The Fall 2008 Ray Smith Symposium:

Feminist Rhetorics
for Social Justice
October 23 and 24

Journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Backlash, Susan Faludi will speak, 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 23 in SU's Stolkin Auditorium, Physics Building. Faludi has chronicled—with astonishing clarity—the changing roles of men and women in society, becoming one of the most provocative voices on women's rights. Her latest book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America, examines the political and cultural fallout from 9/11.

Other Susan Faludi Events:
The Writing Program's Nonfiction Reading Series

Associated Event:
"Gawking, Gawking, Staring:
Living In Marked Bodies"

a public lecture by Eli Clare, Wednesday, October 22.

Friday's Featured Speakers:

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota and author or editor of eight books including the groundbreaking, two- volume series of early feminist work Man Cannot Speak For Her.

Wendy Hesford, associate professor of English at Ohio State University and author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy; co-editor with Wendy Kozol of Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real;" and Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and The Politics of Representation.

Shirley Wilson Logan, professor and director of writing programs in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, and editor of With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women. The book includes speeches by Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Anna Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Victoria Earle Matthews.

Malea Powell, associate professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American cultures and a faculty member of the American Indian Studies Program at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the rhetorics of survivance used by 19th century American Indian intellectuals with a keen eye on the rhetoric of Native American women.

The Fall 2008 Ray Smith Symposium:
Feminist Rhetorics for Social Justice
October 23 and 24

The Feminist Rhetorics for Social Justice Symposium, to be held at Syracuse University on October 23-24, 2008, will bring together communities of feminist rhetoric scholars, public intellectuals, and community activists to discuss the intersections of feminist rhetoric and feminist history making with local and global issues of social justice. Speakers will include Pulitizer prize winning journalist and noted feminist author Susan Faludi and four nationally recognized scholars of feminist rhetorics: Dr. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (University of Minnesota), Dr. Shirley Wilson Logan (University of Maryland), Dr. Malea Powell (Michigan State University), and Dr. Wendy Hesford (Ohio State University). Community panelists who work on issues of social justice will offer insights and thoughts about activist strategies and tactics. The presentations are free and open to the public (Register).

On Saturday, October 25, 2008, a post-symposium Feminist Research Network Forum will be held from 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. in order to allow faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates a chance to share their current projects and receive feedback from each other as well as leading scholars in the field of feminist rhetorics. Anyone interested in participating in the Research Network forum should send a 250 word proposal no later than the August 15, 2008. Papers (6-8 pages) for the Research Network Forum will be due October 1, 2008. More details can be found in the Call for Papers [pdf] (Register).

The Ray Smith Symposium Series was established in 1989 as the result of a bequest from the estate of SU alumnus Ray W. Smith '21 to support symposia on topics in the Humanities in SU's College of Arts and Sciences. Funding for the symposium is also being provided by The Writing Program and the Department of Women's and Gender Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences; the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts; and Colgate University's Upstate Institute, Department of Writing and Rhetoric, Program in Women's Studies and the Division of University Studies.

Rationale for the Symposium

Central New York has long been known as the “birthplace of women’s rights,” the place where the first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls in 1848. Given Syracuse University’s historical location in Central New York and its proximity to feminist landmarks like the Women’s Rights National Historical Park, the Susan B. Anthony House, and the Matilda Gage Foundation, it seems fitting that a symposium in feminist rhetorics would take place here. Yet the Syracuse community’s connection to feminist activism is not merely a historical one, but a living connection that thrives as feminist activists continue to be engaged in movements for social change on campus, off-campus, and across the region.

In the academy, Feminist Rhetorics has, over the past two decades, become a very promising interdisciplinary field, spanning communication studies, women’s studies, rhetoric and writing studies, various branches of ethnic studies, and even branches of the social sciences. In a general sense, the term feminist rhetorics has referred to “to discourse advocating enlarged legal, economic, and political rights for women” (Karlyn Kohrs Campbell “Feminist Rhetoric” 301). Feminist rhetorics also have served as a way to document and analyze the multi-layered histories of feminist social movements.

Scholars of feminist rhetorics have undertaken a large-scale historical recovery project that involves recovering, analyzing, and anthologizing speeches and written texts by feminist activists, organizers, and writers. There are now graduate seminars taught nationally on feminist rhetorics and many graduate students in communication studies and rhetorical studies are choosing to focus their work in this area, often blending scholarship and activism. In addition to focusing on the historical past, feminist rhetoricians also have studied and participated in strategies and movements for contemporary feminist social change in the arenas of public policy, politics, education, the workplace, and community organizing.

Major Themes and Questions of the Symposium

Our major themes and questions for the symposium will be as follows:

Feminist Activism and Rhetoric:

How can we evaluate and understand the influence of women’s historical, geographic, economic, social, and political locations on rhetorical tactics and strategies for feminist activism?
How can we understand the roles that individuals or groups take in maintaining or dismantling gender-based inequalities at local, national, and transnational levels?
How can we address the presumed division between scholarly theorizing and activist work, and how can rhetoric be a tool for bridging that presumed divide?

Feminist Rhetorical Histories:

Which rhetorical histories have been recovered, and which have been omitted? What generational and social movement tensions are present in these feminist rhetorical histories?
What role has public memory played in feminist rhetorical histories?
How have feminist rhetorical histories accounted for the histories and experiences of aging women, women with disabilities, working class women, women of color, lesbian and transgendered people, women living beyond the borders of the U.S. and Europe?
How have rhetorical histories challenged the primary focus on the Anglo-American context as scholars have begun to engage transnational feminist rhetorical histories and contemporary practices?

Thursday, October 23 Stolkin Auditorium, Syracuse University
7:30	Susan Faludi Lecture
Friday, October 24 500 Hall of Languages, Syracuse University
8:30	Breakfast items available
8:45	Opening remarks: Eileen E. Schell, Syracuse University
9:00-10:30	Panel: Chair, Anne Demo, Syracuse University Speakers: Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (University of Minnesota) “Forgotten Forerunner: Frances Wright and the Struggle for Social Justice”; Shirley Wilson Logan (University of Maryland) “Anna Julia Cooper on Women and Social Justice”
10:30-10:45	Break
10:45-12:15	Community panel—Feminist History Making: The Women’s Rights National Historical Park, The Matilda Gage Foundation, The Peace Encampment Herstory Project
12:15-1:00	Lunch
1:00-2:30	Panel: Chair, Gwendolyn Pough, Syracuse University Speakers: Malea Powell (Michigan State University) “Rhetorical Powwows: American Indian Women and the Production of Meaning in Native Communities”; Wendy Hesford (Ohio State University) “Cosmopolitanism and the Geopolitics of Feminist Rhetorics”
2:30-2:45	Break
2:45-4:15	Community panel—Feminist Peacemaking and Social Justice The Syracuse Peace Council, Women Transcending Boundaries, Mothers Against Gun Violence
4:15-4:45	Wrap-up Discussion and closing remarks
8:00-11:00	Open Mic Feminist Performance Party at the Sparks Contemporary Art Space, 1005 E. Fayette Street
Saturday, October 25—Post-Symposium Workshop
9:00-1:00	Post-Symposium Workshop on Work-in-Progress By registration only.

	"Why Feminism Still Matters" Susan Faludi has chronicled—with astonishing clarity—the changing roles of men and women in society, becoming one of our most provocative voices on women's rights. In her major new work, The Terror Dream, she examines the political and cultural fallout from 9/11. With her award-winning book Backlash, Susan Faludi charted a new course for feminism in the US. Faludi is a winner of The Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Critics Circle Award. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Nation and The New York Times, and is also the author of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man and Terror Dreams. Her lectures challenge modern stereotypes and explore the way gender roles have changed and developed in the US in the past few decades. [*more on Susan Faludi* . . . ]
	“Forgotten Forerunner: Frances Wright and the Struggle for Social Justice” abstract (click to open/close) Forgotten Forerunner: Frances Wright and the Struggle for Social Justice Well-behaved women seldom make history, but activists who challenge societal beliefs about femininity, education, religion, marriage, and slavery often end up on the ash heap of public memory. Early woman's rights activists recognized Frances Wright as a pathbreaker, dedicating the History of Woman Suffrage to her along with Ernestine Rose and Mary Wollstonecraft, but her views were so controversial that "Fanny Wrightist" became an epithet to frighten women into silence. Despite her reputation, Wright, a naturalized citizen, was an ardent patriot who goaded Americans to live up to their nation's ideals. In her Views on Society and Manners in America (1821), she wrote of the unusual possibilities of this new nation. She created Nashoba, a community intended to prepare former slaves for freedom; she edited The Free Enquirer, a journal of opinion and debate, and she became a public lecturer with a 4th of July speech in 1828. In her writings and in her lecture tours throughout the nation between 1828 and 1830, Wright emerged as a public intellectual who urged Americans to create the conditions that would make equality of opportunity a reality for the descendants of Africans, for women, and for ordinary wage workers. Dr. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell is a Professor in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Minnesota: She is the author or editor of eight books, including the ground-breaking two volume series of early feminist work entitled Man Cannot Speak For Her. Her research has appeared in such journals as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Communicationand Critical/Cultural Studies, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Women's Studies in Communication, and Communication Education. She has served as the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech and has received many awards, including the National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar Award.
	“Cosmopolitanism and the Geopolitics of Feminist Rhetorics” abstract (click to open/close) Feminist Cosmopolitanism and the Geopolitics of Feminist Rhetoric Eve Ensler's memoir Insecure at Last: Losing it in our Security Obsessed World (2006) exposes the coupling of rhetorical identification and transnational sentimentality that underlies contemporary feminist cosmopolitanism and its focus on the consumptive practices of vision and spectacle. In order to respond to the risks of cosmopolitanism, we need to rethink how we theorize the spatial and temporal as part of a feminist rhetoric for social justice. I argue that we can begin to critically demystify feminist cosmopolitanism and identify its limitations by articulating the goals and methods of a transnational feminist analytic. With few exceptions, feminist rhetorical studies has not sufficiently engaged the complex material and rhetorical dynamics of transnationality or addressed the need to revisit key rhetorical concepts, such as the public sphere, to account for the movement of people, goods, and ideas across and within national boundaries. Dr. Wendy Hesford is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. She is the author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy, co-editor with Wendy Kozol of Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real," and Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and The Politics of Representation. She is a scholar working in the emerging field of transnational feminist rhetorics and visual rhetorics, and has published essays on these topics in PMLA, College English, Biography, and TDR: Journal of Performance Studies, among others. Her second single-authored book, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights, Feminisms, and the Transnational Imaginary, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
	“Anna Julia Cooper on Women and Social Justice” abstract (click to open/close) Anna Julia Cooper on Women and Social Justice The 150th anniversary of Anna Julia Cooper's birth provides an occasion to reconsider some of rhetorical tactics the activist scholar-educator employed to advance her views on women's rights and social justice at the turn of the nineteenth century. Drawing examples chiefly from two essays from A Voice from the South, I will open a conversation about the extent to which her strategies for articulation of relationships among black men, black women, and white women in 1892 might inform current efforts to secure social justice for women. The two texts—"The Higher Education of Women," first offered as a speech at the 1890 American Conference of Educators, and "Woman versus the Indian," written in response to a speech by Anna Howard Shaw in 1891—reveal Cooper's use of understatement, irony, and dialogue to expose inconsistencies and missed opportunities in various quests for social justice. Dr. Shirley Wilson Logan is Professor and Director of Writing Programs in the English Department at the University of Maryland. Dr. Logan is editor of With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women, with speeches by Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Anna Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Victoria Earle Matthews. She has also authored We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women and several essays in journals and collections. She is co-editor of the Southern Illinois University Press series Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms. Her book, Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America, is scheduled for release in October.
	“Rhetorical Powwows: American Indian Women and the Production of Meaning in Native Communities” abstract (click to open/close) Rhetorical Powwows: American Indian Women and the Production of Meaning in Native Communities. The presentation will connect historical research on American Indian women's alphabetic writings with contemporary American Indian women's non-alphabetic meaning-making practices (like beadwork and basket-making) in order to argue for a continuum of meaning-making practices that must be considered when examining rhetorics of survivance more broadly in American Indian communities. Dr. Malea Powell is an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American cultures, and a faculty member of the American Indian Studies program at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the rhetorics of survivance used by 19th century American Indian intellectuals, with a keen eye on the rhetoric of Native American women. Dr. Powell also has several book-length projects in progress, including Of Color: Native American Literatures. She is currently editor of SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures, a quarterly journal devoted to the study of American Indian writing, and co-editor of the NCTE-LEA Research Series in Composition & Literacy.
Community Panelists:
	The Matilda Gage Foundation Mothers Against Gun Violence The Peace Encampment Herstory Project Syracuse Peace Council Women's Rights National Historical Park Women Transcending Boundaries

Syracuse Hotels by Price Range

Local Interest

Under $75	Microtel Inn Carrier Circle http://www.microtelinn.com 800-435-1665
	Extended Stay America http://www.extendedstayamerica.com 800-398-7829
$75-$100	Days Inn http://www.daysinn.com 800-329-7466
	Quality Inn http://www.choicehotels.com 800-424-6423
	Clarion Inn http://www.clarioninn.com 315-451-600
$100-$150	Parkview Hotel http://www.theparkviewhotel.com 800-365-4663 or 315-701-2600
	Courtyard by Marriott http://www.marriott.com/courtyard 800-321-2211
	Doubletree Hotel Syracuse http://Doubletree1.hilton.com 315-432-0200
	Genesee Grande Hotel 1060 East Genesee Street http://www.geneseegrande.com 800-365-4663 or 315-476-4212 The Genesee Grande, a few blocks from Syracuse University is holding 25 rooms for symposium attendees until September 23. $129 per room.
	Hilton Garden Inn http://www.hiltongardeninn.com 800-445-8667
	Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel & Conference Center 801 University Avenue http://www.sheratonsyracuse.com/ 800-395-2105 The University Sheraton is offering a special rate if you book by September 23rd. When you call to make a reservation, specify that you are coming to the Symposium on Feminist Rhetorics for Social Justice. The room rate will be $118 for single, $128 for double.
$150+	Renaissance Syracuse Hotel http://www.marriot.com 315-479-7000

Women's History Sites	Women's Rights National Historical Park (including Elizabeth Cady Stanton House, M'Clintock House, Hunt House, and Wesleyan Chapel) Seneca Falls Susan B. Anthony House Rochester Harriet Tubman House Auburn Matilda Joslyn Gage Hous Fayetteville Harriet May Mills House Syracuse (call for appointment)
Museums	Erie Canal Museum Syracuse Everson Museum of Art Syracuse Museum of Science and Technology Syracuse The Abolitionist Hall of Fame Peterboro Abolitionist Commemoration Dinner
Wine Tours	Finger Lakes Wine Country Cayuga Wine Trail Seneca Lake Wine Trail
Parks	Onondaga County Parks Rosamond Gifford Zoo

Feminist Rhetorics for Social Justice Symposium Planning Group

Faculty:	Lois Agnew, The Writing Program, Syracuse University Anne Demo, Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Syracuse University Kendall Phillips, Communication an Rhetorical Studies, Syracuse University Gwen Pough, The Department of Women's Studies and the Writing Program, Syracuse University Eileen Schell, The Writing Program, Syracuse University Suzanne Spring, The Writing Program, Colgate University

Graduate Students:	Tamika Carey, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, The Writing Program Laurie Gries, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, The Writing Program J. Haynes, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, The Writing Program Carolyn Ostrander, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, The Writing Program Elisa Norris, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, The Writing Program Kelly Rawson, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, The Writing Program Dianna Winslow, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, The Writing Program