Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference 2016: “Rhetoric and Literacy on the Border”

Friday and Saturday, October 21-22, 2016 at UC San Diego

The Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference was initiated to allow scholars in the Western region to come together and exchange current research in rhetoric and literacy studies. In keeping with the spirit of a small gathering, the conference is held in a professional but relaxed atmosphere. Its goal is to address theoretical and pedagogical issues through a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. This year’s conference theme is “Rhetoric and Literacy on the Border.”

Borders are liminal spaces that shape identity, determine citizenship, and invite or dissuade participation; they are used to exclude as well as to include. Borders are sites of domination, resistance, and sometimes violence, but also can provide a locus for interaction, transition, and exchange. While rhetoric and literacy play a significant role in helping to create and maintain the asymmetrical power relations that borders engender, they also have the potential to destabilize, dismantle, and transcend borders. This year’s conference presentations interrogate, explicate, complicate, and otherwise engage with real and imagined borders between and among countries, regions, disciplines, institutions of learning, languages, technologies, and cultures.

Keynote Speaker: Elizabeth Losh

Keynote address, Friday, October 21, 2016 at 9:30 a.m.
Leave No Trace: Digital Erasure and the Composition Classroom

Elizabeth Losh is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at The College of William and Mary and the author of The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press, 2014),which won the 2016 CCCC Outstanding Book Award. She also is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009) and co-author of the comic book textbook Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013) with Jonathan Alexander. Before moving to William and Mary, Professor Losh served as the Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College at UC San Diego, where she taught courses on digital rhetoric and new media.

Professor Losh has written a number of frequently cited essays about communities that produce, consume, and circulate online video, videogames, digital photographs, text postings, and programming code. The diverse range of subject matter analyzed in her scholarship has included coming out videos on YouTube, videogame fan films created by immigrants, combat footage from soldiers in Iraq shot on mobile devices, video evidence created for social media sites by protesters on the Mavi Marmara, remix videos from the Arab Spring, the use of Twitter and Facebook by Indian activists working for women’s rights after the Delhi rape case, and the use of Instagram by anti-government activists in Ukraine.

Much of this academic research concerns the legitimation of political institutions through visual evidence, representations of war and violence in global news, and discourses about human rights. Professor Losh is also a blogger for Digital Media and Learning Central and a Steering Committee member of FemTechNet.

Schedule

Logistics

Location: Cross-Cultural Center, Price Center, UC San Diego

Registration for this event is free. To register please send an email to hbauer@ucsd.edu

The closest visitor parking is in the Gilman Parking Structure located at the intersection of Gilman and Villa La Jolla. The fee for all-day parking on weekdays is $16. On weekends there is no fee.

A light breakfast of coffee, tea, and pastries will be provided both days. Lunch is not included in the programming, but there are many places to eat around Price Center.

Hosted by UC San Diego’s Division of Arts and Humanities, the Warren College Writing Program, the Writing Center, and the Cross-Cultural Center

Conference Program

Download the tentative WSRLC Program (subject to change)

2016 Program (.pdf)

Travel and Hotel Information:

Best Western Premier Del Mar Inn

Sheraton Inn

Residence Inn

Directions to UCSD
from SAN airport