ASHR Business Meeting
- Friday, November 21, 2025, 7:00am Mountain Time
- Location: Willow Lake 04 (Coffee, tea, fruit, and pastries will be provided!)
- Join via zoom.
- Business Meeting Agenda
- Business Meeting Materials (for ASHR members)
ASHR Panels
ASHR received a limited number of slots from NCA this year, but we are excited to feature the following papers + panel discussions across three sessions.
Challenging the Limits of Knowledge and Community in Rhetorical Theory and Practice
Thursday, November 20 – 1:00-2:15pm, Willow Lake 04
This panel’s papers examine how a range of rhetoricians and rhetors has confronted questions of the familiar and the unknown, of neighbors and strangers. Working across diverse chronologies, geographies, and rhetorical traditions–pre- and post-Socratic debates on natural science, eighteenth-century Italian social scientific philosophy, Federalist-era legislation on wartime authority in American politics, and the rise of modern conservative intellectualism—each presenter considers the rhetorical theories and practices that answered, for better or worse, the challenges of knowledge and anti-social inclinations.
- Crystal Broch Colombini, “Recovering the Social Rhetoricities of the Void”
- Zoltan P. Majdik and Megan Poole, “Verum Factum and Aesthetics of Inquiry”
- William Rodney Herring, “Did It Happen Here (in 1798)?”
- Mark Longaker, “Richard Weaver and Regionalist Ordo Amoris”
Contours of Constraint: Rhetorical Limits, Imagery, and Institutions Across Time
Friday, November 21 – 2:30-3:45pm, Willow Lake 04
This panel explores how rhetoric functions within and against the limits imposed by epistemology, institutional power, aesthetic form, and historical context. Across a range of periods and artifacts—from early American sermons and classical theory to bureaucratic planning documents and contemporary visual media—these essays engage the conditions under which rhetoric emerges, circulates, and encounters resistance.
- James Fredal, “Is Rhetoric the Antistrophe of Dialectic”
- Michael Milford, “From Sheep to Spiders: A Rhetoric of Threat and Imagery in ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’”
- Jose G. Izaguirre, III, “The Communication that Refuses Elevation: Clever Speech and the Limits of Rhetoric”
- D. Nicole Campbell, “Constructing a Carceral System: Frederic D. Moyer’s ‘Total Systems Planning’ in the National Clearinghouse for Criminal Justice Planning and Architecture”
- Ben Crosby, “Through a Lens Darkly: Rhetorics of Phantasia and Mimesis in the Gaza Collective Photo Essay Project”
Black Memory Studies in Precarious Times: Emerging Scholars on Black Memory Landscapes: Remembrance and Resistance
Saturday, November 22 – 9:30-10:45am, Willow Lake 04
This session highlights the work of emerging scholars whose research foregrounds Black memory practices. It illuminates the breadth and depth of the rhetorical practices Black people have mobilized in performing the inherently political work of “making a way out of no way” and demands further attention to the sites, methods, and tools used to construct a more expansive repertoire of Black historical representation. The panelists thus highlight the creative and innovative ways in which Black history and memory is recovered, sustained and represented in the U.S. Moreover, because Black history neither begins in North America nor is confined within its geographical borders, the panel discussion will encompass work showcasing the possibilities inherent in collaborations between U.S.-based institutions and Africa-based partners to preserve Africana heritages and strengthen the diasporic dimensions of a sense of Black collective consciousness.
- Ariel Seay-Howard, “Understanding a Violent Memoryscape and Building Better Memoryships: The Wilmington Coup d’état of 1898”
- Stephen E. Rahko and Byron B. Craig, “Rhetorics of Redemption: Race, Reparative Memory, and the Reckoning of 2020”
- Celnisha L. Dangerfield, “Our Hope, Our Fight, Our Land: African American Heirs’ Property and the Work of Vernacular Commemoration”
- Jessica Parr and Killion Mokwete, “A Fusion of Traditional and New Memoryscapes: Geo-spatial Technologies as Tools for Africana Memory Praxes”