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

4:00-5:30pm— Introductions and Panel: "Transnational Rhetorical Feminist Methodologies" 

“Story Sharing, or How to Narrate Your Trauma for an Unpersecuted Audience by Lindsey Albracht

"Infrastructures for a new cultural future: aiding, integrating, and using unaccompanied minors in Sweden" by Alexis Larsson

"Affective Management and Digital Access in the Rights-Based Landscape" by Seth Graves

"The Federalist Papers and the Geneva Conventions: Conceiving Rights and Access, Arguing for the Principle" by Vivian Liang

5:45-6:30pm— Workshop: Mapping Spectacular Rhetorics

Panelists will lead participants in a collaborative annotation of popular images of refugees in circulation. Participants are encouraged to bring images to share--no originals, please: we will make a mess of them together. Scholars of affect, trauma, and postcolonial theories are warmly invited to collaborate.

6:45pm— Keynote Speaker: Rebecca Dingo

Professor Dingo is the author of Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing (Pittsburgh 2012) (winner of the W. Ross Winterowd Award for outstanding book on Composition Theory 2013) and co-editor of The Megarhetorics of Global Development (with J. Blake Scott) (Pittsburgh 2012). She has published articles and chapters on a wide range of topics related to rhetoric, feminism, composition, and globalization. She has reviewed manuscripts for several rhetoric, composition, and women’s studies journals, and is on the Editorial Board of Lexington Press’s Cultural Studies/Pedagogy/Activism series.

Dingo's research spans the fields of composition & rhetoric and feminist studies; she has published essays on transnational feminist rhetorical methods, transnational literacy, writing program administration and globalization, as well as a policy brief on UK international disability and development policies.

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