Rhetoric, Reified:
Bringing Rhetoric into the World

May 31 - June 1, 2024 in Minneapolis, MN

Proposal Deadline: February 1, 2024

Deadline extended to February 10, 2024

The Applied Rhetoric Collaborative (ARC) is an interdisciplinary group of scholars who practice, teach, and study applied rhetoric: a rhetorically grounded method for and study of action-oriented research, teaching, and service in live situations that solves problems and achieves positive ends in communities. ARC offers a para-professional space for support, feedback, collaboration, and encouragement to those at any stage of their careers (from students to retirees) who seek to solve problems and achieve positive ends in communities using applied rhetoric.

Our summer symposia allow us to examine how rhetoric is enacted in our professional and public spaces. Symposium presentations have covered the realms of applied rhetoric (AR) in healthcare, academic programming, digital spaces, physical public spaces, the media, and the classroom. Topics have been as varied as public memory projects, rhetorical activism, free speech rules, international censorship, and historical legal testimony.

Since the symposium began in 2018, the world we live in has dramatically changed in many ways—for better and for worse. Accordingly, ARC sees a need to reconsider how we conceptualize how we “do” rhetorical work in our communities and classrooms. ARC’s fifth summer symposium will continue to build on the foundations laid during our previous meetings, as we come together to further develop and define the ideas of applied rhetoric. To do this, we ask symposium participants to emphasize how people (researchers, teachers, practitioners, activists, leaders, community members, and everyone in between) bring rhetoric into the world.

We are interested in diverse works that discuss how we bring rhetoric into the world. Potential topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:

• What does it look like for academics to take their knowledge of rhetoric into public spaces?

• How can we, as both community members and rhetoricians, be a force for good in the world as we put our rhetoric into action?

• How do community members enact rhetoric and rhetorical principles to get things done?

• How do rhetorical principles affect ideas, events, and/or outcomes in nonprofit organizations?

• How do people enact rhetoric in legal spaces for the good or ill of all involved?

• How do academics encourage and enable students to enact rhetoric out in the world, either on their own or as part of an academic enterprise?

• How does one learn to do rhetoric out in the world? How does one teach students to do rhetoric out in the world?

• How do people enact rhetoric online to affect positive or negative change? How can positive change be further amplified or developed? How can negative change be combated or counteracted?

• How do people balance the desire to enact rhetoric out in the world with the other professional and non-professional commitments that they have?

The Applied Rhetoric Symposium was built on foundations of collaboration, coordination, networking, and friendship. In the symposium, we seek to embody these concepts by providing community-building opportunities for those who enact and study applied rhetoric. The symposium itself consists of multiple plenary sessions focused on the presentation of scholarly work to an audience of colleagues. The presentations consist of new “works in progress,” concrete results of established research, and/or what we call “Quick Hits—Rhetoric in Practice” (all described below) with ample time to discuss with the audience after each session.

FORMATS

Works in Progress (30 minutes each)

Not a presentation or a workshop, Works in Progress sessions are a time to get feedback on how to finish a project that seems stuck or how to start working on a promising idea that seems overwhelming.

Traditional (20 minutes each)

You know what we are talking about. Strict time limits, but these presentations will be followed by an extended open discussion after each set of three traditional presentations.

Quick Hits: Rhetoric in Practice (10 minutes each)

A lightning round of sorts in which participants review or critique applications of rhetoric in their work, communities, or society at large. Quick hits will be followed by open discussion sessions.

Fully Virtual Delivery

The last several years have presented many unexpected difficulties in our professional and personal lives that have limited access to the traditional conference model for many people in our communities. To embody the goals of applied rhetoric, ARC is committed to making the conference accessible to as many people as possible. Therefore, this year we're taking the symposium completely online.