ASHR Business Meeting
Friday, November 21st, 7:00-7:45am, Willow Lake 04
Session chair: Allison Prasch, University of Wisconsin-Madison
ASHR Panels
Challenging the Limits of Knowledge and Community in Rhetorical Theory and Practice
Thursday, November 20th, 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.
Chair William Rodney Herring, Associate Professor, University of Colorado Denver
Recovering the Social Rhetoricities of the Void, Crystal Broch Colombini, Associate Professor, Fordham University
Verum Factum and Aesthetics of Inquiry, Zoltan P. Majdik, Professor, North Dakota State University, Megan Poole,
Did It Happen Here (in 1798)? William Rodney Herring, Associate Professor, University of Colorado Denver
Richard Weaver and Regionalist Ordo Amorism, Mark Longaker, University of Texas at Austin
Contours of Constraint: Rhetorical Limits, Imagery, and Institutions across Time
Friday, November 21st, 2:30-3:45, 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. Together, the work on this panel examines how rhetorical form mediates between sense and structure: how images of threat operate in religious oratory; how speech that refuses elevation or persuasion challenges normative frameworks of rhetorical success; how carceral planning documents enlist technocratic language to legitimize institutional violence; and how visual media under conditions of conflict construct complex relations between phantasia, memory, and representation. By foregrounding rhetoric’s historical entanglements with authority, visibility, and refusal, this panel invites reflection on both the enduring power and strategic limitations of rhetorical practice across time.
Black Memory Studies in Precarious Times: Emerging Scholars on Black Memory Landscapes: Remembrance and Resistance
Saturday, November 22, 9:30-10:45, 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. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, this session features presentations from early-career scholars whose analyses of their research, teaching, and praxes will be featured in the forthcoming edited collection Black Memory Landscapes: Remembrance and Resistance. In so doing, it takes up the call of the conference to “amplify the many voices, realities, and experiences that inform all that we do and who we are.” The presentations on this panel demonstrate the possibilities for these scholars to contribute to a new canon in memory studies that foregrounds the various ways in which Black publics engage the past in both the U.S. and the broader African diaspora.
Patricia Davis, Northeastern University