Seminar for the Summer Insitute of 2023 of the Rhetoric Society of America Environemtnal Rhetoric

Poieses of the Future: The Transdisciplinarity of Climate Change, Migration,

and Land-Based Ethics

Ralph Cintron, University of Illinois Chicago

Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, University of Wisconsin Madison

Michelle Hall Kells, University of New Mexico

Donnie Sackey, University of Texas Austin

The peoples of the world may be at a remarkable juncture. On the one hand, climate scientists are predicting catastrophic disruptions to our food systems, our built environment, and the ability of nation-states to adapt to internal and external migrations. On the other hand, such impending calamities may also drive remarkable innovations in terms of technology, political/economic/legal institutions, and even our epistemological/ontological/cosmological presumptions. This seminar will engage some of these discussions.

Our co-leaders are transdisciplinary scholars of rhetoric: from the anthropology of democracies; to science studies; to local policy-making; to environmental rhetorics and extraction industries; to technical communication; to race studies. More significantly, however, we will be inviting scholars with different disciplinary formations such as climate science, migration studies, philosophy, indigenous scholarship, and so on. One of our goals will be to bridge across this siloed knowledge and explore emerging theories of rhetoric.

Our seminar will form four workshop groups of 7-8 seminarians. The groups will shift among themselves and across the four co-leaders. A typical day will consist first of engaging over zoom (more than likely) one or more invited speakers. Later that day in our workshops we will translate the speakers’ words and arguments into a steadily expanding set of heuristics that will be useful to the individual projects of the seminarians and for rhetorical theory in general. Before the start of the seminar the leaders will provide an evolving bibliography of their own and others relevant work. Given the flow of the discussions during the seminar, some of this bibliography may be collectively discussed. The end product of the seminar will be the improvement of our collective thinking (seminarians and co-leaders both). Such improvement might be recorded in the form of a redrafted dissertation proposal, a dissertation chapter, an article, and so on. In taking seriously the phrase “Poieses of the Future” we fully expect that our collaborative discussions and drafts during the seminar will continue beyond the end of the institute in much the same way that the peoples of the world will continue negotiating the (dis)juncture(s) of climate change.