officers invite you donate to the Coalition through this Donately campaign. If you have the means and desire, any amount is welcome, and all donations are tax deductible.

Please make your donation to the CFSHRC through this Donately page. Also, please note that we have Sustaining and Lifetime memberships that help promote the fiscal future of the Coalition. We so appreciate your support as we plan: FemRhets 2027 held at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, future issues of Peitho, upcoming awards and webinars, and our annual gathering at Cs (Wednesday, March 4).

We are a lean, volunteer-run professional organization, so we also deeply appreciate everyone volunteering for committees and stepping up to help when and however you can. Thanks, in advance, for any support you can give.

In solidarity,
Becca Richards (Pres.), Cristy Beemer (VP), Jess Enoch (Immediate Past President), David Gold (Treasurer), and Risa Applegarth (Secretary)

Feminisms and Rhetorics 2027 Site Announcement: U of Minnesota- Twin Cities!

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Dear Coalition,

On behalf of the Conference Planning Committee, we’re thrilled to announce the site for the 2027 conference:

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities! 

The conference theme will be “Resistance/Resilience: Sustaining Feminist Activism,” and will be hosted by Drs. Liane Malinowski and Jacklyn Fiscus-Cannady in the U of M Department of Writing Studies.

Some members of the Coalition may recall that the University of Minnesota also hosted FemRhets in 1999. This is the first time in the history of the Coalition that we have returned to a former conference site! Stay tuned for the CFP in 2026.

Many thanks to the current members of the Conference Planning Committee members who circulated the call for hosts, encouraged submissions, and reviewed applications. Committee members are: Patrick Thomas (chair), Holly Anderson, Moushumi Biswas, Cristy Beemer, Erica Cirillo-McCarthy, and Rhea Lathan. Please be in touch with Coalition President, Becca Richards (president@cfshrc.org) regarding opportunities, questions, or concerns.

The Coalition’s Conference Standing Committee supports conference site hosts in their efforts to host conferences that are antiracist and inclusive, affordable, accessible, and transparent in their conference planning.

Share Your Ideas for 2025-2026 Cheryl Glenn Advancing the Agenda Webinar Series

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The CFSHRC Cheryl Glenn Advancing the Agenda Webinar series hosts 3 events a year (typically between October and June) to provide members with mentoring/workshop events focused on a variety of feminist-related topics. Last year, for example, we discussed the presidential election and coalition building strategies, grant proposals, and community engagement work. These events and those that preceded them in previous years have been deeply meaningful and broadly engaging, so we’re thrilled to continue the Webinar series thanks to financial support from Cheryl Glenn!

The planning committee (co-chaired by Patty Wilde and Jenna Vinson) and I invite you to suggest topics, workshops, discussion leaders/scholars you’d like to see in the next year. Additionally, we welcome self-nominations, too. To receive full consideration, we’d appreciate your responses to this survey by August 1, 2025.

For those of you attending Feminisms and Rhetorics this week, consider nominating a panel you attend for a webinar. If you hear a panel/presentation that you think would help our Coalition, we’d love to know about it. Again, you can submit your ideas using this Google Form link: https://tinyurl.com/mr3e2vy2.

While we won’t be able to take up every idea, we appreciate any nominations and suggestions. And we look forward to seeing you at an upcoming webinar!

Thank you so much!
Becca Richards, President
Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.