Rhetoric and Composition @ WSU

The Rhetoric & Composition Program will be well-represented at this year’s 4 C’s convention, with over a dozen faculty and students delivering talks:

•  On 2/17 Professor (and Director of Composition) Ellen Barton will deliver a talk entitled “If I Knew Then What I Know Now” as the keynote speaker of the Qualitative Research Network meeting.
• On 2/18 five of our graduate students will present as part of the panel “Don’t Call It a Comeback: Remixing the Rhetorical Canons as Affirmative Rhythms”: Jared Grogan (”Style: Regenerative Style in Ecocomposition”); Mary Karcher (”Delivery: Exploring the Potential of Participatory Culture”); Wendy Duprey (”Arrangment: Rearranging Arrangment with Kairotic Attunement”); Michael McGinnis (”Invention: The Crowded House of Writing as Social Process”); and Kim Lacey (”Memory: Techne, Technology, and Remembering”).
• On 2/18 PhD candidate Jill Morris will be a participant in the “Writing Lessons from Gamespace: Playing with Rhetoric and Rhetoricizing with Play” roundtable discussion.  
• On 2/19, PhD candidate Car Kozma will present the talk “Check Out This Remix: Sampling Globalization Theory into Service Learning” as part of the panel “Remixing Service Learning for Civic Engagement.”
• On 2/19, Professor Gwen Gorzelsky will present a talk entitled “Remixing Literacy and Social Change: Findings from a Historical-Qualitative Study of Spirtual Literate Practices” as part of the panel “Remixing Literacy to Create Cultural and Religious Identities: Literacy Practices of Inclusion.”
• On 2/19, PhD candidate Clayton Walker will present the talk “The Embodied Act of Writing: Toward a Theory of Affects and Agency” as part of the “Theorizing Agency in Writing Studies” panel.
• On 2/19, PhD candidate Whitney Hardin will deliver the talk “Remixed Identities: Rhetorical Ecologies and the Performance of Louisvillian Citizenship” as part of the panel “Remixing and Theorizing Identity in Louisville.”
• On 2/19, Professors Richard Marback and Jeff Pruchnic will present the talks “The Cosmopolitan Virtues of Working Class Consciousness” and “Analog Politics, Digital Economies: Rethining Progressive Pedagogy,” respectively, as part of the panel “Remixing Work: Learning to Labor in the Digital Economy.”
• On 2/20, Professor James Brown will present the talk “Delivery: From Cicero to Beyonce” as part of the panel “‘Is Aristotle on Twitter?’ A RhetComp DigiTech Mashup.”

Professor Marback’s essay “A Meditation on Vulnerability in Rhetoric” appears in the latest issue of Rhetoric Review (29.1, 2010).

Professor (and Director of Composition) Barton has been named a winner of Wayne State’s Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award. The award is presented annually to two members of the university’s graduate faculty whose scholarly achievements are judged to have contributed significantly to the University’s scholarly profile. Professor Barton’s previous awards include the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Braddock Award (2009); Technical Communication Quarterly’s Nell Ann Pickett Award (2009); and The National Council of Teachers of English awards for Best Article in Reporting Qualitative or Quantitative Research in Technical or Scientific Communication (2005), Best Article on Methods of Teaching Technical/Scientific Communication (2004), and Best Article on Philosophy or Theory in Scientific and Technical Communication (2002).