Thanks, RSA!

RSA Dinner with Dr. Nedra Reynolds:
(Left to right, top): Georganne Nordstrom, Katie Uechi, Chelsey Kojima, Jolivette Mecenas, Mei Li Siaw, Jim Henry. (Bottom): Holly Bruland, Erica Clayton, Nedra Reynolds.

Thank you, everyone, for welcoming Nedra Reynolds to UH. She sent this picture of our amazing feast at Little Village. Will we ever forget the fancy roast duck manapuas or the honey glazed shrimp? Special thanks to Jocelyn Cardenas, who contributed to the dinner even though she couldn't be there, and to Erica Clayton. It was great to see everyone and to hear what you've been working on. I know this is the last push of the semester and we're working hard doing our thing that we do as grad students, but I hope that we see each other at least another time before the end of the semester.

Grad Student Funding

I was talking to another PhD Candidate the other day and she was debating as to whether or not she should go through the tedious, time-consuming work of gathering information and filling out forms and writing letters according to the Graduate Student Organization protocol for funding, all to receive the $250 award (she had asked for $400 for travel to a conference in San Francisco). I think she decided not to go through with it, and I understand - the amount of work that one puts into a GSO funding application throughout the duration of the process is mind-numbing. Talk about colonial bureaucracy!

Here are some alternatives that I have found to fund my own conference travels. Although some of these funding options can also be used towards projects other than conference travel, a lot of what we do as grad students in English and in the Humanities in general is give talks at conferences, and as College of LLL Dean Joe O'Mealy (who is also from our English Dept.) told me in conversation, he reminds others serving on awards panels that those in the Humanities do not have a lot of funding options, like those in the sciences.

Arts & Sciences Advisory Council Awards
Office of Community & Alumni Relations
Dean O'Mealy serves on this council, which is lucky for us in English to have an advocate for grad students, one who knows how important it is for us to attend conferences, and how nearly impossible it is to secure funding. I won this award spring 2008, along with other people in English like Christine Kotecki (who asked for retroactive funding for a conference she attended) and Rachel Choy (who funded her study abroad to South America last summer). I applied for $1,100 to fund my travels to two conferences that summer, and won that amount.
How to Apply:
You need to be pro-active on this because they don't really advertise much. The deadlines fall around end of January. Contact:
Karin Mackenzie, Director
Office of Community& Alumni Relations
Colleges of Arts & Sciences
(808) 956-4051 or karinm@hawaii.edu

UHM English Dept.
Frierson Endowed Scholarship Fund
Usually the department gives two awards per year, one for undergrads and one for grad students, but Professor Heberle indicated that due to tough economic times, the dept. may be able to give only one of these awards this year. If English is a second language for you or if you come from a family for whom English was a second language, and you intend to pursue a career in English, you should consider applying for this $1,000 award. Be aware, however, that it is distributed via the UH Financial Aid office, so if you have loans, you must report this award to the Financial Aid office will adjust your award without telling you and a huge bureaucratic mess will follow. Be forewarned!
How to apply:
Contact the English Dept for info.

Travel Grants to College Composition and Communication Conference
CCCC Chair's Memorial Scholarship
Awards $800 travel grant to graduate students who are presenting at the annual conference. I applied for this one year but didn't get it.
Scholars for the Dream Award
Awards $800 travel grants to first-time presenters from U.S. minority groups at the annual conference. UH grad students have a good track record with this award: Robyn Tasaka won it when she was an MA student in 2005; I won it in 2006; Ryan Omizo was an MA student when he won it in 2007. About ten presenters are selected for this award based on their conference proposal. You attend a ceremony and meet the other awardees. It's worth applying for.
How to Apply:
Information is always posted on the annual CFP, which is on the CCCC website.

UH Manoa Dai Ho Chun Grad Fellowship Competition
This one is very competitive and labor-intensive to apply for (I didn't get it), but I'd encourage people to look into it anyway. It allows $2,000 travel award for MA thesis completion, $5,000 award for full-time thesis completion, or $10,000 award for dissertation completion.
How to Apply:
Contact Graduate Fellowships and Scholarships Office, Spalding 354D. The deadline usually falls the very beginning of January, so you should contact them early Fall.

Fullbright Scholarships
Of course, highly selective and competitive, but Professor Caroline Sinavaiana (Dr. Sina), a former recipient, is the area coordinator for Fullbright and very helpful and encouraging for interested applicants. Contact her at: sinavaia@hawaii.edu

I hope this is helpful, and I encourage anyone to respond to this posting with your own leads into funding or your success stories.

The 2009 Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference

Hey folks, I went to this conference in 2007 when it was in Little Rock, Arkansas and I really enjoyed it. The organizers were very on top of things, and yet it was way smaller and more intimate than CCCC. I went to some pretty good talks, including several on transnationalism and feminist rhetoric, which of course helped me think about my diss project. These conferences are a good way to see what others are working on nationally and sometimes internationally, to meet other grad students from different programs, meet senior scholars in preparation for future job searches or perhaps if you are thinking of applying to a PhD program. I like to think of it as another type of training in academia, much like I heard David Bartholomae say in his C's exemplar speech at CCCC 2006 in Chicago, that the conference was like another type of graduate school for him. But above all, many of the talks and roundtables are energizing, and make me excited to be in my field. I know funding is tough; see my post above for some ways I've funded conference travel.

Michigan State University / East Lansing, Michigan / October 7–9, 2009
The 2009 Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference will be hosted by the
Rhetoric & Writing program at Michigan State University.
We invite proposals
that:

• reflect the complexity and diversity of who "we" are as a scholarly community;
• make manifest the deep structure of the connections, intersections, and overlaps that actually make us a community;
• help articulate who "we" are as a deliberate community of scholars, and what that means about our responsibilities and relationships to one another across scholarly areas and institutional positions;
• highlight scholarly and teacherly activities that deliberately create space for more complex notions of scholarship and teaching within the discipline of Rhet/Comp;
• include and significantly engage communities outside of the academy;
• focus on antiracist pedagogies and scholarship; present interdisciplinary scholarship in Afrafeminist Rhetorics; American Indian Rhetorics, Chicana Rhetorics, Asian American Rhetorics, post/neo-colonial rhetorics;
• highlight the intellectual traditions of women's communities, especially communities constellated around specific identity markers such as race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation issues, geographic origins;
• explore the relationships between written, oral, and material discursive production;
• and other topics that address the connections in the conference theme.

We also welcome proposals on relevant topics not directly addressed above, that significantly engage disciplines other than Rhet/Comp, and that have consequences for communities located outside of the academy. Although traditional presentations are acceptable, we encourage participants to create formats that go beyond the read-aloud academic paper. Interactive sessions that include discussions, dialogues, and performances are especially welcome. Proposals should be uploaded to the FemRhet 2009 web
site (www.femrhet2009.org), and can be for:
• 20-minute individual presentations (250-word proposals)
• 90-minute 3–4 member panels (500-word proposals)
• 90-minute workshops or roundtables (500-word proposals)
Please plan to submit a title, a proposal the length indicated above, and a program-ready, booklet-friendly 50-word blurb for the presentation.
Proposal System Open: December 15, 2008
Proposal Deadline: February 1, 2009
Acceptances Distributed: April 30, 2009
For more information: Contact Malea Powell (powell37@msu.edu), Nancy DeJoy (
dejoy@msu.edu), or Rhea Lathan (lathan@msu.edu) or visit our website at
http://kairos.wide.msu.edu/~femrhet/

RSA's Third Biennial Summer Institute

Apply Now!

June 22-28, 2009
Penn State University

Now that the election is over, we want to steer your thoughts back to the 2009 Summer Institute in case you haven't had a chance to apply for a seminar or workshop or both. Below is the original announcement that went out. The roster of seminars and workshops is extremely strong and we encourage you to apply before the December 1^st deadline, less than a month away.

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We are excited indeed to present the finalized program of the third RSA Biennial Summer Institute: mark your calendars, plan on attending, submit your application and call this program to the attention of others.

Running from 22-28 June 2009, the Institute again includes two components: two five-day Seminars (running Monday, 6/22, through Friday morning, 6/26); and nineteen two-day Workshops (running Friday afternoon, 6/26, through Sunday morning, 6/28). Participants may choose to attend either a seminar or a workshop or both. At lunch on Friday, there will be a plenary talk by Stephen Browne, scheduled to accommodate both seminarians and workshoppers, and some meals and receptions are (tentatively) included in the fee.

The fee for a Seminar is $400 ($450 for nonmembers; this fee includes a one year membership to RSA). The fee for workshops is $200 ($250 for nonmembers; this fee includes a one year membership to RSA). For each seminar, there are ten $200 dollar scholarships available for graduate students who are receiving insufficient or no institutional support to attend. These will be competitively distributed. To be considered for these scholarships, graduate students should apply for the scholarship at the same time they apply to the seminar. The link to the scholarship application is included in the general application form. When you are notified of your acceptance into a seminar or workshop (in January), you will be given registration and housing information.

Because they are non-overlapping, you may apply to both a seminar and a workshop. CLICK HERE (or go to the RSA website) to complete and submit your application on or before December 1.

Seminars are focused on offering graduate students and early career professors advanced study in foundational areas of rhetoric for purposes of pedagogy and research. Workshops are targeted to professors as well as graduate students and function as "special-interest" groups within subfields of rhetoric; they are meant to cover common topics of interest within those subfields and provide an opportunity for scholars to gather to address significant issues related to their research program and teaching specializations.

The two five-day Seminars offered in 2009 will focus on Rhetorical Criticism, led by Michael Leff (University of Memphis), Alisse Portnoy (University of Michigan), Steve Mailloux (University of California, Irvine) and Ruth Amossy (University of Tel Aviv); and Visual Rhetoric, led by Robert Hariman (Northwestern University) and John Lucaites (Indiana University). Each of these seminars has a capacity of 25 participants.

The two-day Workshops, which typically enroll between five and eighteen participants, depending on the topic, cover a rich range of rhetorical subfields. In 2009, the Institute has tentatively arranged to offer the following workshops:

1) Rhetoric, Nationalism, and Post-Nationalism - Vanessa Beasley (Vanderbilt U)

2) Women, Religious Persuasion and Social Activism in America 1780-1940 - Patricia Bizzell (College of Holy Cross), Jane Donawerth (U of Maryland), Shirley Wilson Logan (U of Maryland), and Roxanne Mountford (U of Kentucky)

3) Women, Rhetoric, and Political Agency: What Do Women Need to Know About Their History in Order (Phronesis) to be Successful Politically? - Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (U of Minnesota), Mari Boor Tonn (U of Maryland), and Justin Killian (U of Minnesota)

4) Toward a Rhetoric of Multilingual Writing - Suresh Canagarajah (Penn State U), Maria Jerskey (La Guardia College), Jay Jordan (U of Utah), and Xiaoye You (Penn State U)

5) Performance and the Rhetorical Tradition - Jenn Fishman (U of Tennessee-Knoxville) and Jeremy Wear (U of Tennessee-Knoxville)

6) Career Retreat for Associate Professors - Cheryl Geisler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), S. Michael Halloran, (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), and Krista Ratcliffe, (Marquette U)

7) Rhetoric and Race - Keith Gilyard (Penn State U), Victor Villanueva (Washington State U), Kevin A. Browne (Penn State U), and Ersula J. Ore (Penn State U)

8) Visualizing Patterns of Group Communication in Digital Workspaces - William Hart-Davidson (Michigan State U), Clay Spinuzzi, (U of Texas), and Mark Zachry (U of Washington)

9) History Matters: Materials and Methods for Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric - Debra Hawhee (U of Illinois) and Richard Graff (U of Minnesota)

10) Rhetoric and the Sacred in the 21st Century - Robert Glenn Howard (U of Wisconsin-Madison), Rana Husseini (Northwestern U), and Susan Zaeske (U of Wisconsin-Madison).

11) Discourse Analysis for Rhetorical Studies - Barbara Johnstone (Carnegie Mellon U) and Christopher Eisenhart (U Massachusetts Dartmouth)

12) Queering Rhetorical Studies - Charles E. Morris III (Boston College), Isaac West (U of Iowa), and Karma Chavez (U of New Mexico)

13) Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project - Shawn J. Parry-Giles (U of Maryland), J. Michael Hogan (Penn State U), and Robert N. Gaines (U of Maryland)

14) Globalization and Rhetoric - Andreea Ritivoi (Carnegie Mellon U) and David Frank (U of Oregon)

15) Understanding Kenneth Burke through His Archives - Jack Selzer (Penn State U), Ann George (Texas Christian U), and David Tell (U of Kansas)

16) Rhetoric, Public Memory, and Forgetting - Bradford Vivian (Syracuse U) and Carole Blair (North Carolina U)

17) Medical Rhetoric: Ethical Issues, Archival Concepts, and Imaginative Writing - Susan Wells (Temple U) and Ellen Barton (Wayne State U)

18) Science and Its Publics - James Wynn (Carnegie Mellon U) and Lisa Keranen (U of Colorado)

19) Reading Lincoln's Rhetoric - David Zarefsky (Northwestern U)

Visit to Manoa Heritage Center and the Kūka‘ō‘ō Heiau

HI everyone,
Since Nedra Reynold's visit focuses on ecocomposition and the politics of place in relation to writing pedagogy, we invited her to visit the Manoa Heritage Center, where the Kūka‘ō‘ō Heiau is located, just a 10 minute drive from campus. Melanie Ried is arranging a guided tour for us on:
Monday, Oct. 27
10:15 am - 11:30 am
2829 Manoa Rd
Honolulu, HI 96822
(808) 988-1287
Get directions

If you would like to join us, please RSVP with Melanie at mried@hawaii.edu

Here's some info from their site, http://www.manoaheritagecenter.org/ :

For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, Kūka‘ō‘ō Heiau has watched over Mānoa Valley. Said to have been originally built by the Menehune, this heiau reflects the long and dynamic history of the Hawaiian Islands. Historical evidence suggests that the heiau eventually became an agricultural temple of the māpele class dedicated to the rites and rituals surrounding food productivity. Restored in 1993, Kūka‘ō‘ō Heiau survives as the last intact Hawaiian temple in the greater ahupua‘a of Waikīkī and remains an extraordinary link to the past.

Readings for Reynolds Seminar

The readings for the Tuesday seminar with Nedra Reynolds are available in the English Dept. office KUY 402, on the bookshelf in front of Ethel's desk.
The main readings are:
Soja, Edward "Chapter 4: Increasing the Openness of Third Space" from Thirdspce: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places.

Buell, Lawrence. "Chapter 2: The Place of Place" from Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the US and Beyond.

Brooke & McIntosh. "Deep Maps: Teaching Rhetorical Engagement through Place-Conscious Education" from The Locations of Composition.

Additional readings that we may discuss are also available, including an additional chapter from Soja's book and an essay by Julie Drew from Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches (Weiser and Dobrin, eds.)

If you would like to receive an PDF file of the three main readings, please email Jolivette at mecenas@hawaii.edu

Updates: Website, Reynolds dinner and readings

Hi everyone,
The Oct. 1 meeting was canceled. If you came to Manoa Gardens after 5pm and I missed you, sorry for that late cancellation. I didn't send a reminder for the meeting, which may have been a problem, but also several people canceled that day. So I don't think meeting on the first Wed. of every month like we agreed to at the last meeting is a good idea. Seems like due to our individual commitments we can meet only for our scheduled events. Which is completely understandable, but if that is the case, we really need to communicate with each other more frequently, and to make clear commitments to the events we have scheduled. I suggest this blog so we don't clog up emails and perhaps have running conversations going. And as always, I welcome your suggestions.

Here are a few updates:

The RSA website is up on the English Dept. server. Here is the new URL:
http://www.english.hawaii.edu/rsa/

Tuesday dinner with Nedra Reynolds:
I've invited Nedra Reynolds to dinner with RSA students after the Tuesday seminar that we are sponsoring. Erica and Jim Henry will also be there, and I've reserved the back room at Little Village for 6pm. The room seats about a dozen people, so space is limited. If you would like to come, please respond to this posting and we'll sign up first come, first serve. I'm looking forward to having a casual dinner with Reynolds and some of our favorite, hard-working professors (Erica and Jim, of course) off-campus, so should be a relaxing way to end a Tuesday.

Fundraising
In order to reserve the room, however, we need to order at least $250 worth of food/drinks for dinner.
So I need some feedback - are people still committed? Can we raise money beforehand? Or should we look for alternative restaurants?
We must brainstorm on this - I've already invited Reynolds to dinner, so we need to commit to planning this.

We also need to raise a small amount of money or think of an alternative (potluck pupus?) for refreshments for the Tuesday seminar that we are sponsoring.

One quick method I know the Philosophy Grad students association does is to pool together unused textbooks and sell them, putting the money into the grad group fund. I have a few contacts of book buyers - what do you think of this option?

THANK YOU in advance for responding to this posting with RSVP to dinner and any feedback/ideas you have for the above. Or you can contact me via email: mecenas@hawaii.edu