The annual Gesa E. Kirsch CWS Graduate Symposium is a research forum where Illinois graduate students—working on topics within writing, rhetoric, literacy, discourse, media, and communication—can present work-in-progress and receive feedback from a small, interested group of peers and faculty. The symposium event is organized by CWS graduate students. Participants come from disciplines across campus, including English, Communication, Education, and Linguistics.
This year's symposium marks a return to an in-person event, with the option to watch online via Zoom. Please contact CWS Assistant Directors Megan Mericle (mericle2@illinois.edu) and Finola McMahon (finolam2@illinois.edu) for the Zoom information. Due to rising COVID rates in the Champaign-Urbana community, we strongly encourage in-person attendees to get tested before attending and wear masks throughout the event.
Below you can find a complete schedule for the two days of the Kirsch Symposium, along with information on the keynote speaker, CWS alumnus Dr. Jonathan W. Stone:
Day 1: Thursday, April 28
8:45am - 9:30am | Catered breakfast
9:30am - 11:00am | "Resounding History: Sound, Rhetoric, and Archival Methods” | Workshop with Dr. Jonathan W. Stone
In this interactive workshop, participants will draw from Jon’s work to consider nontraditional approaches to archival, rhetorical, and historiographical methods. Sound has been at the center of Jon’s “nontraditional” approach, but the workshop will be all the richer if we can push beyond sound and bring other modes, approaches, and exigencies to the methodological frame, especially those that are intersectional and/or provide means to address marginalized rhetorics and promote equity, diversity, and inclusion in our research. The workshop will also offer a behind-the-scenes look at the research/publication process and a chance to discuss student interests, projects, and questions.
Optional: before attending the workshop, please check out Dr. Stone's book’s chapter on historiography at https://bit.ly/ResoundingGKS and his recently published piece over at Intermezzo: “Resounding History: A Rhetoric of Sonic Historiography (in Two Parts)”: http://intermezzo.enculturation.net/14-stedman-et-al/stone.html
11:00am - 11:30am | Break
11:30am - 12:15pm | "Exploring Expertise in Writing Studies: A Mini-Workshop on Graduate Student Experiences & Mentoring" | Workshop with Megan Mericle
Day 2: Friday, April 29th
9:30am - 10:00am | Opening Remarks | Dr. Peter Mortensen
10:00am - 10:45am | Panel, "Recalling Embodiment"
Yvaine Neyhard, "On Remaining Human While Teaching and Learning as Cyborgs"
Azlan Smith, "Writing Shadows: Queer Fiction, Queer Study"
11:00am - 12:00pm | Catered lunch
12:00pm - 12:15pm | Introduction to Keynote | Dr. Peter Mortensen
12:15pm - 1:00pm | "Rhetorics of Change, Archives of Sensation: A (mid)Western Meta-tation" | Keynote from Dr. Jonathan W. Stone
In this talk, Jon invites you to accompany him on a rhetorical journey, connecting memory, history, and the archive with place, sensation, and the lived experience of (and resistance to) change. With images, sounds, a taste for Maize huitlacoche quesadillas, and metaphorical toes sunk into the soil of the Marrow Plots, Jon will address the difficulty and importance of transitions, both personally and culturally. Learning to think or act or live differently (and with difference) is a messy process, and rhetorics of change are equally so, requiring diverse discursive, material, and embodied knowledge, not to mention a felicity in rational and nonrational/sensory persuasive modes in their composition. Drawing on research from his recently published work, Jon will argue that new approaches to and conceptions of “the archive” provide inroads for new understandings of key historical and ideological shifts and tools for enacting (or enduring) contemporary ones. This meta-tation on change will be undergirded with wily tales from Jon’s time as a student at the University of Illinois, his experience teaching, writing, living, and hiking in Utah, and will extend, consequently, into sketches of possible routes through a nascent project exploring the American West as a sensory archive of environmental reckoning. Climate change is, after all, coming for us all.
1:00pm - 2:30pm | Panel, "Memory, Remembering, and Activism"
Jackie Abing, "Discourses of Debt & Welfare from 1970s Mexican Repatriates Looking Back at the 1930s"
Lesley Owens, "Exploring Genre & Graduate Student Experiences of Ableism During COVID-19"
Bruce Kovanen, "Perezhivanie and Becoming: Tracing Flat CHAT Assemblage in Labor Activism"
2:30pm-3:15pm | Break
3:15pm - 4:00pm | Panel, "Multimodal Realities"
Bri Lafond, "'Just because it's not my voice doesn't mean it's not my words': The Complications of Collaborative Multimedia Authorship on YouTube"
Tessa Crosby, "Stranger than Fact: Realism Meets the Real in Fictionalized Investigative Podcasts"
4:00pm - 4:45pm | Graduate Reflections
Logan Middleton & Carrie James
4:45pm - 5:00pm | Closing Remarks | Gesa E. Kirsch
At 5pm on Friday, after the events have concluded, a happy hour will be held at Murphy's Pub.
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
The Kirsch Foundation | Gesa E. Kirsch | The Center for Writing Studies | Peter Mortensen | Panera Bakery Champaign | Pekara Bakery | Piato Catering
Planning Committe: Antonio Hamilton (adh8@illinois.edu) & Yvaine Neyhard (neyhard2@illinois.edu)
