2022 Symposium Schedule

Schedule at a Glance

All Times in Mountain Daylight Time (GMT -6)

Friday, June 17, 2022

8 a.m. Breakfast

9 a.m. Welcome & Session 1

10 a.m. Session 2

11 a.m. Session 3

12 noon Lunch on your own

1:30 p.m. Session 4

2:30 p.m. Session 5

3:30 p.m. Break

4 p.m. Session 6

5 p.m. Session 7

6 p.m. Break

7 p.m. Conference Dinner

Saturday, June 18, 2022

8 a.m. Breakfast

9 a.m. Session 8

10 a.m. Session 9

11 a.m. Session 10

12 noon Lunch on your own

1:30 p.m. Session 11

2:30 p.m. Session 12

3:30 p.m. Break

4 p.m. Session 13

5 p.m. Closing Discussion


Session Schedule

All presentations are traditional 20 min. presentations unless otherwise noted.
(QH) = Quick Hits: Rhetoric in Practice [10 min.] (WIP) = Work in Progress [30 min.]
(V) = Virtual Attendee

Fri.

9 a.m.

Welcome & Session 1

  • Welcome!
    Matt Sharp, Jacob Rawlins, and Melanie McNaughton

  • Using Rhetorical Invention to Reimagine Public Streetscapes (QH)
    Jamie Littlefield, Texas Tech

Community groups across the country are working to create safer streets by implementing temporary “tactical urbanism” projects. With hay bale bollards, buckets of chalk paint, and borrowed lawn furniture, participants create short-term projects to help the public imagine a human-centered street redesign. Which rhetorical tools can best help community members re-invent their streetscapes? How can we create a network of rhetoricians to support the neighborhoods, governments, and nonprofits engaged in this work?

  • Questioning Rhetorical Intentions through Public Art & Empowering Students to Shape Community
    Cynthia Pope, Syracuse University (V)

One local contemporary public sculpture recently became the cornerstone of social protest to disrupt our sense of comfort and compel us to install a new social narrative regarding community standards, identity, and race relations. My presentation will provide exposition of said rhetorical art form and will showcase how I teach students to transform their immediate surroundings in public forums for the common good rather than being passive observers waiting for change to occur.

Fri.

10 a.m.

Session 2

  • Rhetorical Internships for Personal Growth and Social Change (QH)
    Kathryn Swacha, University of Maine (V)

The Quick Hit presentation discusses specific pedagogical strategies for helping students to develop awareness of their internships at non-profit sites as part of larger rhetorical constellations, rather than in terms of discrete genres or rhetorical situations. Such explicit rhetorical training can help students to understand their work both in terms of their own professional growth AND in terms of how their work and that of their host organizations’ can contribute to larger social change.

  • When Technical Communication Prescribes Expressive Writing to Mental Health Workers: Or Asset-Based Inquiry Is Applied Rhetoric
    Lenny Grant, Syracuse University

Asset-based inquiry (ABI) is a participatory action research method of solving community-based problems by forging collaborations between ostensibly disparate local people and organizations, and removing barriers from siloed assets, skills, and capacities. In this presentation, I share how applying ABI to the problem of limited psychological services in Onondaga County, NY resulted in two innovative community-based mental health interventions. I conclude by advancing ABI as a means of bridging disciplinary silos in writing studies.

  • The Epideictic (re)Production of Campus Free Speech: Beyond the Chicago Statement
    Matthew R. Sharp, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (V)

This presentation will analyze speech codes from universities who have not adopted the Chicago Statement—a free speech statement considered a model statement by The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)—through a lens of epideictic rhetoric. By (re)producing certain value hierarchies, these speech codes create deliberative calls to action that encourage organizational, institutional, and cultural change.

Fri.

11 a.m.

Session 3

  • What the Doctor Ordered: Applied Rhetoric in the Biopharmaceutical World
    Stephen Bernhardt (V) & Greg Cuppan, McCulley/Cuppan Inc.

We describe applications of rhetoric to a particular industrial setting—the world of biopharmaceutics. In particular, we highlight our uses of rhetorical theory, logical and argumentative theory, audience analysis, information design, and scientific style. We will discuss why the industry needs rhetoric to do its business and what the gaps are in current industry practices. We hope to engage the audience in thinking about how our understanding of rhetoric offers value to industrial partners.

  • Moving Toward a Clinical Trial: Rhetorical Contexts of a Health and Medical App
    Russell Kirkscey, Penn State University

Health and medical (mHealth) app development has proliferated recently. However, health and medical providers are reluctant to use these products or recommend them to their patients because little scholarly research has investigated the efficacy of the tools. This presentation explores the rhetorical contexts that should be investigated before performing a clinical trial of an mHealth informational app.

Fri.

1:30 P.m.

Session 4

  • Out of the ivory tower and into your earbuds: Podcasting to bridge the academic/ public divide
    Abigail Bakke, Minnesota State University, Mankato & Benton Bakke

We describe our podcast “TC Talk” (https://anchor.fm/techcommtalk), where Abigail talks about her academic reading in rhetoric and technical communication, and Benton, her nonacademic partner, asks questions that help connect rhetoric to issues that affect us all - vaccines, climate change, conspiracy theories. The goal of the show is to make the scholarship of rhetoric accessible to people outside of the academy. We argue that podcasting represents a way for rhetoricians to bring their expertise to the larger world.

  • Establishing Expertise: Rhetorical Strategies for Creating Credible Public Scholarship
    Jacob Rawlins, Brigham Young University

One of the goals of the Applied Rhetoric Collaborative is to move beyond academia “to solve problems and achieve positive ends in communities.” In this presentation, I will explore rhetorical strategies for establishing expertise outside of academia. I will draw on research about the early use of expert witnesses in murder trials. I will examine the rhetorical arguments made by these expert witnesses can provide lessons for our own forays into public scholarship.

Fri.

2:30 P.m.

Session 5

  • Not Seen on TV: Highlighting Consent’s Absence in Mediated Images of Sex
    C. Wesley Buerkle, East Tennessee State University

Mediated images of sexual interactions routinely minimize consent and promote problematic, heteronormative notions of sexually appealing men as assertive or aggressive. I will share how I incorporate rhetorical analysis of mediated sex into my discussions of consent with traditional-aged college students. Doing so helps them reframe what they think confident sex should be like. I will also explore how rhetorical analysis may reach other audiences to challenge their understanding of various “personal” and social issues.

  • The Sovereign Home (WIP)
    Melanie McNaughton, Bridgewater State University

This project explores the visual construction of home and family life in Christmas cards from Britain’s royal family, who is perhaps the world’s most visible family. Christmas cards are a traditional text for many– they signify a moment when we reach out across cul-de-sacs, countries, and continents. By exploring a mode of communication that is practiced by “everyday people,” one of the goals of this project is to illustrate the relevance of rhetoric to everyday moments.

Fri.

4 P.m.

Session 6

  • Discerning Law's Relationality: Legal Grammar and Its Implications for Applied Rhetoric
    Mark Hannah, Arizona State University (V)

"This presentation offers a descriptive account of law’s grammar, notably law’s relationality, and connects it to rhetoricians’ capacity for bringing rhetoric into the world. The presentation offers a background discussion of law’s grammar and illustrates its attendant relationality through a vignette activity that invites session attendees to think through an applied rhetoric fact pattern and discuss how relationality prefigures the context through which rhetoric is brought into and applied in professional and nonprofessional spaces.

  • How does Social Media Use Affect the Rhetorical Practices and Paradigms of Individuals? (WIP)
    Devon Cook, Penn State New Kensington

Description of the beginning stages of a project which explores the relationship between the technological details of social media platforms and the rhetorical experience of users. Includes a presentation on the results of a multi-disciplinary research review and a discussion of possible empirical research frameworks that could be used to study how social media technology acts back on users, changing or modifying our understanding of the longstanding rhetorical principles that inform applied rhetorical work.

Fri.

5 P.m.

Session 7

  • Curating Analgesia: Applying Rhetoric as Pain Management
    Brenton Faber, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

This presentation discusses the use of applied rhetoric as a clinical tool for pain reduction. Working from a clinical case study, the presentation discusses the pathophysiology of pain, the rhetorical process of distraction, and how and why distraction can provide analgesia. Stepping back to applied rhetoric, the presentation posits the concept of "discursive curation" as an applied assemblage of discourses enacted for temporary, strategic, but semantically ambivalent results.

  • Communication within Constraints: Using Microstructures to Build Reciprocity and Trust (WIP)
    Lucía Durá, University of Texas at El Paso

In my work I observe that when there are constraints, especially of time and space, tweaking just one microstructure, such as the question prompt to participants, or engaging in culturally appropriate participation, makes a difference in building reciprocal experiences. In this Works in Progress session, I seek feedback on how to string applied rhetoric case studies into a book.

SAT.

9 a.m.

Session 8

  • What We Learn about Customer Satisfaction from Adversative Connectives
    Matt Baker, Brigham Young University

Online reviews play an important role in the economic success of many restaurant owners worldwide. This presentation will report the qualitative results of a corpus analysis and content analysis of 1,000 online restaurant reviews. Specifically, results will shed insight into the way customers use adversative connectives to communicate their (dis)satisfaction. This insight has meaningful implications for businesses whose success might be enhanced by improving how they interpret the content of reviews surrounding these connectives.

  • Taking Rhetoric into the Field--Literally (WIP)
    Angie Mallory, University of Maryland's Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security (V)

In an attempt to build an immersive communication experience for military veterans, I have started a nonprofit where veterans and wild mustangs engage in trust-building. We know that rhetoric lives in meaning-making, however, there is no charted path for applying this to horse-veteran interaction. My biggest challenge is reaching veterans in higher education who would use my program. I covet your help in making these connections.

SAT.

10 a.m.

Session 9

  • Establishing Authorial Voice across Academic Disciplines: An Interdisciplinary Study
    Elizabeth Hanks, Northern Arizona University
    Leanne Chun,     Brigham Young University
    Ryan Bartholomew, Northern Arizona University
    Jacob Rawlins,     Brigham Young University

Students are asked to make rhetorical and linguistic shifts as they write papers in different disciplines. To better understand writing across disciplines, we created an interdisciplinary project to perform a systematic investigation of authorial voice. In our project, we compared how citation type, integration type, reporting verbs, and person pronouns are used in published academic texts across six disciplines. Students and teachers can use our findings to better engage with disciplinary research conversations.

  • Establishing Authorial Voice across Academic Disciplines: The Reporting Verb Dictionary (WIP)
    Leanne Chun, Brigham Young University
    Jesse Vincent,     Brigham Young University
    Ryan Bartholomew, Northern Arizona University
    Grant Eckstein,     Brigham Young University

A follow-up Work-in-Progress presentation showcasing one of the results of our research: a detailed dictionary of reporting verbs used in academic writing.

SAT.

11 a.m.

Session 10

  • UX, Rhetoric, and the Professional Communicator: How Do We Move Beyond “Can You Find It?”
    Karen Gulbrandsen, UMass Dartmouth (V)

In teaching User Experience/Usability, students often find it challenging to move beyond UX as an exercise in “can you find it.” This presentation addresses this challenge, asking: How can we scaffold the learning experience to engage our strengths as rhetorically-trained professional communicators? How can SOTL further conversations about rhetoric’s role in UX? I present ideas for revising traditional assignments to encourage discussion about these two questions.

  • Let’s Have Better Arguments About the Internet: A Stasis-Question Analysis of Rhetoric Concerning the Governance of the Internet (WIP) (V)
    Stephen Carradini, Arizona State University

One reason that discussions cannot reach productive ends surrounding internet issues is that there is no consensus on what the fundamental elements of internet governance are, much less agreement on how those elements should be handled. I propose a set of stasis questions that reflect five elements of internet governance, with the hopes of leading to better grounding for arguments and ultimately more productive rhetoric.

SAT.

1:30 P.m.

Session 11

  • “What should I say?” Searching for persuasive strategies for farmland conservation work
    Sara B. Parks, Stephen F. Austin State University (V) & Lee Tesdell (V)

Concepts of “stewardship” and “family farms” dominate popular conservation rhetoric and self-identity in the sustainable agriculture community. But what are the dangers of invoking these and other classic tropes? We share our experiences in the applied field where we have found resistance to the ethical trend of ecocentrism in favor of anthropocentrism. Our paper explores the reliance on and implications of shifting tropes by agriculture conservation professionals as well as the academics who support them.

  • Applied Rhetoric for Mobilizing Networks on Campus: A Case of Three Interdisciplinary Minors
    Ed Nagelhout, UNLV, & Melissa Carrion, UNLV

This presentation describes the applied rhetorical thinking that we used at the front end of our program development process for three interdisciplinary minors. We outline the key front-end features to mobilize networks and build a sustainable program: designing the curriculum, determining primary contacts, planning initial meetings, developing handouts/materials for these meetings, engaging with stakeholders in a reasonable order, following up effectively, taking next steps, and cultivating long-term relationships.

SAT.

2:30 p.m.

Session 12

  • Bearer of Bad News: Using Rhetorical Strategies to Revise Academic Suspension Notices (QH)
    Jennifer Veltsos, Minnesota State University, Mankato

No one wants to deliver bad news, but common business writing strategies such as BILL, or “big idea a little later” (Veltsos and Hynes, 2021) offer writers proven techniques for softening the blow, presenting the negative news, and reinforcing the relationship. This quick hit will describe how a cross-functional team worked together to create psychologically attuned academic suspension, warning, and probation letters.

  • Taking Rhetoric to School
    Dirk Remley, Kent State University (V)

In this presentation, the speaker will describe in detail application of rhetorical principles in a proposal for a public school district to change its GPA calculation system to include weighing of rigorous courses such as honors and AP classes to address abuse of the existing system. Attendees will come to understand another example of applied rhetoric and how they might be able to effect similar changes and integrate such examples into their own pedagogy.

  • Students Doing Good for Each Other: Learning from an On-Campus Usability Partnership
    Ashley Patriarca, West Chester University

This presentation shares lessons learned from an ongoing, five-year usability partnership between a university web content team and a professional & technical writing class. Through this partnership, students learn to do good in their world by testing university websites to ensure that fellow students at their university can access and use critical information.

SAT.

4 p.m.

Session 13

  • Layered Rhetorics: The Intermingling of Force and Persuasion in the 1967 “Gater Incident” (QH)
    Nkenna Onwuzuruoha, University of Utah

This presentation examines how force and persuasion operated during a physical altercation in 1967 between San Francisco State’s Black Student Union (BSU) and the staff of the school’s student newspaper, the Gater. In particular, the presentation focuses on constructions of violence and the rhetoric of confrontation. Audience members can expect a discourse on forms of harm aligned with the “Gater Incident” that is neither an immediate abdication nor an intricately-explained justification of them.

  • Misfit Rhetoric: A Look at Greta Thunberg’s Use of Rhetoric to be a Force of Positive Change
    Alina Thurman, Georgia State University (V)

At 15 years old, Greta Thunberg declared she was going on school strike until Sweden took action to address the climate crisis. What should have been an unremarkable action by a young autistic girl grew into a global movement through her use of rhetoric. This interactive presentation looks to examine how a social misfit used rhetoric to disrupt a global status quo, build an international following, and become a social force for positive change.

  • Enacting the Power of Rhetoric in the Criminal Justice System
    Catherine Goodman, University of Utah (V)

How can we bring about change, through the mere force of our words? Can the way we speak – about ourselves, our families, and our acts – help us see ourselves in a new way, and set a new path for our futures? This presentation will explore the many avenues for change in the prison system, using a recent six-week writing workshop in the Utah prison system to explore the transformative power of rhetoric in the offender experience. "