Registration Opens for The Philadelphia Convention

The February 15 deadline to register for the 2012 RSA Conference is fast approaching. Be sure to secure your place on the program by registering now!

1. ACCEPTANCE NOTIFICATIONS: If in mid-December you received an acceptance email for a single-paper proposal, then all you need do to guarantee your place on the 2012 program is to register (see #2 below); however, if you received an acceptance email for a panel or special session, then you need not only to register but also to contact all the participants on your panel and encourage them to register as well so as to confirm their places on the program. The easiest way to contact them is to forward the acceptance email and attached letter that you received in mid-December.
    
2. REGISTRATION: The registration site for the 2012 conference is up and running.  To register, simply follow these steps:
1.  Go to the RSA home page.
2. Click on the box marked Conferences and Institutes.
3. When that page opens, go to the column on the far left and click on registration.  Then follow the directions for registering. 

Remember, those of you who intend to present at the convention must register by February 15 to reserve your place on the program; failure to register forfeits your spot. 
 

3. HOTEL: The main conference hotel is the Philadelphia Loews, which has negotiated generous conference rates and which is, well, cool because it is the first modern skyscraper in the US. If you want reserve a room at the Loews, go to the RSA registration page and click on hotel information,which is also found on the far left side of the page. There you will have all the information needed to make a reservation. 
    
4. LUNCHEON: If you want to attend the luncheon on Sunday where Jacqueline Jones Royster is speaking (and it’s something no one would want to miss!), please check the appropriate box on the registration form. As always, because a limited number of seats is available, spaces will be awarded to the first registrants to check the box. So don’t wait.  Register and reserve your spot now. 
    
5. RESEARCH NETWORK: The Research Network: Sharing Work in Progress has enrolled 78 participants and will be conducted by 13 facilitators who will contact the participants assigned to their groups to make arrangements for reviewing papers.
    
6. ISHR/RSA SEMINAR:  As you may know, in 2012, Professor Laurent Pernot had to cancel his seminar on epideictic rhetoric, but he has agreed to revisit the topic and lead his seminar this year! The same group who signed up for the 2010 seminar will be studying with Prof. Pernot.
    
7. SUPERSESSIONS: Plans for the supersessions are nearing completion, and they promise to be—OK, I’ll echo Mike Leff here and make the pun—super! They include: Human Rights Rhetorics (Arabella Lyon and Lester Olson); Transnational Rhetorics (Ralph Cintron and Bob Hariman); Rhetorical Leadership (Greg Clark and David Kaufer); Women in the History of Rhetoric (Cheryl Glenn); Visual Rhetoric & Presidential Politics (Cara Finnegan); Decolonial Rhetorics of Indigeneity and Latinidad (Victor Villanueva); Rhetoric and Film (Joyce Middleton and Kendall Phillips); Kenneth Burke (Jack Selzer); Rhetoric from Beyond (the Human) (Diane Davis); Rhetorical Pedagogy (Katie Kavanagh O'Neill); and Rhetorical Criticism (Charles Morris)
    
8. CONFERENCE PROGRAM: In late February after registration has closed and acceptances have been finalized, the 2012 conference program will become available. (Please note: because of the increased number of proposal submissions this year, the conference will begin on Friday morning instead of Friday afternoon.) And speaking of the conference's first day, do plan to attend the Friday late-afternoon general session, where Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell will join forces to address us all and provide us with lots to discuss at the reception afterwards. As you will see when you view the program, the conference will have a wonderfully diverse and interesting array of presenters from many countries and with as many attitudes about rhetoric as there are definitions of it.
    
9. AND DON’T FORGET: • If you submitted a panel proposal, you are responsible for contacting the other people on your panel and telling them the results of the program committee’s review. • If your panel or paper proposal was not accepted, you may still participate as a panel chair; to do so, please indicate your interest in an email to Kim Newman, Conference Assistant, at kimberly.newman@marquette.edu. 

The conference promises to be exciting, featuring a cast of many hundreds of rhetoricians, all engaged with how the histories, theories, and practices of rhetoric inform our scholarship and our daily lives.