RSA 2015 Summer Institute - Sampler of Seminars and Workshops

A Sampler of Seminars and Workshops

What can you expect at the RSA Summer Institute in Madison in 2015? The answer is: a wide array of workshops and seminars on a range of topics of interest to scholars across the spectrum of rhetoric studies.

Here’s an example of what you’ll see in a little over a month, once the full array of offerings is posted on this website:

• Debra Hawhee and Vanessa Beasley will discuss how rhetoric is finally coming to its – or to the – senses, in a five-day seminar on “Rhetoric and Sensation,” focusing on the sonic, haptic, and olfactory rhetorical senses.
• In the summer of 2015, the country will be gearing up, for better or worse, for the primaries leading up to the presidential election a year later. Mary Stuckey’s workshop will focus on the rhetorical and political networks that sometimes make us wonder: do elections really matter?
• How do we evaluate the advances made in the neurosciences when it comes to the nature of language, perception, and consciousness? Jordynn Jack and David Gruber will focus their workshop on the promise and risk associated with the transdisciplinary field of “neurorhetorics.”
• If this is an age of skepticism, in which political campaigns are constantly fact-checked, how durable is rhetoric’s demystifying power in the face of powerful populist discourses? Those who want to participate in Dana Cloud’s workshop will begin to answer that question.
• Jack Selzer, Kyle Jensen, and Krista Ratcliffe will lead a seminar that takes the measure of Kenneth Burke’s contribution to rhetoric through a recently-discovered and never-before published section of A Rhetoric of Motives. Why does Burke matter so much to rhetorical scholars when his work is so imperfect (and imperfectly understood)?
• In Bill Hart-Davidson and Ryan Omizo’s workshop, participants will learn to apply computational methods - including network analysis & graph theory, natural language processing & text mining, and activity stream analysis - to invent new analytic and heuristic approaches to technical and professional writing.
• Leah Ceccarelli’s seminar on rhetoric and science will examine how the challenges of the twenty-first century – including “citizen science,” open access of scientific journals, conflicts between public policy and scientific inquiry, and the questioning of the “reality” of climate change – and what role rhetoricians of science can play in meeting them.

If this sampling of the workshops and seminars in Madison sounds intriguing, please consider signing up for one of the 7 seminars and 24 workshops (or one of each!) we have on tap for the summer of 2015. The application process will begin in late May. So watch this space!