RSA 2020 Virtual Awards ...Announcing the Winners of the Hauser & Outstanding Student Chapter Awards

Each year, RSA recognizes one of its Student Chapters with the Outstanding Student Chapter award, and each biennium, RSA celebrates the accomplishments of graduate students presenting at the RSA Conference by giving the Gerard A. Hauser Award. Today, to kick off the virtual RSA Awards Ceremony, we officially announced the winners of both those awards with short videos.

We hope that you’ve seen and shared the videos already. If not, you can watch the Outstanding RSA Student Chapter announcement here and the Hauser Award announcement here. These awards videos were generously sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin Writing Center.

The winner of the 2020 Outstanding Student Chapter is: RSA @ Louisiana State University.

 RSA@LSU has a strong record of hosting inter- and trans- disciplinary events that connect graduate students across a range of disciplines, departments, and institutions. As their rationale notes, the chapter has experienced an intensive revitalization beginning in fall 2018, grown its membership, and demonstrated a passion for promoting the visibility of rhetoric and RSA on LSU’s campus. Besides holding regular meetings and hosting social events, they have organized writing workshops and academic job talks through which members can expand professionalization efforts. Since 2019, their speaker events have brought together audiences from both Communication and Composition/Writing/English, and welcome faculty and students from other disciplines as well. Indeed, it is evident that RSA@LSU is dedicated and passionate about increasing the visibility of rhetoric and RSA at LSU, across Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region, and nation-wide.

The winners of the 2020 Gerard A. Hauser Award are:

• Zhaozhe Wang for his paper “Activist Rhetoric in Transnational Cyber-Public Spaces”
  
  
• Yebing Zhao for her paper “Reflective and Reciprocal Hospitality: ‘Voice’ Dialoguing with Chinese Literary Theory of ‘Wenqi 文气’”
  
  
• Joshua N. Morrison for his paper “Focus on the Queers: Benevolent Rhetorics of LGBTQ oppression and the Discourse of Christian Care in Radical Right Politics”
  
  
• Matthew Halm for his paper “Molten Circulation of Plate Tectonics as a Diagram for Rhetoric's Materiality”
  
  
• Yanar Hashlamon for his paper “Rhetoricity at the End of History: Carceral Power and the Neoliberal Gradations of Rhetorical Debility”

Congratulations to RSA@LSU, to the five Hauser Awardees, and to all the graduate students who make rhetorical studies a vibrant, engaging, always-growing discipline.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the announcement of the Cheryl Geisler Award for Outstanding Mentor and the RSA Fellows’ Early Career Award!