<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Dear Colleagues, <br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Just a quick reminder that the proposal deadline for the ARSTM preconference on <i>Rhetoric, Science, & the In/humanities,</i> to be held on November 17th, 2021, is due at the end of this month. CFP is <a href="https://www.arstmonline.org/2021/06/02/arstmnca-2021-preconference-cfp/">here</a> 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. <br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">All best, <br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Kenny<br clear="all"></div><div><br></div><div><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif" class="gmail_default">--</div><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif" class="gmail_default"><h2><span style="font-weight:400">Rhetoric, Science, & the In/humanities</span></h2>
<blockquote><p><span style="font-weight:400">“We need to speak instead of our </span><i><span style="font-weight:400">genres of being human</span></i><span style="font-weight:400">. Once you redefine being human in hybrid </span><i><span style="font-weight:400">mythoi</span></i><span style="font-weight:400"> and </span><i><span style="font-weight:400">bios</span></i><span style="font-weight:400"> terms, and therefore in terms that draw attention to the relativity and original multiplicity of our </span><i><span style="font-weight:400">genres </span></i><span style="font-weight:400">of being human, all of the sudden what you begin to recognize is the central role that our discursive </span><i><span style="font-weight:400">formations, </span></i><span style="font-weight:400">aesthetic
fields, and systems of knowledge must play in the performative
enactment of all such genres of being hybridly human.” ~Sylvia Wynter</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight:400">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?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400">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 </span><i><span style="font-weight:400">scientia</span></i><span style="font-weight:400">
(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).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400">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).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400">Thus, the 2021 ARSTM@NCA Preconference invites individual papers and panels that address and/or embody the following questions:</span></p>
<ul><li style="font-weight:400"><span style="font-weight:400">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?</span></li><li style="font-weight:400"><span style="font-weight:400">How have technoscientific rhetorics and racial-patriarchal projects emerged together historically and contemporarily?</span></li><li style="font-weight:400"><span style="font-weight:400">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?</span></li><li style="font-weight:400"><span style="font-weight:400">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?</span></li><li style="font-weight:400"><span style="font-weight:400">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? </span></li></ul>
<h3>How to submit</h3>
<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail_default">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 <a href="mailto:kenneth.walker@utsa.edu" target="_blank" rel="noopener">kenneth.walker@utsa.edu</a>.</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div>
<div class="gmail_default">
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.</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div>
<div class="gmail_default">Any questions about this CFP and the ARSTM@NCA 2021 preconference may be addressed to <a href="mailto:kenneth.walker@utsa.edu" target="_blank" rel="noopener">kenneth.walker@utsa.edu</a>.</div>
</div>
<h3>Dates and Deadlines</h3>
<p><i><span style="font-weight:400">Abstract submission deadline:</span></i><span style="font-weight:400"> Monday, August 30</span><span style="font-weight:400">th</span><span style="font-weight:400">, 2021 at 11:59pm ET</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight:400">Decision notification:</span></i><span style="font-weight:400"> Monday, September 27</span><span style="font-weight:400">th</span><span style="font-weight:400">, 2021</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight:400">Papers/presentations due for upload:</span></i><span style="font-weight:400"> Monday, November 8</span><span style="font-weight:400">th</span><span style="font-weight:400">, 2021 at 11:59 ET</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight:400">Preconference date:</span></i><span style="font-weight:400"> 9:00am-4:30pm PST, Wednesday, November 17</span><span style="font-weight:400">th</span><span style="font-weight:400">, 2021</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400">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 17</span><span style="font-weight:400">th</span><span style="font-weight:400">, 2021, the day before the</span><a href="https://www.natcom.org/nca-107th-annual-convention-renewal-and-transformation"><span style="font-weight:400"> 107th Annual Convention of National Communication Association.</span></a></p></div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div>Kenneth Walker, PhD <br></div></div><div>Assistant Professor<a href="http://colfa.utsa.edu/english/certificate_rc.html" target="_blank"><br></a><a href="http://colfa.utsa.edu/english/degreeplans.html" target="_blank">Graduate Advisor of Record (GAR)</a></div><div>First Vice-President, <a href="https://www.arstmonline.org/" target="_blank">Rhetoric of Science, Technology, & Medicine</a><br></div></div><div dir="ltr"><a href="http://colfa.utsa.edu/english/" target="_blank">Department of English</a><br><a href="http://www.utsa.edu/" target="_blank">University of Texas, San Antonio</a><br>One UTSA Circle<br>
<span>San Antonio, TX 78249<br>
<a href="tel:210-458-5344" value="+12104585344" target="_blank">210-458-4374</a><br>
<a href="http://colfa.utsa.edu/english/walker.html" target="_blank">http://colfa.utsa.edu/english/walker.html</a></span><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>