How to make the most of CCCC 2013

Melissa Ianetta just posted this list for first-time attendees: Cs First Time Tips

1. Either use the online program or sit down with the program book when you get there and figure out what sessions are “must see” for your area of interest.

2. Go out and buy some kind of snack to keep in the room so that you’re not compelled to buy $8 muffins when you want a bite between sessions.

3. Go to the Coalition of Women in the History of Rhetoric and Composition meeting and attend the mentoring sessions.

4. Go to Bedford / St, Martin’s Party and consume as much free food as possible while talking to people you don’t know. Use this as an opportunity to broaden your understanding of the many, many kinds of schools and writing programs that are out there.

5. Wander around the book exhibit and try to figure out what kind of books each publisher specializes in and what books are contiguous to your interests.

6. Go to the business meeting — it’ll give you an idea how this racket works on the national level.

7. Go to the opening session.

8. Do talk to people you don’t know who share your interests (we’re friendly!) but try to resist the urge to opening a conversation by telling Ann Gere / Susan Jarratt / David Bartholomae that they, in fact, are Ann Gere / Susan Jarratt / David Bartholomae. (My grad school peers and I have already handled this announcement, so you can be sure they have this vital information).

9. Drink TONS of water — the talking and hotel air will turn you into a raisin.

10. Have publishers send you books. Avoid the almost-overwhelming desire to request every book you see. Do not try to carry them all home. Save your back and your luggage weight, if possible.

11. Bring a suitcase large enough for any swag you acquire and books you covet to the point of carrying them home.

12. Stop by the Newcomers table and yap with whoever is there. Our job is to help people figure out what’s what, to be friendly faces in the midst of an otherwise busy place, etc. Not that other people aren’t friendly. Maybe I should say we’re charged with being extra-friendly!

13. If possible, have a buddy. You don’t have to stay side by side all the time, but it multiplies the number of people you meet, gives you somebody you know you can find when you want to, somebody to debrief or be excited with.

14. Hang out in the lobby and people watch. You will be amazed at the (friendly!) faces you will put with names.

15. If you have business cards, bring a bunch; if you’re interested in reviewing either textbooks or professional books, introduce yourself to people at the booths, including the scholarly presses. Textbook reviews often are teacher/classroom based; scholarly presses, more on scholarship or a given issue. Be ready to talk about your areas of interest and experience why you’d want to review. But editors are always interested in hearing from people who care about books and media.

16. If you’re in on Wednesday, and are not in already in a workshop, visit the Research Network Forum — lots of graduate students there who are preparing research for publication, or to start a dissertation, meeting journal editors or hearing from others who have done the work. A great event to attend to get a sense of who your contemporaries are and what work is percolating through the field.

17. Go to at least one SIG that interests you.

18. Find a session with a topic that interests you, but that you haven’t read much on.

19. Don’t turn down the chance to have dinner or share a cab with people from other institutions. The more Cs I attend, the more I believe that networking is the most valuable aspect of our merry little gathering.

20. INTRODUCE YOURSELF TO ANYONE. 4Cs people, and WPA-L people in particular, are gracious, humble, and eager to do good in the world. Do not be intimidated by reputations. 99.97% of them do NOT see themselves as too important to talk to you, WHOEVER you are.

21. If you’re a grad student, assume that anyone you meet may be on a search committee interviewing you some day.

22. Water. Seconding Melissa, keep after your hydration, and by a water bottle to go with your power bars. Keep refilling your bottle.

23. Do Humor Night. Okay, okay, so I’m usually part of the CBB, and we gig there. So sue me. You need to see this. It will endear you to this conference and your discipline forever. Thursday, 8-10. Get an early start on the Bedfords party and then come on over.

24. SIGs. You will make more long-term connections in less time than at any other event. Yes, they are late, overlapping dinner and party time. You can do all that later in your career. SIGs will do more than anything else to ensure that you find ways of getting back here.

25. RNF. If you didn’t do it this year, get the info and do it next time. Peer review for scholarship. You can’t beat it. You can’t.

26. Go to the Newcomers’ Breakfast.

27. If you are at a publisher’s party or any other function where you see no one you know, but see someone else standing or sitting alone, go up and start a conversation with her or him. I’ve made some longstanding friends this way–anyone alone at these events (in my experience) is hoping for someone to talk with. I still do this, and I have learned a lot from these conversations.

28. Go to the Newcomers Think Tank for preparing proposals for next year.

29. Be sure to play C’s the Day, the annual conference game.

30. Don’t forget about social medial–tweet/blog/flickr/post to Facebook about what you see/attend/who you meet/etc. You can’t possibly attend every session, so you will want to read highlights of sessions.

31. Review sessions for Kairos. This is a terrific opportunity to get some peer reviewed publications and highlight sessions you attended that others didn’t (those who weren’t able to attend this year will really appreciate descriptive reviews of talks they wanted to go to and couldn’t attend).

CFP: Emerging Genres, Forms, and and Narratives in New Media Environments

The CRDM program at NCSU is pleased to announce the CFP for our 4th annual research symposium, organized by Carolyn R. Miller.  We hope you’ll join us in Raleigh for the event this spring!

Call for Papers
Emerging Genres, Forms, Narratives—in New Media Environments
Research Symposium
19–20 April 2013
Program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM)
North Carolina State University

Submission deadline: 1 February 2013

Digital media have enabled what impresses most observers as a dizzying proliferation of new forms of communicative interaction and cultural production, provoking all manner of multimodal experimentation, artistic and entrepreneurial innovation, adaptive construction and reconstruction, and a good deal of just plain play. Hyperlinking, interactivity, and crowdsourcing change our narrative strategies and structures. Some of these new forms go viral, some persist, some adjust incrementally, others languish or are rapidly replaced by something else. Scholars in multiple fields have begun to explore these processes of emergence, innovation, and stabilization, many of them working with the concept of genre, which has become newly important in rhetoric, literature, game studies, library and information science, film and media studies, applied linguistics, and elsewhere. As social recognitions that embed histories, ideologies, contradictions—as sites of inventive potential—as recurrent social actions—genres are constitutive of culture, in Giddens’s sense. Genre systems can tell us a great deal about social values and cultural configurations; narratives tell us who we are and who we want to be; rhetorical and poetic form offers recurrence, recognition, satisfaction.

The 2013 CRDM Research Symposium will explore through both theoretical inquiry and case studies these processes of emergence, innovation, and stabilization as rhetorical energy meets the affordances and constraints of new technologies. Issues of interest include the relationship(s) between medium (or technological affordances) and the evolution and stabilization of genre conventions; historical examples of genre emergence when old media were new (print, film, phonography, radio, television, etc.); the re-mediation or adaptation of familiar forms and narratives in new media; the potentialities of new combinations of modalities, of sound and text, image and word; the processes of global distribution, uptake, and modification of historically and culturally situated forms and narratives; the emergence and assimilation of new forms and genres in education, science, religion, and politics.

Sponsored by NC State’s doctoral program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, the annual CRDM Research Symposium brings together faculty, graduate students, invited speakers, and other participants to engage in collective inquiry and dialogue on a topic of interdisciplinary interest.

Keynote speakers for 2013 include Janet Giltrow (University of British Columbia), Lisa Gitelman (New York University), David Herman (Ohio State University), and Neil Randall (University of Waterloo Games Institute). For a full list of our keynote and featured speakers, please see the Speakers page.

We invite participation from CRDM faculty and graduate students; from other departments and programs across NC State University; from other universities and colleges, and from corporate, governmental, and academic institutions throughout the Research Triangle and at the national and international levels. We welcome two main types of submissions: (1) traditional paper presentations, and (2) digital projects or installations. To present a paper, please submit a 250 word proposal by 1 February 2013 through the submission portal on the conference website (Please note: you must have an account with the site to submit a proposal). To present a digital project, demonstration, or installation, please submit a 250 word proposal/description of the installation. Additionally, please include as much detail as possible about your space and technology requirements. Notifications will be sent on 15 February 2013.

Joint Event with Carolina Rhetoric Conference
The 2013 CRDM Research Symposium will be held jointly with the annual Carolina Rhetoric Conference (CRC), a graduate student conference organized cooperatively by students in rhetoric at Clemson University, the University of South Carolina, and NC State University, and hosted this year by CRDM students and the NC State chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America. The CRC is open to any graduate students interested in rhetorical studies. Several events will be held jointly by the CRC and the CRDM Symposium on Friday, and participants in each event will be able to attend sessions at the other.

Publications and Media Archives
We plan to publish selected papers from the Symposium as an edited volume and/or special journal issue related to the theme and to make videos of Symposium presentations available on the CRDM website. The CRC plans to create a podcast series. More details will be available later.

CRDM at the NCSU Graduate Research Symposium

Again this year, CRDM students made a strong showing at the 7th annual NCSU Graduate Research Symposium. Giving poster presentations this year were:

Jeff Swift, “Digital Demagoguery and the Virtue of Bias.” Jeff’s project examined demagoguery on online political websites.

Valeska Redmond, “The Influence of Power in Upward Employee Dissent.” Valeska’s research looked at how employees dissent in the workplace and developing a model for studying it.

Elizabeth Johnson-Young, “Media Use, Body (Dis)Satisfaction and Behavioral Intentions: Toward a Model of Media Effects and Health during Pregnancy.” Elizabeth examined the relationships between media use, (dis)satisfaction of their bodies, and health behaviors of pregnant women.

Ashley R. Kelly and Meagan Kittle Autry, “Temporal Trends in Digitally-Mediated Environmental Debate: An Analysis Across Media to Assess Social Media Use in Local Environmental Debate.” Ashley and Meagan’s research examined public response on Twitter.com to the proposed Duke Energy and Progress Energy merger. Their poster was awarded third place honors in the Humanities and Design division.

Meagan (l) and Ashley (r) with their winning poster. Photo courtesy of NCSU.

Another great Cs for CRDM

We’re all back from St. Louis and recovered from a great conference week. This year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication was extra special because our very own Dr. Chris Anson was the program chair. He worked tirelessly for the last 12+ months putting together a great four days of panels, workshops, events, and more for more than 3,500 writing instructors from across the United States and around the world. Thanks for all your hard work, Dr. Anson!

As usual, CRDM students made a stellar showing at the conference, and we want to acknowledge everyone from the program who participated in this year’s Cs.

Wendi Sierra: Co-led a workshop, “Play/Write 4.0: Alternative Reality Games and Composition” and gave a presentation, “Gamers, Scholars, Guildies: Gaming as a Gateway to Scholarly Identity”
Jennifer Ware: Co-led a workshop, “Multimedia Building Blocks: Design Plans and Storyboards” and gave a presentation, “Easing the Assessment Angst: Storyboarding Activities for the Composition Classroom”
Kati Fargo Ahern: Gave a presentation, “Attending to Sound: How Do We Listen for Auditory Rhetoric in Composition?” and co-led a workshop, “Cutting/Moving/Singing/Drawing through the Hype: Writing Actions and Activities in Multimodal Composition”
Kate Maddalena: Gave a presentation, “Collaboration and Control: The Instructor Icon in a Hybrid Writing Classroom”
Jeff Swift: Gave a presentation, “Disagreement Online: Engaging Students in Productive Digital Dialogue” and a Computer Connection session, “Digital Narratives in the Classroom: Multimodal Tools for Research, Debate, and Discussion”
Meagan Kittle Autry: Gave a presentation, “‘Are you talking to me?’: Facilitating Community in a Hybrid Composition Classroom”
Lauren Clark: Gave a presentation, “Commenting, Communicating, and Collaborating: How to Foster Productive Discussion Online”
Robin Snead: Gave a presentation, “Meaning Potential: Interface as Visual Metaphor” and co-led a workshop, “Cutting/Moving/Singing/Drawing through the Hype: Writing Actions and Activities in Multimodal Composition”
Dana Gierdowski: Gave a presentation, “It’s not Just About the Chairs: The Power Dynamics of the Classroom Space”
Jason Kalin: Gave a presentation, “Curating Copia: Amplifying Practices of Digital Memory”
Kevin Brock: Co-led a workshop, “Cutting/Moving/Singing/Drawing through the Hype: Writing Actions and Activities in Multimodal Composition” and had an installation with Dr. David Rieder, “emBody{text}”

Congratulations to everyone for participating in such a great conference. And start working on your proposals for next year’s conference now – Las Vegas, here we come!

~ Meagan Kittle Autry

CRC 2012, CRDM, and You

This weekend, February 17th and 18th, marks the 2012 Carolina Rhetoric Conference. CRC rotates between Clemson, NC State, and University of South Carolina (NCSU will be hosting in 2013, so mark your calendars). You can find the 2012 schedule here–NCSU and CRDM will be well represented.

• The Rhetoric of the Future: Enthymemes and Occupy Wall Street (Jeff Swift, CRDM)
•  #OCCUPY: Has the women’s liberation movement been occupied or is a distinct rhetorical genre rising from the ashes of social movement’s past? (William Sink, NCSU)
• The Ethos of Crap: Woot.com’s Approach to Credibility on the Web (Samara Mouvery, CRDM)
•  Rhetorics of Scale: Style and Interface in The Climate Reality Project (Brent Simoneaux, CRDM)
• Merging Duke Energy and Progress Energy: Examining Rhetorical Boundary Work in Nuclear Energy Discourses in the Carolinas (Meagan Kittle-Autry and Ashley R. Kelly, CRDM)

Keep your eyes out this weekend for some blogging recaps (you can check out our liveblog of the 2010 CRC here).

Computers and Writing 2012

Computers and Writing 2012 will be hosted at North Carolina State University, and CRDM is involved! We’ll post more about how CRDMers are involved with the conference in our next update, but for now please read our call for conference papers and a related call for a special issue of Enculturation. Please visit the official site as well.

The Call

We welcome proposal submissions for Computers and Writing 2012, “ArchiTEXTure: Composing and Constructing in Digital Spaces.” Under this theme, we encourage submitters to consider issues, challenges, and benefits specifically related to the production of digital texts. Additionally, submissions are encouraged to consider questions that both address “archiTEXTure” in the classroom and as part of a scholarly agenda.

The goal of this conference is to move beyond traditional, print-based examinations of new media objects as texts. Thus, we are interested in how digital spaces and new media objects interact with and influence the ways that we compose ourselves, our classrooms and our scholarly work. The archiTEXTure of new media can be the media object itself, but can also be the the contexts, spaces, bodies, materials, ideas, and histories of media. The TEXTure of the media could be the screen, but it could also be the differing surfaces and materials of media. In the space between the competing materialities of classroom and text, we can ask questions about construction, process, movement, and change.
At Computers and Writing 2012 we will turn our focus to those issues related specifically to composing and constructing as writing flows from the page and the screen to new contexts and formats. The concerns listed below are not exhaustive, but a beginning point for participants to consider:

• What are the material and/or immaterial barriers and considerations involved in creating new media/digital texts?
• What changes in the creative process take place when students and instructors utilize new or unfamiliar technologies?
• How do the institutions in which we teach and work constrain or enable different forms of production?
• How do new media objects and digital spaces help us to build identities as scholars, instructors, and/or students?
• How do new media objects and digital spaces enhance the way we construct our courses?
• What practical concerns do we and our students face when developing new media/digital texts?
• What do new media objects tell us about how technology influences the relationship to space, body, and self?

Presentation Formats
Computers and Writing 2012 invites proposals in a variety of formats: conference presentations and panels, installations, performances, half and full day workshops. We also introduce a new spin on the mini-workshop: a type of session we call CREATE! In all presentation formats, we strongly encourage presenters to move beyond a traditional read-aloud paper and consider other delivery methods. Please note that presenters can only have one speaking role.  A speaking role includes: Panels/roundtables, CREATE! sessions and ConstrucTEXT.  A speaking role does not include installations and workshops.

Individual Presentations (20 minutes; 250-word proposal)
Panels and Roundtables (90 minutes; 3 or more presenters; 500-word proposals)
Interactive Installations (250-word proposals)
Replacing the traditional poster session, we instead encourage scholars to share research projects, game play, software, videos, or other media that they are researching in or teaching with. Interactive Installation proposals should describe space and technology requirements

Half-Day (3 hour) or Full-Day (6 hour) Pre-Conference Workshops (1 or more presenters; 500-word proposals plus schedule of activities)
Pre-conference workshops are intended to involve participants in a technology or issue set that rewards intensive work, giving them opportunities to learn new applications, assessment, and integration of emergent technologies for writing, learning, and collaboration. Workshops should be participatory, and proposals should articulate how attendees will interact with each other, the presenters, and/or technologies involved. If you submit a workshop proposal, please submit a word document that outlines the proposed workshop timeline of activities.

CREATE!  (90 minutes; 1 or more presenters; 500-word proposals)
CREATE! sessions are similar to mini-workshop sessions at prior C&W conferences. For these sessions facilitators should focus on presenting a specific application or skill to attendees, and all participants should leave the CREATE! sessions with an artifact that they produced. This artifact can be something quite traditional—the basic outline for a lesson plan or a specific activity to use in a classroom—or it could be a new media object.

ConstrucTEXT (90 minutes; 1 or more artists/performers; 500-word proposals, including samples of work if applicable)
ConstrucTEXT sessions are designed specifically to invite artists, performers, and creators to present their work at the conference. We are interested in highlighting artists who are interacting with technologies in some way, shape or form. Sessions can be performance-based, and artists should indicate length of performance, and space and technology needs. In addition, artists are encouraged to take some time to talk about their work which could be during a round table with other artists or an individual session.

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Onsite Conference: Thursday, May 17, 2012 – Sunday, May 20, 2012
Proposal Submission Opens: September 17, 2011
Proposal Due Date: October 22, 2011 (before midnight EST)
Notifications of Acceptance: December 15, 2011
Registration Opens: January 15, 2012
Online Conference: Dates to be announced

CFP: Enculturation 2012 Special Issue

Computers & Writing 2012: ArchiTEXTure: Composing and Constructing in Digital Spaces
Guest Editors
Meagan Kittle Autry, North Carolina State University
Ashley R. Kelly, North Carolina State University

We welcome manuscript submissions for a special issue of Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. For this issue, we invite papers originating from presentations given at Computers and Writing 2012, “ArchiTEXTure: Composing and Constructing in Digital Spaces.”  Under this theme, conference organizers encourage submitters to consider issues, challenges, and benefits specifically related to the production of digital texts. Additionally, submissions are encouraged to consider questions that both address “archiTEXTure” in the classroom and as part of a scholarly agenda.

Notifications of acceptance for C&W 2012 will be sent to the presenters on December 15, 2011. Should your presentation be accepted to the 2012 conference, we encourage you to consider crafting and creating your presentation now for consideration in this online special issue.

Media and Genres
We welcome a mix of media and genres to reflect the various presentation types featured at Computers and Writing 2012 individual presentations, interactive installations, CREATE! sessions, or ConstrucTEXT presentations. Traditional essays, hypertexts, videos, and multimedia projects are all suitable for publication in Enculturation.

Schedule
Inquiries from authors to guest editors begin: September 25, 2011 (Not all submissions must be queried first, but authors are welcome to correspond about their ideas)
Submissions due: Final day of C&W conference, May 20, 2012
Notifications to authors sent: July 15, 2012
Revised manuscripts due by: September 1, 2012
Publication date: October 1, 2012

Submission Guidelines
Please send queries and submissions to guest editors at cwspecialissue[at]gmail[dot]com.
Email should include author name(s), email address(es), and title of submission within the body. Please ensure no identifying information is contained within your file submission. Submissions should be attached as .doc or .rtf formats. If you are submitting a non-print text, please email the guest editors to inquire regarding appropriate formats for your submission.

A wild time at Wildacres: Carolina WPA Conference recap

For two and a half days this week, I got to escape my tethered technological lifestyle and escape to the mountains of North Carolina to Wildacres, a conference center and retreat in Little Switzerland, NC. There, I attended the Carolinas Writing Program Administrators’ fall conference with fellow administrators at North Carolina State. It was my first year attending the conference, and I am glad for the opportunity to meet other WPAs from institutions around the Carolinas – it was an excellent networking opportunity.

The entrance to Wildacres. Source: Wildacres.org

We arrived late Monday afternoon, weaving up the top of a mountain. The conference center is a quaint assemblage of wooden cabins and larger buildings, some residential, some with open conference space, and one large mess hall. Yes, a mess hall – we were commanded to each meal by the ringing of a bell. (I didn’t know anyone still did that!) The mission of Wildacres is to provide a retreat and conference space for non-profit organizations, particularly in the arts, and to give attendees a chance to reconnect with nature. There are no TVs in the rooms at Wildacres, nor phones nor clocks, and our group quickly ate up the limited wifi bandwidth available – and crashed it for the remaining time that we were there!

This year’s conference theme was grant writing and funding, an increasingly important component of a WPA job. Our own Susan Miller-Cochran spoke the first evening about national WPA council grants that are available, providing insight from her years of experience on the council. Tuesday was a full day of workshops, including discussion from Tim Peeples at Elon, who spoke from his experience as an Associate Provost about how to apply for and win internal grant funding. Meg Morgan at UNC-Charlotte talked about finding national funding sources, and Michelle Eble from East Carolina University gave an overview of researching and writing grant proposals. The sessions combined informative discussion and writing (hey, we are WPAs, after all) that left us all feeling a little more confident about applying for grant money for our own programs.

Our two day mini-retreat was not all work, though – there was plenty of time for socializing, games, and and bonfire. While I certainly learned a lot about grants, the best part for me was the social time, talking to other WPAs from the Carolinas and making important connections for when I’m on the job market in two years (still such a long ways away!). Groups members are clearly close friends, and were open and welcoming to newbies/grad students in attendance. On the first night, we had an informal ping pong (table tennis for all the serious players out there) tournament, which yours truly is proud to say she is the champion of. Guess I’ll have to go next year to defend my title! Our final night, the staff at Wildacres held a bonfire for us, and we enjoyed more socialization, roasting marshmallows, and some banjo and guitar entertainment provided by a couple of members. We awoke Wednesday morning to a dreary, rainy day at the top of the mountain, and after a quick breakfast and “beat you in ping pong next year!” we were on the road back to Raleigh.

The rocking chairs were a popular spot for socializing. Source: Wildacres.org.

It was truly a good time had by all, and I got the sense that the writing program administrators’ community is not just a professional group, but a community in the true sense of the word, where members look out for one another and are working together to achieve their goals and to improve writing programs at all institutions. This was also a good time for me to get to know my fellow NCSU administrators better, too. Special thanks to the First Year Writing Program at NCSU and director Susan Miller-Cochran for the opportunity to participate!

~ Meagan
*This post originally appeared on my own blog, Meg’s Road to PhD.

CRDM’s second annual research symposium: Environments, Risks, and Digital Media: Communicating, Governing, and Managing Risks in a Mediated World

“The unique moment—being here now, talking throughout the day—is not digital.”

–G. Thomas Goodnight, NCSU Rolf Buchdahl Memorial Lecture, April 15^th, 2011

CRDM hosted its second annual research symposium on April 15^th and 16^th, with keynote talks on Friday from both established and emergent scholars: Graham Murdock, G. Thomas Goodnight, Blake Scott, and Matthew Nisbet. The two-day “discourse party” (Kinsella, 2011) proved to be a concentrated complex of conversation about the ways we construct control and chaos in the digital/global age.

Murdock (dressed in a pleasant combination of three different greens) and Goodnight bookended Friday with talks that focused on the contested field (risk) and its rhetorical milieu (digital media), respectively. Murdock proposed risk as a narrative that is replacing progress in a time when progress is “exhausted.” He went on to describe several material variables (connectivity, interactivity, and mobility) that allow the digital media frame risk and influence public perception. Our own Jeremy Packer, in his response, added “informationalizability” to the list of important digital affordances—the ability of the digital to immediately add to the pool of data that name, locates, and fixes risky populations. Packer also noted that the word “obfuscation” was easier to type than it was to say.

2nd-year Chris Cummings, doing his best to avoid obfuscating anything.

Blake Scott and Matthew Nisbet, the other two keynote speakers, spoke about media’s role in specific risk communication events. Scott addressed the “riskiness of rhetoric” around the global pharmaceutical market and how India specifically dealt with the Western framing of its generic drug trade. Nisbet discussed the scientific community’s much-vexed struggle to communicate to the public about climate change. His talk included his own audience effect study, given on the National Mall.

Other Friday speakers included Dr. Carolyn Miller, who invoked Aristotle and asked what trust means in terms of risk communication, and David Berube, who talked about spin and strategies of risk attenuation on the web.

Saturday’s topic were more various, and included analysis of emails from “Climategate” (Marlia Banning of Texas A&M), recreation and park system management’s use of risk communication (Jordan Smith, NCSU) media effects on health-related decision making during pregnancy (Kelly Albada and Brandi Moyer, NCSU), “risky” sound and control of the soundscape (Seth Mulliken, NCSU), and a revision of existing frameworks for studying the social amplification of risk (Chris Cummings, NCSU).  After lunch, a session devoted entirely to the nuclear question and recent events at Fukushima included Andrew Binder (NCSU), Tatsuo Nakajima (Duke), Tudor Ionescu (Stuttgart), and Ashley Kelly & Meagan Kittle-Autry (NCSU). Our own Bill Kinsella, Elizabeth Dickinson (Salem College), and visiting NCSU professor Pat Arneson ended the day.

This reporter thinks that the highlights of the symposium were the intellectually risky situations it engendered and managed, itself.  Foremost in my mind:

• Carolyn Miller being “not quite convinced” by Blake Scott that “tactical” was so different from “intentional” in a discussion of affect as what Scott called a “precognitive intensity” (well-put, I think).
• Graham Murdock calling Chris Cummings’ use of the SARF framework to task because of its lack of attention to the visual.
• Matthew Nisbet calling for semantic scruples in Marlia Banning’s treatment of the Climategate papers. Particularly problematic terms: “neoliberal” (as all of the interested parties are arguably influenced by neoliberal ideologies), and the idea that the emails in question were “stolen” or “hacked.”

It should also be noted that after constant critical attention to the ways in which risk is “made” by media as a dominant frame, narrative, or mechanism of control, we were all happy to play our part as subjects when tornadoes touched down in Raleigh and the news media told us to go underground. Risk may be rhetorically constructed, but on that day, DE-struction was material and real. Our good wishes go to those nearby who weren’t as lucky as we were.

Thanks to all faculty on the planning committee who organized the conference, and to CRDMers Fernanda Duarte, Nathan Hulsey (with Shari Oliver), Ashley Kelly, and Seth Mulliken, who (with Robert Bell) coordinated video and audio recording of all presentations.

~Kate Maddalena (@KateMadd)

The Sounds of C’s: Kati’s 2011 Playlist of Auditory Highlights

[Our second CCCC recap comes from 3rd-year Kati Fargo, who specializes in auditory rhetoric and sound in composition studies (hence the theme)]

1. Discussion of annotated playlists as genres available in the classroom (W6 all-day workshop) “Sound Teaching: Bringing Music and Audio into the Composition Classroom.”
2. Craig Saper’s unbelievable audio, sampled, performative work on “Epcot” on the panel entitled “Florida.”
3. Steph Ceraso’s Remix composition project in the “Sound Teaching” workshop
4. Making an audio-essay on noise using an incredibly loud barking dog sample and scream music with Geoff Sirc and Spencer Schaffner
5. Rebecca Black’s “Friday” –while not an auditory highlight, thanks to Matt Morain, this song has been seared into my brain. Literally.
6. Halbritter and Lindquist’s audio-visual methodology of patience
7. Karaoke @ Metro Cafe
8. McGraw-Hill Rock n’ Roll dance party
9. Chris Anson’s We are 113! Ignite– bringing memory, delivery, (and humor) together in this highly oral form
10. Dawn singing my alarm clock ring tone back to me in order to convince me that she had turned it off and I should wake up.

Of course there were also innumerable highlights that were not necessarily focused on the auditory experience. NC State students and faculty represented well across the chart. If you want to know more about DSP ask Dawn and David, Oulipian writing ask Kevin, re-photography ask Jason Kalin, and C’s the Day (the game) ask Wendi. If you want to know more about internet culture and memes do NOT ask Matt; you will never be able to stop humming “Friday.” But seriously, a huge shout out to all who presented and/or attended!

CCCC Recap: “We are 113!”

A featured session at C’s on Friday was a curiously titled one: “We are 113!” The program abstract indicated, “The purpose of this panel is to embrace the call of cluster 113 by breaking traditional boundaries.” Submitted to the #113 category, newly created this year by Malea Powell to encourage outside-the-box thinking, this panel wowed the crowd and might just be the best panel of the conference. They presented in Ignite format: 10 speakers, 5 minutes each, 20 slides per person. Rapid fire delivery. Boundary-breaking topics. Speaker detailed parts of their personal life to connect to how they have transcended boundaries and not conformed to traditional rules of the discipline.

Shelley Rodrigo opened the panel with an introduction to the concept: Rhetoric & composition, as a field, has rules. We are placed into categories based on our research interests, administrative duties, and aspirations. But we need to break these rules and transcend boundaries to be truly successful. We should embrace collaboration, or as she and Susan Miller-Cochran call it, being partners in academic crime. We are more than we study, and it is time we embrace blurring boundaries. This panel – We are 113! – is a call to do so.

Next up: Paul Kei Matsuda, who discussed how his scholarship in second language studies and writing has transcended boundaries and created new boundaries, the field of second language writing. The field also encompasses/considers many others: technical writing, global professional writing, rhetoric, basic writing, and writing program administration. His takeaway: at this point, we have enthusiasm and experience with the field, but now we need expertise that can truly transcend boundaries. And that we are 113!

Cynthia Selfe held the crowd captive with her discussion of identity and how we relate to each other. She says we can only know ourselves through relating to others, and that discourse is a central way in which we do so. We need to be open to transcending boundaries to relate to people in news ways and new people in new ways. By doing so, we are 113!

Greg Glau, known for his work in basic writing, brought in his previous work in sales to talk about how teachers are really in the business of selling, and that teachers make good salespeople. We sell our students how much our class is going to benefit their studies and life. His work traces across all three public universities in Arizona, and he has now come full circle with both his sales and teaching work, saying that he is now in the business of helping his teachers learn how to sell what they are teaching. We need to transcend the boundary of teaching and see it in new ways. If we do this, we are 113!

Jay Dolmage presented a science fiction of sorts, asking us to imagine what the 4Cs would look like in 2020. He began by offering several possible – yet scary – scenarios: at the Palin Presidential Conference Center in Alaska, on a cruise ship in Hawaii, the SS CCCC, hosted by Pearson-MacMillan-Bedford-Cengage-McGraw-Hill-et al. publishing company, with a conference so large and disparate that many could neither afford to go nor get accepted. A place for the select few. These scary scenarios contrast with what Dolmage says we can do instead: have an inclusive, increasingly affordable, and infinitely accessible conference for all involved. As our discipline grows, we have the opportunity to make this a truly great professional conference by emphasizing access. We can do this by putting more and more content online, choosing affordable locations for the conference, and encouraging more contact and interaction, not less. His vision for CCCC 2020 is one that we can achieve – and we can all be 113!

Kathy Yancey followed with a discussion of her path to rhet/comp scholarship. As a young girl, she wanted to be an actress, then an architect, and went to school and became a teacher. She reckons that if she had attended school at another time, she would have studied weather, fascinated by use of patterns and the unpredictability of it. Instead, she’s now in the business of big ideas and always trying to come up with the next great one. This has led to many projects over the years, too many for her presentation or me to list here, but most recently the Center for Everyday Writing, a new initiative at Florida State. By tackling academic projects and thinking of big ideas, we are 113!

CRDM’s very own Chris Anson brought down the house by telling the narrative of his childhood, a mix of identities: a nature and animal lover, a writer, a wannabe veterinarian, an English child living in France and then the United States. His identity broke boundaries and he struggled to transcend them in school, resisting his American teachers’ desire for conformity to American spelling. In moments of brilliant openness and hilarity, he showed us how we all have mixed identity that transcends boundaries – that we are all 113.

Lamiyah Bahrainwala also told a narrative of the experiences that led her to study at Michigan State University. Born in India, she migrated to Dubai as a child, going to an all-girl’s private Catholic school until she went to the American University in the Middle East. It was there that some of her friends, whose L1 was Arabic, but who wrote predominantly in English, created a new language in order to reconcile their desire to write in Arabic but having to conform to English coding/writing online. Fascinated by the language, she now studies it at MSU, asking questions about how people are reclaiming their language while also contesting boundaries. They are 113!

Finally, Kati Fargo and Kevin Brock, both of  our program, introduced how their work and CRDM contests boundaries every day. Interdisciplinary in nature, CRDM brings together communication and rhetoric scholarship while asking questions through the lens of digital media and technology. We are fostering collaboration across topics and fields. Kati and Kevin are writing program administrators, grant writers, graduate students, teachers, and friends. Our program blurs and transcends boundaries. WE ARE 113!

The panel ended with smart questions exploring how we can apply 113 to our work. The panelists are making a call for us to break, blur, transcend, and collaborate across boundaries to improve their field and make our scholarship even better. The panelists report struggling with the concept of first, unsure of how exactly to break boundaries and call for change in their short talks. But their message was clear: we are 113!

~ Meagan
Note: This post was adapted from an original entry in my blog, “Meg’s Road to PhD.”