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.

Jordan Frith, PhD

Congratulations to Jordan Frith, CRDM’s newest PhD. Dr. Frith successfully defended his dissertation, “Constructing location, one check-in at a time: Examining the practices of Foursquare users” to a packed house on Friday, October 12. Jordan’s 380-page tome studied how superusers of the mobile application Foursquare appropriated the technology for a variety of purposes, including social connection, exploring new places, privacy control, and memorializing their life. His dissertation committee members were Adriana de Souza e Silva (chair), Steve Wiley, David Berube, and Jason Swarts.

Jordan is the co-author of Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability with CRDM faculty member Adriana de Souza e Silva. He has also published in the journals of Mobilities and Communication, Culture, and Critique.

Best wishes to Dr. Frith, as he is now in his first year as Assistant Professor of Technical Communication in the Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication at the University of North Texas.

Journey into the land of… high schoolers!

This year, CRDM’s Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) Student Chapter is undertaking a variety of outreach projects to increase awareness of rhetoric in our community. As a part of this project, this week, Ashley R. Kelly and I (Meagan Kittle Autry) volunteered at a local high school, Broughton, to speak to International Baccalaureate (IB) program twelfth grade students in a Theory of Knowledge class. The class was just finishing up their semester, so now was the perfect time for us to come in to introduce another way of looking at knowledge (and perhaps to encourage them to think about studying rhetoric as they set off for college in the fall!). We taught two separate classes, one each day, and let me tell you – teaching high school is exhausting! Each class had 40 students, and we were outside in a portable, a fairly small space for that number of students. For both of us, this was our first experience in a U.S. high school, though overall, it wasn’t that much different from our experience in Canada.

We covered basic concepts of rhetoric (what is it? where does it come from? how do we talk about it?) before moving on to a topic that they had covered in the semester: science. They had covered concepts of knowledge in science, so by bringing in the perspective of rhetoric of science, we connected to some ideas they had covered but also challenged them to think about science in new ways. We talked about expert and inexpert audiences, adapting arguments based on the different audiences, and the importance of science for the general public and for themselves as individuals. We based a lot of the discussion on our research into nuclear energy in both a local setting (with the Duke-Progress merger) and on a global scale (with the accident at Fukushima last March and Germany’s reaction to the disaster). The students were bright, talkative, and engaged – and sure knew way more about nuclear energy than I did in high school!

All in all, filling a 100 minute class to engage 40 adolescents the whole time was a challenging experience. But we left encouraged that the students were so engaged, and their teacher indicated that afterword, they expressed interest in the work we are doing and the CRDM program – they thought it was all pretty cool. Taking on this outreach opportunity was a really great experience, and we can’t wait to hear what other CRDMers are doing for it, too!

Originally posted on my blog, Meg’s Road to PhD.

Dana Gierdowski, ABD

Congratulations to CRDMer Dana Gierdowski on earning ABD and doctoral candidate status!

Her committee members are Chris Anson, Deanna Dannels, Vicki Gallagher, and Susan Miller-Cochran (chair). The working title of her dissertation is ”The Geographies of a Writing Space: An Ethnographic Study of a Flexible Composition Classroom.”