I had a lot of fun at 4C’s and went to quite a few talks (though I read on others’ blogs that this is typical of the first-timer’s trip: trying to fit it all in). Let’s see if I can summarize adequately what I’ve been up to, seen, and heard so far, reconstructing the events from my scribbled notes. I’ll make a post for each day of the conference.
Wednesday:
The Future of the History of Rhetoric and Composition (Sponsored by the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition)
I unfortunately didn’t take notes during Linda Ferreira-Buckley‘s (University of Texas at Austin) talk “Archival Research and the Construction of Women’s Histories,“ except to note that she referred to Jacques Derrida’s paper on archives, “Archive Fever,“ published in 1996 by the University of Chicago Press. Derrida discusses the ways in which archives are used to remember and honor groups, and sometimes to forget them.
The second talk in the event was Kate Adams‘s (Loyola University) talk “A Future for Pedagogical Research and the Construction of Women’s Histories,“ in which she argued that there are two questions we must ask when doing archival work: 1) “So what?“ and 2) “Why me?“ (i.e., Why not someone else in another field? What do I, as an interested person, and as someone schooled in rhetoric, bring to these archives that someone else would/could not?)
Bo Wang‘s (California State University, Fresno) talk “Generating a Dialogue between East and West: Research in Asian Rhetoric“ argued for (from my memory) the use of Chinese rhetorical theories when researching Chinese texts, not the colonialization of the texts by Euro-American theories of rhetoric (e.g., not using Aristotelean rhetoric to understand Chinese argumentation or discourse).
Because Mary Hocks (Georgia State University) could not attend, Anne Wysocki (soon to be of University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) discussed the ways in which corporations are creating and having us create our culture (e.g., voting for American Idol or Survivor winners and losers; the number of people who voted in the most recent Survivor vote equaled a quarter of those who voted in our last presidential election). She mentioned a 2006 book Rainbow’s End by Ving, about the future and digital technology in which a discussion is held, after all the books in a library have been digitized, whether traditional books should all be destroyed. The book is eerily similar to Henry Jenkens’s conception of the present in Convergence Culture, wherein Jenkens discusses collective intelligence and our society in which participants are interacting with a new set of values that we don’t yet understand; we are no longer just consumers and producers, but both. However, all of the subjects of his book are hyper-consumers. The concern, then, is trying to find spaces outside of a monolithic capitalism/economy for change. Wysocki brought up the book A Post-Capitalist Politics by JK Gibson-Graham (who is/are two women writing under one name). The premise of the book is that we believe in one monolithic economy, yet there is not one. Instead, using global feminism, the authors argue that we need to look at localized economies and work toward change that is “good enough.“ She also mentioned the book The Threshold of the Visual World by Kaja Silverman, but I don’t remember the context or reason.
After the talks and questions, we broke into discussion groups, and most people unfortunately left (it was late at night, though). I was one of four men in the room before we broke up; I think I was the only one to stay for discussions. I had a great talk with Kathleen Welch (University of Stony Brook SUNY) and Joyce Irene Middleton (East Carolina University), as well as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina (she gave me her card, but I can’t seem to find it at the moment) about women and online media, including blogs, MySpace, and online dating. It was a great talk, and both I and the UNC doctoral student discussed our research with Kathleen and Joyce.
