Who’s in, Coalition? 
The image featured in this post shows a tweet posted by @CWSHRC that reads, “A Q for @CWSHRC #4C15-goers: Who can help tweet our 3/18 6:30pm session? It’s Marriott Salon E—& here, hopefully! .” Below @jcburgess25 replies: “@CWSHRC Looking forward to attending & to tweeting from the session!
4C15 approaches, and there are an unprecedented number of incredible sounding sessions and events on the docket. In fact, it is a near-impossible task to choose just one per time slot. That’s where the Coalition can help.
3/18: Spend the day (9-5) at the Feminist Workshop in the Tampa Convention Center, Room 5. This year’s theme is “Teaching, Service, and the Material Conditions of Labor.” Participants will work to identify ways they can and do engage in feminist labor within academia. First Level Co-Chairs include Lauren Connolly, Jennifer Nish, April Cobos, Patty Wilde, April Conway, Lydia McDermott, Roseanne Gatto, Shannon Mondor, Moushumi Biswas, Emma Howes, Alison A. Lukowski, Nicole Khoury, and Lauren Rosenberg. Speakers include Dawn Opel, Liz Egen, Jessica Philbrook, Dara Regaignon, Jennifer Heinert, Cassandra Phillips, Shelley Hawthorne Smith, and Michele Lockhart, Kathleen Mollick.
The letters CWS, HRC, and NWS are stacked on top of each other at the center of this image. The phrase “CCCC 2015” runs sideways along the left-hand side; the names of NWS speakers are listed (also sideways) on the right.
3/18: Join the CWSHRC from 6:30-8:30 in the Marriott’s Salon E.
We’ll start with a showcase of new work by 11 Coalition scholars: Heather B. Adams, Erin M. Andersen, Geghard Arakelian, Heather Branstetter, Tamika Carey, Lavinia Hirsu, Nicole Khoury, Katie Livingston, LaToya Sawyer, Erin Wecker, and Patty Wilde.
We’ll end with interactive mentoring tables on the following topics: Alt Academics & Independent Scholars with Beth Hewett & Erin Krampetz, Campus Labor Activism with Kirsti Cole & Bo Wang, Developing Research Questions with David Gold, Sarah Hallenbeck, & Lindsay Rose Russell, Grad School Transitions with Nan Johnson & Wendy Sharer, Fostering Inclusion with Risa Applegarth, Cristina Ramirez, & Hyoejin Yoon, Making Monographs with Kate Adams & Lynée Gaillet, Making the Most of Digital Resources with April Cobos & Becca Richards, Mentoring Undergraduate Research with Jane Greer & Paige Banaji, When and How to Say No with Marta Hess & Gwen Pough, Working in the Archives with Nancy Myers & Kathleen Welch.
This image, an informational poster for the Women’s Network SIG, features a Wonder Woman LEGO figure, complete with star-spangled bikini and red boots.
3/19: Participate in the Women’s Network SIG from 6:30-7:30 in the Tampa CC, Room 14.Open to all CCCC attendees, this Special Interest Group is a participant-led sharing session on gender, professional labor, and workplace equity. Chair: Heather B. Adams.
3/21: Meet the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession from 9:30-10:30 at the Action Hub in Tampa CC, Ballroom B. This final-day meet-up is a chance to talk with representatives from all 4Cs committees, including this one led by Co-Chairs Holly Hassel and K. Hyoejin Yoon.
There is a lot going on with the Coalition these days, and as a result we have five new scholarly and volunteer opportunities to announce. Specifically, we are currently looking for 1) a new Assistant Editor to Peitho; 2) a Curator for the Digital New Work Showcase that will appear in Peitho 17.2; 3) volunteers for a new Task Force on Digital Media; 4) volunteers for a new Task Force on Mission Articulation; 5) and FemRhet 2015 liaisons.
Read all about these great opportunities to get (more) involved with the Coalition and volunteer!
1) Assistant Editor, Peitho
A great opportunity for a Coalition scholar who would like to join the Peitho Editorial Team and learn more about Peitho and scholarly editing, the Associate Editor is responsible for book reviews, author correspondence, and (if desired) contributor mentoring. You can read more here. For full consideration, applications are due 12/10/2014.
2) Curator, Digital New Work Showcase
Attention digital scholars: The Coalition would like to collaborate with you on the digital version of this year’s 4Cs New Work Showcase. The event itself will feature new scholarship by 12 Coalition colleagues, and the digital version of the event will make everyone’s work accessible to Peitho 17.2 readers. Volunteers for this role should be experienced multimedia composers familiar with Word Press. Interested? Volunteer by 10/27.
3) Task Force on Digital Media
Are you a social media maven? Do you research digital scholarly and social communication? If you answered, “Yes!” to one or both of these questions, then you are half way to joining the Task Force on Digital Media, which will help the Coalition develop and use its online resources. Ready to take that next step? Click the link and volunteer by 10/27.
4) Task Force on Mission Articulation
As many of you know, members of the Advisory Board have become increasingly concerned that the Coalition is failing to engage the full range of teachers and scholars who are doing feminist historical work (broadly defined) in rhetoric and composition. In particular, we worry that our group’s nomenclature, language in our governing documents, and/or our organizational practices contribute to a culture that undermines the CWSHRC mission and alienates scholars we wish to include: scholars of color, LGBTQ scholars, scholars with disabilities, male-identified feminists, and more. Members of this task force will lead an organizational self-study and make concrete recommendations to the Advisory Board. Be part of this important group: volunteer by 10/27.
5) CWSHRC-FemRhet Liaison Committee
Are you *both* a FemRhet fan and a CWSHRC devotee? Join this committee and help coordinate conference-related communication and projects, including the FemRhet 2015 Book Exhibit. Everyone interested in hosting a future FemRhet conference is especially encouraged to apply (by 10/27).
With thanks to Michie.ru for “Volunteer.”
Mentoring is an activity and ethos fundamental to the CWSHRC, and this year Coalition members have a unique opportunity to mentor scholars who are knee-deep in important new work. Read on for details, including the 9/21 deadline for volunteering.
As you may recall, our Wednesday night session at the CCCC in Tampa will begin with an hour-long New Work Showcase featuring 12 scholars’ simultaneous, showcase-style presentations of new work. This group will also remediate their presentations for inclusion in the Spring 2015 issue of Peitho.
To prepare, we are matching each scholar with a mentor. Specifically, are pairing presenters with Coalition members
Nota bene: Conference presentations include posters, audio-visual laptop displays, brief activities, and so on. Peitho remediations will translate face-to-face presentations into formats that will be meaningful and accessible to online journal readers. The latter are *not* meant to extend conference presentations into full-length articles.
To become a mentor, review the list of Showcase presentations below and email me your request no later than Sunday, September 21st.
Best and looking forward!
Jenn, CWSHRC President (2014-2016)
1. From Research to Archive Building: A Model for Feminist Scholars Working with and for “Participants—This project is a prototype for a digital archive I hope to make with and for former unwed mothers. A StoryCorps-style interview will capture two mothers’ memories of being shamed and silenced, hiding their pregnancies, and relinquishing their children for adoption.
2. “Making the Most and Best Use of Eggs”: Producer-Consumers, Modernist Labor Periodicals, and the Rhetoric of The Farmer’s Wife—The Farmer’s Wife (c. 1906) is a periodical as unique as its intended audience. But should it remain a “ladies’ magazine” in scholarship? Or can connections be made to rhetorics of labor? This speaker will confront these questions, exploring 1916 issues of TFW & other magazines.
3. Recasting Aurora in a New Light: Rhetorical Agency, Genocide, and Cinema—The subject of this project is Aurora Mardaganian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide and a historical figure in American silent-cinema. As a historiographical recovery effort, it will examine the rhetorics Mardaganian deployed in order to understand what has not been considered or has yet to be theorized about Mardaganian’s rhetorical agency.
4. Madams, Memory, and Myth in a Wide-Open Mining Town—This project examines rhetorical patterns of historic discourse that enabled the open secret presence of brothel-based sex work in a rural northern Idaho mining town from 1894-1991. How do community values negotiated through gossip impact the way we create and change culture?
5. “I Apologize”: Promiscuous Audiences, Surveillance, and the Risks of Televised and Online Black Feminist Discourse—Ironically, successful shows like MSNBC’s “Nerdland” seem to amplify threats against Black women after verbal missteps. By analyzing recent controversies through a reimagining of the “promiscuous audience” (Zaeske 1995), this paper considers how to reduce risks of public activism.
6. Introducing the Digital Archive of the Colored State Normal School of Elizabeth State University, Elizabeth City, North Carolina—Resisting an essentialist view of the New England normal school and southern black industrial school, this presentation employs strategic listening to the journalist writings of young female teachers committed to literacy and community uplift despite legal disenfranchisement.
7. A Decade of Growth: An Overview of Feminist Research Methods and Methodologies—This presentation reports on feminist studies published in six leading journals in rhetoric and composition. This overview presents the types of feminist work valued in the discipline, and it identifies sites of intervention that feminist scholars should attune to in the future.
8. Middle Eastern Feminist Rhetorics—To challenge the persistent silencing of Middle Eastern women and address their exclusion from histories of rhetoric, this presentation reads contributions of Lebanese and Arab feminists to Al-Raida (1976-present) as integral to understanding contemporary transnational rhetorics.
9. Doing it All the Time: A Queer Consent Workshop—In queer and pro-sex feminist communities, sexual consent is an embodied process and a set of teachable practices. This mini-workshop uses the methodology of peer education to teach consent. Participants will learn consent practices and get consent zines as takeaways.
10. Black Feminists Make Online Community not War over Beyoncé and Feminism—In 2013, singer Beyoncé asserted herself as a feminist in her self-titled visual album. This project uses computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring 2004) of blog responses to the album to demonstrate how Black female bloggers build community through both assent and dissent.
11. Conscious Cleansing: Rhetorics of Reconciliation and Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries—This showcase will examine the impact of the Irish government’s apology to Magdalen laundry survivors as an act that alters the rhetorical space afforded to victims. As a way forward, a rhetoric of reconciliation is offered in conjunction with the work of Christine de Pizan.
12. Cross(dress)ing the Mason-Dixon Line: Recovering Rhetorical Histories that Disrupt Normative Notions of Gender—Featuring two memoirs that portray women’s experiences as crossdressing spies and soldiers in the American Civil War, this presentation advocates for recovery and study of histories that illuminate and disrupt assumptions about gender within rhetoric and composition scholarship.
If you follow the Coalition on Facebook or Twitter then you know May 5th turned out to be a banner day. In the throes of third quarter for some and the end of the semester and academic year for others, the meme to the right turned out to a rallying cry for our membership—along with more than 5000 of our friends, friends of our friends, friends of friends of our friends, and so on.
Oh, how tempting it is to try turning that runaway meme into an ad hoc membership drive. Oh so very, very tempting.
Instead, I offer everyone reading this post a unicorn, a variation on the theme of butterflies, and some rainbows.
To start, a unicorn along with the first rainbow:
This particular unicorn and the figure we now know as Everyprofessor, all revved up to grade all the things, are both the work of Allie Brosh. Although she did not create the meme, she is well known through her website, Hyperbole and a Half, her book by the same name, and all kinds of cool swag. Brosch writes humorously and movingly about any number of subjects, including her own childhood and depression. Increasingly, her work appears on rhetoric and composition syllabi alongside Lynda Barry‘s, Alison Bechdel‘s, and others’. When you have a chance, take a look. Meanwhile, we owe Brosh one heckuva hat tip.
As for butterflies, they’re aspirational. At least here along the shores of Lake Michigan it’s early for caterpillars let alone butterflies. As a substitute, how about a button? Back in March at #4C14 we gave everyone able to attend the Coalition’s 25th Anniversary Gala a keepsake pin. Today we pair it with a button. Specifically, and thanks to Alli Crandell, our most wonderful webmistress, we offer you a Peitho recommendation button.
Click it and you’ll find yourself on a page with a short form where you can tell Peitho‘s editors about colleagues with as-yet-unpublished projects on feminist research, histories of women, and/or studies of gender and sexuality in rhetoric and composition. If you are attending conferences this summer, starting with RSA in San Antonio, try it out. Please, too, let us know if you have any problems or suggestions for how it can be improved.
Now rainbows, a topic that has at least some of you thinking about 4Cs, Cs the Day, and those ever-sought-after Sparkleponies. (If you missed the post-conference controversy, read all about it here, here, here, and here.) Whether you plan to celebrate the sixth year of the conference’s first (formal) augmented reality game at #4C15 or not, as you get ready to upload your proposals plan to use Joyce Carter’s innovative keyword system to help Coalition members identify—and attend!—your sessions.
So far, three keywords have emerged as Coalition members’ favorites: Coalition, CWSHRC, and FemRhet. If your session addresses feminist research, histories of women, and studies of gender and sexuality in rhetoric and composition, use one or more of these terms, and next spring we’ll be there.
As promised, then, a unicorn, butterflies (more and less), and rainbows. Check this space again in a week or two for news about the Coalition’s 2014-15 volunteer survey among other things.
