The program will be well-represented at the Computers & Writing 2011 Conference hosted by the University of Michigan this May.
- Faculty member Jim Brown will be a co-leader of the “Composing Digital Scholarship: A Workshop for Authors” workshop (session HDW02, Thursday 9 AM-12PM), co-presenting a talk entitled “Digital Poetry: Coding Publics” as part of the “Networked Publics” panel (session B02; Friday 11:45 AM-1 PM), and a panelist for the third Town Hall of the conference, “The Future(s) of Computers and Writing” (session TH03, Sunday 12 PM-1 PM);
- PhD candidate (and GTA) Andy Engel will present a talk entitled “Writing On/In/Over Space: Writing Practices in Augmented and Dimished Reality” as part of the panel “Writing in Action: Citizenship and Electronic Common Spaces” (session B04, Friday 11:45 AM-1 PM);
- PhD candidate Donoroa Hillard will present a talk entitled “’The very brokenness of these things is the witness of my life’: New Media Writing and the Alzheimer’s Afflicted Individual” as part of the panel “Brokenness and the Quest for Identity in New Media” (session E12, Saturday 8 AM-9:45 AM);
- PhD candidate Mary Karcher will present a talk entitled “Fringe, Fans, and Facts: Alternate Reality Games as Research Methodology” as part of the “Serious Fun and Games” panel (session E10, Saturday 8:30 AM-9:45 AM);
- Faculty member Julie Thompson Klein, who served as a proposal judge and as the HASTAC Liaison on for the C&W Conference Planning Committee, will moderate the second Town Hall, “Are You a Digital Humanist?” (session TH02, Saturday 11:45 AM-12:45 PM);
- Recent PhD graduate Kim Lacey will present a talk entitled “Some New Laws of Motion Physics and Digital Writing” as part of the panel “Motion in Theory: Mobile Learners, Mobile Memes, and Mobile Access as Culturally Grounded Rhetorical Action” (session K02, Sunday 10:15 AM-11:30 AM);
- PhD candidate Jill Morris will be a participant in the preformance session “New Media Performance: Technology, Orality, Dance, and Speech” (session PERF01, Friday 8:00 AM-9:30 AM);
- Faculty member Jeff Pruchnic will present a talk entitled “Maps of the New Worlds: William Bunge and Digital/Ethical Representation” as part of the panel “Historical Perspectives and Current Applications: The Pasts and Futures of Digital Scholarship, Zines, and the Ethics of Technical Communication” (session K01, Sunday 10:15 AM-11:30 AM); and
- PhD candidate (and GTA) Derek Risse will present a talk entitled “Zombie Etymologies: Hacking as New Media Voodoo” as part of the panel “Templates: Formal, Informal, and Hacked” (session H11, Saturday 4:15 PM-5:30 PM).
Four graduate students (and GTA’s) in the program will deliver talks as part of WSU’s Center for Study of Citizenship 8th Annual Conference, “Bodies and Citizenship.” As part of the “Rhetoric and/of Citizenship” panel taking place from 8:30-10:00 AM on Saturday, April 2, Michael McGinnis will deliver a talk entitled “Common Sense: Schmitt and Arendt on What We Know,” Whitney Hardin will deliver a talk entitled “Citizenship for the Multitude: The Rhetoric of Localization,” Derek Risse will present a talk entitled “Speaking of Citizenship: Human-Citizens, Animal-Others, and the Ethics of the Rhetorical Event,” and Michael Ristich will present a talk entitled “Hot Bodies: Derrida and the Rhetoric of Global Warming.” The panel will be moderated by the English Department’s own Michael Scrivener.
Department Chair Ellen Barton will also introduce plenary speaker and former faculty member Susan Well, who will deliver a talk entitled “Genres of Citizenship: Power Structure Research in the 1960s and 1970s.” Information on the conference and the full program can be found here.
The Rhetoric & Composition program will be well represented at the 2010 meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, fielding nine presentations during the conference:
- On Friday, May 28, PhD candidate Jill Morris will present a talk entitled “These Balls Taste Like Christmas: The Rhetoric of Memes in Classroom Community Building”
- On Saturday, May 29, PhD candidate Michael Ristich will present a talk entitled “Birthers, Partiers, and Anarchists: The Rhetoric of Anarchism in Contemporary Political Discourse”
- Also on Saturday, faculty member Jeff Pruchnic will deliver the talk “‘To Give Back What is Given’: Isocrates and the Rhetoric of Appropriation”
- On Sunday, May 30, several PhD candidates will present talks as part of the panel “Scandalous!!! Reclaiming Controversy for Rhetorical Scholarship”: Michael McGinnis (“A Matter of Life and Death Panels: Carl Schmitt’s Anti-Rhetorical Politics”); Kim Lacey (“Forgetting to Remember: Keeping Tabs on Digital Memory”); and Derek Risse (“Navigating the Mundane: A Controversially Uncontroversial Approach to Digital Identity in the Twenty-First Century”)
- Also on Sunday, faculty members Ellen Barton and Richard Marback will co-present the talk “Clinical and Critical Imperatives, Impact, and Pragmatic Interdisciplinarity” and faculty member Jim Brown will deliver the talk “New Media and the Limits of Lanham’s ‘Cybernethics’”
- On Monday, May 31, PhD candidate Conor Shaw-Draves will present the talk “Writing in the Moment: Kairos and Performance in Composition”
- Also on Monday, faculty member Richard Marback will deliver the talk “Wikus van der Merwe’s Body and the Fragility of Democratic Rhetoric”
Professor Pruchnic will deliver a talk entitled “On the Genealogy of Mortals: Rhetoric, Biotechnologies of the Self, and the Ethics of Immortality” as part of the 2010-2011 Humanities Center Brown Bag Colloquium Series. The talk is from 12:30 to 1:30 PM, Wednesday, April 4, in room 2339 of the Faculty Administration Building.
Abstract: Two arguments are made in this talk, both of which are fairly straightforward but at the same time somewhat perverse insofar as they try to invert traditional approaches to the subjects under review. The first is that the creation and population of “virtual worlds” — online communities that take place inside computer-based simulated environments — is an example of one of three primary ways that the purposes that drive biological evolution, as first defined by Darwin, take place in contemporary times, a moment in which many evolutionary biologists have proposed that human biological evolution has ended, or at least no longer functions in the ways in which we have traditionally conceived of evolution. The second is that studying the ways that virtual worlds and the “virtual life” populating them have developed and been sustained online might also offer novel strategies for thinking through one of the more urgent concerns of contemporary biological life: environmental crises and the question of how to promote more sustainable lifestyles and uses of natural resources.
In taking up these questions, this talk also discusses more generally the difficulties of defining evolution and “life” and various attempts to link biological evolution and human ethics from the nineteenth century into the present.
