[ATTW-L] ARSTM Precon Proposals Due Aug. 30th

Wed Aug 4 14:30:28 UTC 2021

Dear Colleagues,

Just a quick reminder that the proposal deadline for the ARSTM
preconference on *Rhetoric, Science, & the In/humanities,* to be held on
November 17th, 2021, is due at the end of this month. CFP is here
<https://www.arstmonline.org/2021/06/02/arstmnca-2021-preconference-cfp/>
and pasted below for your convenience. We look forward to reviewing your
proposals and hosting leading work on the edges of critical/cultural
technoscientific rhetorics.

All best,

Kenny

--
Rhetoric, Science, & the In/humanities

“We need to speak instead of our *genres of being human*. Once you redefine
being human in hybrid *mythoi* and *bios* terms, and therefore in terms
that draw attention to the relativity and original multiplicity of our *genres
*of being human, all of the sudden what you begin to recognize is the
central role that our discursive *formations, *aesthetic fields, and
systems of knowledge must play in the performative enactment of all such
genres of being hybridly human.” ~Sylvia Wynter

Rhetoric is a part of the humanities, of course; but rhetoric is also
inhuman—it operates within racialized material economies in its scholarly,
public, and institutional pursuits. The sciences are human achievements, of
course; but sciences are also deeply inhuman—they grapple with natural
phenomena in ways that too often reify racial and patriarchal projects
through which Western Man becomes majoritized and overrepresented (Wynter,
2003; Roberts, 2011; McKittrick, 2015; Yusoff, 2018). In the epigraph,
Sylvia Wynter argues that being human is a process, a praxis, that must be
re-enacted rhetorically, creatively, and hybridly through technoscientific
systems. Relatedly, in recent STS literatures, humans are biocultural
(Fanon 1952; Wynter, 2015; Frost, 2016), sympoetic cyborg kin with unique
response-abilities (Maturana & Varela, 1992, Haraway, 2015; Strathern,
2005), and animals who eat (Massumi, 2015; Mol, 2021). Being human is not a
noun, but an entangled form of earthly praxis. As rhetorical scholars
committed to anti-racist global feminist projects on a living planet, we
therefore must ask ourselves, what genre of the human is doing these
technoscientific rhetorics?

The slash between in/humanities reminds RSTM scholars that an/other
rhetoric of science is possible if it dwells with colonial wounds and works
to build pluriversal futures for Black feminist technoscience (McKittrick,
2020; Noble, 2018; Weheliye, 2014), Chicanx feminist decolonial *scientia*
(Sandoval, 2000; Anzaldúa, 2015; Mignolo, 2015), and Indigenous scientific
praxis (Kimmerer, 2015; TallBear, 2015; Tamez, 2011), just to mention a
few. For those primarily trained in Western onto-epistemologies, engaging
the in/human means some rhetorics and sciences will become unrecognizable
and strange exactly because their relations are multiple (Rivers, 2015). At
the same time, the inhuman reminds scholars that the nonhuman,
more-than-human, posthuman, cannot be ethically engaged without reckoning
with contemporary legacies of coloniality and racialized capital, perhaps
especially when in rhetorical practice with the political, public, and
place-based (Olson, 2014).

Rhetorical new materialisms have questioned rhetoric’s genres of humanness
through its diagnostic critique the modern/post-modern, its rejection of
monohumanist praxis, and its redefinitions of humanness toward the
material-relational (Coole and Frost, 2010; Graham, 2015; Graham 2020;
Barnett & Boyle, 2016; Druschke, 2019; Teston, 2019; Walsh, et. al., 2017).
Yet as STS scholars like Kathryn Yusoff (2018) have argued, the value of
the inhumanities is not just a dialectic to reframe humanist exclusions in
relation to their Others, but rather the inhumanities are an analytic to
trace relations of racialized material economies through scientific
practices (Roberts, 2011; Happe, 2013), and reckon with contemporary forms
of coloniality (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo 2012). Simultaneously, as a version
of counter-humanism, the inhuman understands being human as hybrid (Wynter,
2003; McKittrick 2015; Latour, 1991), as networked within global social
ecologies (Gomez-Barris, 2017), as feminist matters of care (de la
Bellacasa, 2017; Haraway, 2015; Jensen, 2016), as multiply applied and
praxiographic (Mol, 2003; Graham and Herndl, 2013), and always already in
relation to technoscientific infrastructures (Edwards, 2020; Johnson, 2020;
Mehlenbacher, 2019; Kelly and Miller, 2016; Pfister, 2014). When paired
together, rhetorics and sciences practice the technical and creative, the
sciences and the humanities, the being human within networked planetary
relationships. And while technosciences may not in and of themselves be
liberatory, questions of emancipation and abolition seem unthinkable
without reckoning with science’s monumental racial histories and practicing
new technoscientific worldings with distinctive rhetorical arts (Miller,
1984; Graham, 2020).

Thus, the 2021 ARSTM at NCA Preconference invites individual papers and panels
that address and/or embody the following questions:

   - How do sciences, technologies, and medicines engage the process of
   genre-ing the human? How do technoscientific rhetorics (re)define genres of
   the human, and what racializations contribute to these processes?
   - How have technoscientific rhetorics and racial-patriarchal projects
   emerged together historically and contemporarily?
   - How are world-building practices and definitions of the in/human
   inextricably linked in the context of your research questions, sites,
   methodologies, and teaching of RSTM? How do your frameworks reckon with the
   overrepresentation of monohumanness?
   - How do we make an/other (rhetoric of) science possible—one that
   betrays its relationship with racialized capital and instead builds worlds
   where living systems have priority over economic gains, growth, and
   development?
   - How can rhetorical scholars work to empower publics with techne (i.e.,
   citizen science movements, community-based scientists, health collectives;
   alternative medicines; etc), and how might this work transform genre
   processes within technoscience?

How to submit
Submit your individual abstract (300-400 words, not including bibliographic
citations) or four person panel proposals (with 100-word panel rationale in
addition to 300-400 word abstracts for each presenter) to
kenneth.walker at utsa.edu.

Panels should include a chair and speakers from multiple institutions.
Panel respondents are encouraged but not required. Please use “ARSTM
Preconference Submission” as your email subject, and provide your preferred
contact information and the contact information for any co-authors in the
email body. Please also note your preference for either an in-person
presentation, or an asynchronous online presentation with a live in-person
or virtual Q&A and we will do our best to accommodate you.

Any questions about this CFP and the ARSTM at NCA 2021 preconference may be
addressed to kenneth.walker at utsa.edu.
Dates and Deadlines

*Abstract submission deadline:* Monday, August 30th, 2021 at 11:59pm ET

*Decision notification:* Monday, September 27th, 2021

*Papers/presentations due for upload:* Monday, November 8th, 2021 at 11:59
ET

*Preconference date:* 9:00am-4:30pm PST, Wednesday, November 17th, 2021

The Association for Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM)
will host its annual preconference prior to the National Communication
Association conference. We will offer a hybrid format of in person/online
conferencing on November 17th, 2021, the day before the 107th Annual
Convention of National Communication Association.
<https://www.natcom.org/nca-107th-annual-convention-renewal-and-transformation>

-- 
Kenneth Walker, PhD
Assistant Professor
<http://colfa.utsa.edu/english/certificate_rc.html>Graduate Advisor of
Record (GAR) <http://colfa.utsa.edu/english/degreeplans.html>
First Vice-President, Rhetoric of Science, Technology, & Medicine
<https://www.arstmonline.org/>
Department of English <http://colfa.utsa.edu/english/>
University of Texas, San Antonio <http://www.utsa.edu/>
One UTSA Circle
San Antonio, TX 78249
210-458-4374 <210-458-5344>
http://colfa.utsa.edu/english/walker.html
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