The polls are open for seats on the RSA Board of Directors. The Board of Directors is responsible for the management of the affairs of the Society. It is RSA’s principal policy-making body and is responsible for promoting the Society’s purposes. The constitution and bylaws of RSA stipulate that the board composition shall reflect the diverse interest of the Society. You have until April 7 to cast your ballot.
Best
Jerry
Gerard Hauser, Executive Director
Rhetoric Society of America
The election period runs from March 7, 2018 to April 7, 2018.
Please log on to the Members area of the website to access the ballot.
Slate for RSA Board Election:
Position 1: Gwendolyn Pough (Syracuse University) - Blake Scott (University of Central Florida)
Position 2: Elif Guler (Longwood University) - Ersula Ore (Arizona State University)
Position 3: Lisa Flores (University of Colorado) - Charles E. Morris III (Syracuse University)
Position 4: Jiyeon Kang (University of Iowa) - Anjali Vats (Boston College)
Position 5: Laura Proszak (Northeastern University) - Karieann Soto (Syracuse University)
Position 1: Gwendolyn Pough (Syracuse University) - Blake Scott (University of Central Florida)
Gwendolyn D. Pough is Professor and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and affiliate faculty in the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Program at Syracuse University. Her research interests include African-American rhetorics and literacies, feminist rhetorics, hip-hop studies, public sphere theories, and popular culture. She is the author of numerous articles, book chapters and the single-authored book Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture and the Public Sphere. She has also co-edited two special journal issues and the critically acclaimed anthology, Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip-Hop Feminism Anthology. She is currently finishing a book on black women’s book clubs and reading groups titled, Sistah-Girl Literacies: Black Women Reading and Writing. The Rhetoric Society of America has long been a part of Gwen’s conference rotation. It would be her honor to serve the organization in a more formal capacity. She has served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Before being elected to the Chair rotation of CCCC, she served on the Executive Committee and chaired the Nominating Committee for the organization. She is currently serving in elected positions for two other national organizations. She was elected to a five-year (2015-2020) position on the Executive Committee of the Division on Popular Culture for the Modern Language Association. She was recently elected to chair the Third Wave Feminisms Group of the National Women’s Studies Association. She is a member of the Advisory Board for the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, and is a member of the Cultural Rhetorics Consortium and Editorial Board. When asked to serve the Rhetoric Society of America in the past, whether it was as a seminar featured scholar for the 2007 Biennial Summer Institute or as a member of the Policies and Procedures Task Force, she has never hesitated to say yes. When asked this summer if she would be willing to stand for election to the Board, she again did not hesitate to say yes. She wishes to be a part of the conversations, visioning and work needed to insure the RSA’s continued success and growth as an organization.
Blake Scott is Professor of Writing & Rhetoric and Faculty Excellence Fellow at the University of Central Florida. His research interests include transnational rhetorics, rhetorical theory and pedagogy, professional and technical communication, and the rhetoric of health and medicine, and he has received four national awards for his publications. His research in the rhetoric of health and medicine, in particular, has been called instrumental in advancing this emergent scholarly area, particularly around the rhetorical-cultural analysis of public health policy; it includes his book Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing (Southern Illinois UP, 2003, 2014; winner of 2017 NCA Health Comm Distinguished Book Award), his co-edited volume Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine (Routledge, 2017), and articles in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College English, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and other places. He has co-led an RSA Summer Workshop in this area, and is founding co-editor (with Lisa Meloncon) of the new journal Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, published by the University of Florida Press. Blake is also the co-author of Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication and co-editor of Critical Power Tools: Technical Communication and Cultural Studies and The Megarhetorics of Global Development. Throughout his work, Blake has been committed to the role of rhetorical study and practice in the pursuit of social justice in public life, and this work demonstrates that social criticism does not have to remain “academic” and that description and evaluation can lead to informed intervention. The first graduate student board member of RSA in the mid-1990s and currently a member of the RSA Publications Committee, Blake is a longstanding member of this organization that is his primary professional home. He is excited about the prospect of serving RSA as it continues to advance the field’s cultivation of multidisciplinary rhetorical research and curricula/pedagogy and its expanded academic and public engagement (e.g., through the proposed Rhetoric Society Monthly). Back To Top
Position 2: Elif Guler (Longwood University) - Ersula Ore (Arizona State University)
Elif Guler is the Coordinator and an Assistant Professor of the Rhetoric and Professional Writing Program at Longwood University (Farmville, Virginia). She teaches courses and conducts research in the areas of cultural rhetoric, civic and professional writing (face-to-face and distance education), and women’s studies. As an expatriate scholar living in the U.S., she is highly interested in increasing Rhetoric Society of America’s international exposure and encouraging international scholars’ and minorities’ involvement in RSA – a goal which she has pursued since serving in RSA’s Graduate Student Steering Committee in 2008. She received her Ph.D. in rhetorical studies from Old Dominion University (Norfolk, VA) in 2012. She has regularly presented her studies, which recover alternative, non-canonical, and non-Western approaches to rhetoric, at RSA’s biennial conferences for the past ten years. One such study, “The Pedagogical Implications of Teaching Atatürk’s ‘Address to the Youth’ for Global Rhetoric and Civic Action in the U.S. Writing Classroom,” (presented at RSA 2016 in Atlanta) was published in the Fall 2017 issue of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning. Another study on popular culture representations of ancient Turkish women, which she previously presented at a Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference, is forthcoming in Studies in Popular Culture (Spring 2018). She also helped edit Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction and co-authored a study on using online tools for assessment in the writing classroom for Collaboration, Literature, and Composition: Essays for Teachers and Writers of English. She will explore her findings on the teaching and practice of rhetoric in ancient Turkish cultures at the 2018 Symposium of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. She is also an active member of the Rhetoric Society of Europe. More information about her can be found at www.elifguler.com
Ersula J. Ore is the Lincoln Professor of Ethics in The School of Social Transformation and Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies, and Rhetoric at Arizona State University. Her work examines the suasive strategies of aggrieved communities as they operate within a post-emancipation historical context. Her manuscript A Rhetoric of Civic Belonging explores lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement that has, from the 1880s onward, operated as an argument against the inclusion of blacks within the nation. The study gives particular attention to the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. Ersula is a 2013 Institute for Humanities Research Fellow at ASU, a 2011 Penn State Alumni Association Dissertation Award Recipient, and Past-President of the Arnold-Ebbitt Interdisciplinary Rhetoricians (AEIR), Penn State’s RSA Graduate Group. Her most recent publications include “‘PushBack’: A Pedagogy of Care,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture (2017), “Whiteness as Racialized Space: Obama and the Rhetorical Constraints of Phenotypical Blackness” in Kris Ratcliffe’s Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education (2017), and “They Call Me ‘Dr. Ore’,” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society Special Issue: Race, Rhetoric and the State (2015). Back To Top
Position 3: Lisa Flores (University of Colorado) - Charles E. Morris III (Syracuse University)
Lisa A. Flores is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research and teaching interests lie in rhetoric, critical race studies, and gender/queer studies. Her most recent work examines historic narratives of immigrants and immigration, mapping an argument of race making, particularly at the intersections of nation, citizenship, and labor. In this work, she asks questions about mobility and temporality, tracing the ways that the movement of raced bodies racializes. As she completes this work, Lisa is beginning to envision the next project, which will center questions of agricultural labor and the state and will hopefully offer a theory of race and rhetoric, tentatively named “field rhetorics,” that will complement and extend border rhetorics. A past president of the Western States Communication Association and an active member of NCA, she has a strong commitment to disciplinary service and community. Currently, she serves as the book review editor for the Quarterly Journal of Speech and the forum editor for Women’s Studies in Communication and is the incoming chair of NCA’s Public Address Division. Though relatively new to RSA, Lisa has served on the RSA Policies Taskforce, the ad hoc Committee on Contingent Faculty, the editorial board of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and on the RSA Dissertation Award committee. She has published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech.
Charles E. Morris III is Professor and Chairperson in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. A rhetorical critic who identifies as an archival queer, Morris’ books include Queering Public Address: Sexualities & American Historical Discourse, Remembering the AIDS Quilt, An Archive of Hope: Harvey Milk’s Speeches and Writings, and Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest. He is co-founding-editor-in-chief of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and his essays and guest edited projects have appeared in QJS, CC/CS, RPA, TPQ, and in other journals and numerous edited volumes. He has been the recipient of NCA’s Karl Wallace Memorial Award, two Golden Anniversary Monograph Awards, the Randy Majors Award for distinction in LGBTQ scholarship, and in 2016 he was named a distinguished scholar by the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division of NCA. He recently completed service on the Publications Board of NCA, and he has chaired the Public Address and LGBTQ Divisions of NCA. A longtime member of RSA, he has been a seminar and workshop leader at the RSA Summer Institute on four occasions. Back To Top
Position 4: Jiyeon Kang (University of Iowa) - Anjali Vats (Boston College)
Jiyeon Kang is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Korean Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on conceptualizing the democratic potential of the Internet, with a specific interest in the communicative dynamics and cultural norms that have emerged in the contexts of youth-driven social movements and online communities. Her monograph, Igniting the Internet: Youth and Activism in Postauthoritarian South Korea, examines a decade of Internet activism in South Korea by combining textual analysis of online communities with ethnographic interviews. The book attends to the political significance of the Internet as a new social space in which the circulation of multisensory texts invites users to act upon their previously unarticulated desires. It also draws attention to long-term changes in political sensibilities even after the period of activism has passed. Kang’s upcoming projects explore “new civilities” on the Internet, referring not simply to politeness but to the transforming social and ethical norms of coexistence among groups that have heterogeneous or seemingly incommensurable experiences. Her article-length project examines how the unwanted attention and encroachment affects marginalized groups online. She is concurrently working on a book-length project on the novel and varied civilities at play in the online communities of international undergraduate students in the U.S., China, and South Korea.
Anjali Vats is Assistant Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. Her work is focused on rhetorics of race in law and popular culture. She currently completing a monograph entitled The Color of Creatorship: Race, Intellectual Properties, and the Making of Americans, under contract at Stanford University Press. Anjali has published articles in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Communication, Culture & Critique. Recently, she was awarded an AAUW Postdoctoral Fellowship and an Exemplary Diversity Scholar Citation from the National Center for Institutional Diversity for my commitment to race and gender equality in and out of the academy. She is deeply invested in rhetoric as an interdisciplinary tool for cultivating radical politics, social justice, and democratic engagement. She also is interested in supporting the study of vernacular and transnational rhetorics. Anjali has a long history of service to the field, including as: Co-Director of the University of Washington Chapter of RSA from 2011 - 2013, Discussion Pod Leader at the 2014 Midwest Winter Workshop, Workshop Co-leader at the 2017 RSA Summer Institute, and Advisory Board Member for the new Intersectional Rhetorics series at OSU Press. She would be thrilled to continue this work as a board member for RSA. Back To Top
Position 5: Laura Proszak (Northeastern University) - Karieann Soto Vega (Syracuse University)
Laura Proszak is a Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition in the Department of English at Northeastern University. She is chair of the RSA student chapter at Northeastern, and has participated in the 2017 RSA Summer Institute and the 2016 RSA Biennial Conference. Invested in archival studies as well as teaching the archive in her undergraduate writing classroom, she is currently co-authoring a chapter with Ellen Cushman, “Creating a Place With/in the University Archive,” which examines the value of students’ place-based understandings in working with physical and digital archives. Laura’s dissertation focuses on rhetorical education at a late nineteenth-century manual training school for children of immigrants in Boston, and explores the ways in which its embodied, child-centered methods attempted to shape young immigrants into industrious citizens. She will present on this work at the 2018 RSA Biennial Conference. Laura’s research builds on conversations in rhetorical education and historiography, and speaks to rhetorics surrounding manual work, immigration, and social class.
Karrieann Soto Vega is a PhD candidate in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University (SU). She studies rhetorics of defiance in decolonial activism by Puerto Rican women activists--specifically focusing on her feminist rhetorical recovery project on Lolita Lebrón and her transnational solidarity networks. Situated within the intersection of Composition, Rhetoric, Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies, she strives to create bridges in understanding cultural rhetorics across difference. As co-chair of the RSA at SU chapter, she worked with students and faculty across disciplines to put together writing and research workshops, as well as speaker events that would bring together undergraduate and graduate students from disciplines whose interests engaged a rhetorical framework. In her work as co-executive producer of This Rhetorical Life—a podcast dedicated to the practice, pedagogy, and public circulation of rhetoric in our lives—she has produced episodes that address rhetorical issues pertinent to a multitude of disciplines and social justice activists. In general, her work aims to create communication channels between rhetorical studies scholars and practitioners, throughout academic disciplines and geopolitical locations. Back To Top