Event

Mapping the Discursive Landscape

Fri, Apr 21, 2017

4:00 PM–8:00 PM

Room 9207

Join us for this mini-conference “Mapping the Discursive Landscape” which grew out of discussions of bringing postcolonial studies into rhetorical scholarship, using selections from Julietta Hua’s Trafficking Human Rights as an example of how such aspirations might be put into practice. To re-orient the words of Hua, the “work of mapping the discursive landscape and the regimes of knowledge” through which international human rights issues become mediated for U.S. audiences demands a transnational feminist rhetorical methodology: a methodology that is transnational in its attention to the various ways national power, privilege, and identity are positioned. This mini-conference will consider alternative readings of narratives that naturalize particular modes of subjectivity when describing forced migration, asylum, and international community. The conference will feature a panel, an interactive exercise of annotating public images of migration, and a keynote speech by Professor Rebecca Dingo, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

SCHEDULE

4:00pm Introduction/opening
4:10pm Space Matters: Narratives on Refugees and Forced Migrants in Greece. Georgina Vasquez De Los Reyes, New School
4:30pm Documenting Movement Vivian Liang
4:50pm “Not Everyone Wants to Go to Western Europe.” Luka Lucić, Pratt
5:10pm Break
5:30pm To Whom it May Concern Poems by Anthony Alves
5:50pm The Global Internet Seth Graves
6:10pm Swedish Interventions Alexis Larsson
6:30pm Break
6:45pm Keynote by Rebecca Dingo: The Girl Affect: Rhetoric, Circulation, and Political Economy
8:15pm Reception

This event will be livestreamed, click here to watch.

Keynote: The Girl Affect: Rhetoric, Circulation, and Political Economy

Dr. Rebecca Dingo is an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. She is also currently the Director of the
University Writing Program there. Her published research has addressed
transnational rhetorical and composition studies and in doing so she forwards a
transnational feminist lens attuned to global political economy. She is
the author of Networking Argument: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and
Public Policy Writing, which received the W. Ross Winterowd Award in 2012.
She has traveled widely—most recently to Lebanon and South Africa— to
offer workshops and training in research, writing pedagogies, and writing
development. As a result she is currently working on an edited collection
with Jonathan Duek and Rachel Riedner on how writing instruction across the
globe has responded and changed due to neoliberal globalization. She is
also working on a second book project (The Girl Affect) that examines
how political economy animates the circulation of certain rhetorics; she uses
the recently explosion of global girl empowerment initiatives to make her.