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

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