Call for Proposals


Theme: Rhetorics and Sensorium

Keynote Speaker: Debra Hawhee, Penn StateUniversity

October 27-28, 2016
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT

For the 2017 Western States and Literacy Conference, we turn our attention to the field’s ongoing exploration of rhetoric and literacy as sensorial practices. In addition to traditional understandings of rhetoric and literacy as “reason, rationality, or the symbolic work of language…more recent “effort…. includes the rise in work on materiality, bodies, affect, media, machines, nonhuman animals; the list ought to go on” (Hawhee, 2015, p. 4). The study of sensorium contributes to our understanding of the suasive effects that undergird the histories, theories, and practices of rhetoric and writing.

We invite proposals that grapple with these ongoing disciplinary questions of sensorium informing our histories, theories, and practices in our pedagogies and research.  Of particular interest are presentations that encourage audience participation and discussion, and contribute closely to the conference theme of rhetorics and sensorium and to questions concerning aspects of the following:

• Embodied Theories of Rhetoric & Writing
• Pedagogy as Felt Practice
• Rhetorics of the Body 
• Digital & Networked Technologies
• Intersections of Affect and Literacy
• Nature, Animality and the Nonrational
• Nonrepresentational Rhetorics
• Materiality of Rhetoric and Writing

Please submit:
•  A cover page that includes the title, speaker/s, address/es, email/s, and phone number/s, along with a brief 25-50 word description of your presentation
•  A one-page abstract identifying the format of the presentation as: 
(a) 20-minute paper (or a 90-minute panel limited to 3 speakers including time for discussion)
(b) 90-minute round-table (focused discussion encouraging audience participation)

 

Proposals must be postmarked or sent via email by Friday, March, 31, 2017.  Send to:
MAUREEN MATHISON, DEPARTMENT OF WRITING AND RHETORIC STUDIES,
255 CENTRAL CAMPUS DR RM 3700, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84112-0495
maureen.mathison@utah.edu

Visit our website:  http://www.public.asu.edu/~petergo/wsrl/wsrl.html