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

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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).

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Annual Membership/Volunteer Survey

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Just ahead of Winter Solstice (in the northern hemisphere), I send a request on behalf of the Executive Board. Please find a few (~5-6) spare moments to fill out our annual membership survey, available at this link (https://goo.gl/forms/DnNQLChHYuUYbVby1). Please feel free to do so now or just after the holidays as you contemplate returning to the vagaries of the next semester/quarter/term. The survey will collect responses through January 15, 2019.

May you all experience the realities of a peaceful, joyous, and humane new year, no matter the circumstances,

-Tarez Graban
CFSHRC President
(on behalf of the Executive Board)

To the work you do …

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Like many of you, I’m simultaneously intrigued and exhausted by watching, listening to, and reading about today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, investigating sexual assault allegations brought forth by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh. As the positions from which various senators spoke oscillated between critiquing the process, critiquing the investigative ethics, questioning what counts as evidence, and making statements about one another’s motives and behaviors—and moreover, as the performances oscillated between expressions of maltreatment, expressions of solidarity, and expressions of mistrust—it became less clear to me what should be at stake in the hearing at this moment, let alone what will have been at stake when the hearing gets taken up in other historic moments. (What should have been clear became so easily obfuscated.)

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Re-Examining Intersectionality in our 30th Year

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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.

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Stone Walls and Summer Projects

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Dear All,

The central terminal of the O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa is architecturally significant. Some of the walls are constructed of polished geologic stone as if to mark the origins of the continent, and on some of these stone walls the traveler will see a carving or marquee with an African proverb. The attribution of these proverbs is interesting – sometimes they are unknown, sometimes they are far too broadly attributed, and at other times they are mis-attributed but have become woven into the postcolonial discourses of an African country nonetheless. Regardless of its origins, this particular proverb has come to my mind repeatedly over the past few months, as an indication of how the Coalition’s idea of feminist scholarship has informed – and continues to inform – the work of the field at large: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

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Greetings for the 2018-2020 Term

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The optimal way for me to begin this new (2018-2020) term is with the following six gratitudes and platitudes, calling attention to a collaborative leadership structure in which the Coalition has made an important and long-term investment.

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Coalition Welcomes First Peitho Web Coordinator

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The Coalition is pleased to announce that Jen England, assistant professor of professional writing and rhetoric at Hamline University, now serves as Peitho journal’s first web coordinator. Given the journal’s growth and emerging need to become a platform that accommodates a range of web-based formats for publishing scholarly work, the time seemed right to create and fill this role. 

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Winner of the Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award: Jean Bessette’s Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives

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The Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award honors its namesake by recognizing outstanding, book-length contributions in the areas of feminist pedagogy, practice, history, and theory in rhetoric and composition. For the 2018 award, the Coalition received an unprecedented 16 nominations, reflecting the great breadth and diversity of feminist academic work, from subject matter and research methods to modes of delivery and exigences addressed. We want to thank everyone who nominated publications this year as well as the publishers of the print and digital books that were nominated. In addition, we want to thank all of this year’s authors for their inspiring contributions to feminist work in our field.  The Coalition is pleased to announce that Jean Bessette’s Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives is the recipient of the 2018 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award.

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Inaugural Feminist Research Grant Recipients

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The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition is pleased to announce the inaugural recipients of the Feminist Research Grant (FRG). This grant is designed to support the research of feminist scholars and teachers, especially to support archival research, translation, interview transcription, digital archivization and/or digital project development. Join us in congratulating the inaugural recipients of the Feminist Research Grant: Christine Garcia, Krystin Gollihue, and Nancy Henaku.

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Many Thanks from Immediate Past President

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It is a strange and wondrous thing to be stepping down as the Coalition President without our annual meeting at CCCC to mark the occasion.  I would like to thank all of you for your support as I moved into position as the President—I certainly had no idea when I agreed to the task that we would be moving through such politically turbulent times. 

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