b l o g o s

conference childcare--what conference childcare?

I have written here before about the difficulties of attending conferences with a baby in tow. This is on my mind because CCCC is coming up, and the Bean and I are flying there alone. I am lucky because my parents live fairly close to Atlanta, and they are going to come help out so that I can attend my panels, meetings, and a memorial dinner and know that the Bean is safe with Nana and Pops. 

At one point, though, I thought I would need to use the conference's recommended sitter service. (And I am imagining there are others who have no choice.) Mind you, this is not childcare provided by the conference. Several months ago, when I emailed the NCTE offices to find out about conference-provided childcare (because I know I had seen a drop-in option in the past), I received a note saying that they stopped arranging for on-site service. The note went on to offer information about a recommended service and the charges. I thought I needed someone for two hours, and with all the additional charges (including some mysterious "referral fee," parking, and a minimum four-hour charge) it was going to cost me nearly $90.00. I wondered on facebook just how many CCCC attendees with small children could afford that sort of fee. I suspect the answer is not that many.

Since I am planning to attend NCA in New Orleans this November with just the Bean, I decided to look up their policies. This is even better. My search for the term "childcare" of course turned up nothing, but digging in the conference FAQs, I found this gem:

Q. Can my partner, child, or family member accompany me at convention? 

Absolutely! NCA’s annual convention, for many members, is a family affair. The NCA convention has many social aspects in addition to its fine intellectual tradition. Your family members or friends do not need to pay the membership fees if they do not plan on attending programs, convention receptions or visiting the exhibit area. For a $50 registration fee, they are welcome at all sessions, events and receptions.All partner, family, spouse registrations must be purchased onsite in New Orleans.

So I emailed someone at the NCA offices asking whether the conference provided any sort of childcare or at the very least recommended a service, like CCCC and MLA (MLA, which provides vouchers to help curb the cost of the service, is starting to look like the winner here). Here is the response I received:

Hello Debra. NCA does not arrange special childcare services but often the hotel can recommend local services. I would suggest contacting the concierge desk at the hotel at which you are thinking of staying. Thank you!

 

Michelle Randall, CMP
Senior Manager, Convention and Meetings
National Communication Association
1765 N Street NW
Washington DC 20036

In case you have just been skimming, let me sum things up for you: the NCA encourages people to register their spouses and kids--that is PAY to bring them to the conference--but they will not lift a finger to arrange a certified care provider for people traveling with children to their professional conference. Note that I am not asking NCA to pay for childcare, just to make a service available for women (or men) who need to bring their children along with them. Though I do think they ought to also consider at least partially subsidizing childcare for contingent laborers, assistant professors, and graduate students.

I am not sure where the women's caucus is on this issue, and frankly, I would think that NCA would want to be in line with the large conferences and have some sort of childcare procedure in place if they really want to claim to be "family friendly" as they do when they brightly announce the registration fee for spouses and children. 

So here is what I am thinking of doing in New Orleans: I will pay $50.00 to register Nora. She will wear the nametag (a strangulation hazard for a toddler, if NCA must know), and she will come with me to my presentations. I will announce at the beginning of my presentations that I am performing what NCA must think we need to do with our families, and I will let her interrupt my presentation or run around the room as much as she wants. Perhaps I will buy her a noisy tambourine, adorned with the NCA theme, "Voice," just for the occasion.

I will call it a "baby-in."

I want to clarify that I do not think this issue rises to the level of import of the labor issues that NCA has turned a blind eye to in the recent past. But I do think turning a blind eye to the conditions of their conference attendees is of a piece with that very mentality.

 

CHF, T-minus a couple of days

Today, I picked up my hemmed--yes, hemmed!--pants, put out clothes and gear for me and the Bean, practiced my talk in front of John, Tillie, and the Bean (though the Bean seemed more interested in crawl-lunging for the dog water bowl than in staring at my 28 slides), added a new section to the talk and printed that thing OUT.

Tomorrow, I will teach, pack, transfer my interview questions to index cards,  practice the talk yet again, and then I will be ready to go to Chicago, my favorite city, for the Chicago Humanities Festival. I can't wait to introduce the Bean to Chicago (Chicago Children's museum, here we come!)

The theme for the Chicago Humanities Festival this year is "The Body," and I've been asked to speak about my first book. It's very bizarre to be speaking about a book that was published six years ago, and that I finished well before that. But it's also fun to boil things down to 28 slides, a couple of key arguments, and a smattering of fun anecdotes. I see this talk as kind of a highlight reel from the book.

And speaking of highlight reels, let's face it, interviewing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in front of a live audience on Monday night is likely to be a career highlight. As I told my friend S whose office is  across the hall from me, I probably won't do anything this cool as an academic again. Ever.

 

bureacratization of the nonimaginative

Most other people probably realize this, but at NCA this past week, it finally hit home with me that the longer we are in the field, the more our conference experience becomes bureaucratized. For all the board meetings, business meetings, individual meetings, meetings with publishers, and mentoring meetings, I pretty much didn't get to attend a panel unless I presented on it.  I'm also fairly sure--because we talked about it--that the other senior people in the meetings I had on my docket were having the same kind of conference. 

This is a sad state. I generally like to be in the conference audience, to see what's going on in the field, to ask questions and get conversations going from the other side of the podium. I hope to do more of that at RSA in May. I remember one president of ASHR who made a point to go to every single panel that made it onto ASHR's schedule. Tiring, I'm sure, but boy did he get a good sense of what kind of intellectual work the organization is supporting.

nca, yay. chicago, double yay.

The dryer just shut off, so I really need to go finish packing and therefore need to make this short. I am giddy about heading to Chicago for NCA. It's the Chicago part, more than the NCA part, that has me giddy. But NCA is okay, I suppose. I like the people, no doubt, and look forward to running in to everybody.

As an extra bonus, I convinced JM to fly and meet me there after his teaching obligations for the week are done. Chicago is where we always used to go to shake off the end of the semester, to eat some good food, and to catch a film that we might not otherwise catch in a theater. Mornings will be early for me--chock full of meetings and panels--but Friday and Saturday evenings, back to our favorite spots we will go. I even managed to work in an appointment with my favorite hair stylist. So if you don't recognize me, it's either because I'm 6.5 months pregnant, or because my hair has been blown straight. Come to think of it, the combination might not work very well, but I don't even care.

I do know that we miss you, Chicago. We look forward to toting our kid there. But in the meantime, we are excited to have you all to ourselves, even in the midst of the crazy convention.

cool midwestern cities, awesome midwestern rhetoric scholars

I am on a two-legged midwestern trip, having completed the first one yesterday with a drive from Madison to Minneapolis. Appropriately, on the drive, I stopped at the Norske Nook to buy a lingonberry-apple pie.

The folks in English and Communication Arts at U of Wisconsin invited me to present at their colloquium, and I had a blast. For starters I got to see lots of my good friends from Pittsburgh K and M, in addition to dinner with the good comp/rhet folks, and coffee with SZ. One very nice graduate student, A, made a pan of what she called "pregnancy bars" [A, I need that recipe, please!] for the post-colloquium refreshments. At Wisconsin I presented a "bridge" project on Kenneth Burke and animals. Burke won't show up in my animals book--Aesop to Erasmus is already capacious enough--but he is a good warm up for it, because I can ruminate on the question of rhetoric and nonhuman animals more easily given that all his work is fresh in my mind and I'm teaching him this semester. The audience responses also helped me think about the next book while I'm still in the research stage, and so the bridging really is serving its purpose. 

Now I'm in Minnesota for a colloquium on Modern Rhetoric. Tonight's talks by Jim Aune and Bill Keith kicked things off nicely, positing some categories and provoking thought about autonomy, art, and much more. Richard G and I are presenting together in the morning, and we'll be talking about Modern Rhetoric's forwarding of Aristotle.

Now, I think I'll take a break from the cerebral to watch an episode of Friday Night Lights. It must be said that I miss JM and the whippets, and no that's not a band of fast ribby guys.

3 am (re) entry

I didn't have much of a chance to blog from RSA, in part because hi-speed internet access from the room was rather expensive, and in part because I was too busy at the conference. But my conference closed on a terrific note with Jenny Edbauer Rice and Dennis Lynch's panel on "The New Pathos." They played against and with each other quite nicely. So smart and thoughtful, both of them. And the audience was full of people whose work I adore. I continue to admire how Jenny pushes boundaries of what a conference panel can do, first with our amateuring gallery/panel on opening day, and then with her paper on pathos, a set of reflective meditations on rhetoric, emotion, affect, teaching, and the impossibility of affectlessness. And to my delight we got to talk just a little bit about why the heck animals keep coming up in theoretical discussions of pathos.

I enjoyed the roundtables I was on--the one on Burke was quite lively I thought. The five of us committed to presenting short statements in order to leave plenty of time for discussion, which meant we amped up our claims, tamped down our evidence, and had at it. I am really starting to like the roundtables, with their luxuriously ample discussion time that really draws in the audience. From an audience member's point of view, it's so hard to sit through three or four 15-20 minute papers, and then there's rarely enough time to really hash through people's responses, or the issues the papers raise for them. But at the Burke roundtable, and at the Pathos panel, since its members were reduced by a last-minute cancellation, we really got to explore the corners of the room, the joints of audience members' connections. When on a roundtable or panel like that I find that I think so much more during the give-and-take, after the papers are laid down, and it's those moments of exchange that linger with me long after I unpack my suitcase.

I've heard a few people say that they don't really go to panels besides the one they present, and I just don't think that's particularly cool. It's far more important, I think, to attend panels and pose questions, to push the discussion to new places. Otherwise, how will growth or transformation happen?

I kept hearing repeatedly that RSA is unique  because  most all the panels had good-sized audiences. As an example, I chaired a great panel with all graduate student presenters that had about 30 people in the audience. This is rather rare for the bigger conferences (CCCC, NCA), where the audience can get diluted to the point of nearly vanishing. So thanks to those who came to the conference, who attended a number and range of meetings. We travel so far not to perform our own little shows, but to actively engage each other's work.

rsa

A little live blogging of RSA, Seattle, with a one-day delay: yesterday, in addition to all the meetings tucked here and there, starting at 7:15 (!), and the chance ones squeezed in as well, I chaired a fun panel on popular culture, attended a great panel on "The Greeks" (not named by the panelists, I feel sure), and a supercool SUPERsession on the 2008 election, featuring, among other distinguished speakers, my new colleague John Murphy. These papers reminded me a little of listening to a long-ish piece on NPR, or an amplified (in both senses) piece from Oratorical Animal (no coincidence there of course). In other words, they were accessible, relevant, and thorough. The evening treat was a reading by Charles Johnson of two short stories, one featuring Plato as the frustrated teacher-narrator getting schooled by his student Diogenes, and the other featuring Martin Luther King, Jr. having an epiphany while rummaging through the fridge: food as the ultimate connector. Note to self: you need to make an effort to attend more readings like this.

Speaking of which, I am very happy to have discovered piroshkis (thanks, M!), savory pastries stuffed with all kinds of yummies. Yesterday, I had one crammed with sauerkraut, cabbage, carrots, and onions. Yum.



 

whoa.

Yesterday when I checked in to my room at the Westin in Seattle, there were clouds hanging over the Sound. They went away during the lovely hike M and I took in Discovery Park. After making our way back to downtown, stuffing ourselves with sushi, and walking back to the hotel, it was sleepy time.

And so it wasn't until this morning--a clear morning--when I realized that my 31st-floor room also features a fantastic view of the Olympic Mountains (I've noticed people call these "The Olympics" here.) Those are some mighty, mighty mountains.

2b2b

Too busy to blog. It's RSA's fault. Hope to see a lot of you in Seattle next week.

anatomy of a conference abstract

Speaking of rhetorical exercises, I just finished drafting my abstracts for ISHR and CCCC, two conference cultures that, as I mention in my previous post, could not be more different. Even though I'll be presenting pretty much the same material at each conference (I have learned that it's not realistic to write brand new papers based on brand new research for back-to-back conferences), the papers will end up being very different. The difference, though, is largely because of the audience.

I'm posting these here just to highlight the differences. Note, first of all, that the Cs proposal is shorter by about 100 words. The online submission box only allows 5000 characters, including spaces (thanks to advisee, C..., for the headsup). I've gotten mine down to 1600, which is a third of that, to allow room for my co-presenters. But I'll still have to chop more, mainly because the 5000-character limit applies to the entire session, and so I'll need considerable space (relatively considerable, anyway) to set up the panel itself. So I'll probably end up cutting this one in half, just about. It's way easier for me to cut stuff, though, once everything's there.

I decided to put these up here in part because we don't often share abstracts (they feel so wee and vulnerable--they might get rejected!--and this is just a little teeny slice of a much, much larger project), but also to show how starkly distinct they are. Even though they end in the same way, they begin and, largely, reside in very different argumentative spaces. ISHR is a smaller conference, but--sorry for the overused term here--the footprint of the argument tries to be a bit bigger. Or maybe the Cs one is bigger, I don't know. Now I can't tell.

Abstract One, ISHR

Performing as Animals

Recently, critics in the humanities (e.g., Agamben, Wolfe, Atterton, and Carlarco) have engaged what has become known as “the animal question,” which is to say they have focused on the enduring role played by animals in writings about human identity, values, and ethics. Most of this work has centered on philosophical texts.  Yet rhetorical texts deserve consideration as well, not least because ancient rhetorical treatises are crawling with animals. Aristotle finds beasts useful when theorizing humility and shame. Cicero and Quintilian write of horses, dogs, and birds. But the rhetorical genre with animals at its core is that of the fable. Fables appeared early in the sequence of ancient school exercises, or progymnasmata. That animals figure so prominently in these stage-setting composition exercises calls for more scrutiny. What, exactly, are animals doing there, and what can their presence tell us about rhetoric as an art?

The treatise on progymnasmata attributed to Hermogenes asks students to consider the collective delight experienced by humans in cities, but to do so from the vantage point of an ape. The writer of the treatise suggests that students expand this fabulous scenario by composing a speech for said ape.  Later, John of Sardis develops the ape example in an exercise found later in the sequence, ethopoeia, or speech in character. Students, that is, were frequently asked to compose in the “voices” of animals, to perform as animals.

My paper will examine such prompts to perform as animals in educational settings, with a particular focus on the progymnasmata tradition. I will argue that performing as animals helps to infuse early rhetorical education with more than low-stakes fictitious play, but that animals function more generally as an other—an other to humans, and uniquely, an other to children. Here the stakes of the animal question become more apparent for rhetorical studies: animals’ centrality in rhetorical education expands rhetoric from the art of observing the available means of persuasion to an art of becoming someone—or something—else.

 

Abstract Two, CCCC

 

Animals in Ancient School Exercises

The recent flurry of attention to ancient school exercises called progymnasmata has interested compositionists for the way they make writing regular and habitual, and how they ease students into the difficulties of rhetorical training. Thanks in part to J. David Fleming’s recent exhortation to embrace the “very idea” of these exercises, the progymnasmata are finding their way into classrooms and textbooks (D’Angelo, Crowley and Hawhee). This small but discernible shift in practice might usefully be accompanied by careful scrutiny of the exercises themselves, their history, their sequence, and their often striking content. Why, for example, are the progymnasmata crawling with animals?

Students working in this tradition usually began by composing fables about animals, but they were also, later in the sequence, asked to compose as animals, to write in the “voice” of, say, an ape interested in forming a city with fellow apes. I propose to examine the prompts that ask students to compose as animals. If, as Fleming (quoting Murphy) argues, the point of the progymnasmata was to “‘become rhetorical,’” then the exercises’ more peculiar features might tell us a bit more about what exactly that means. For starters, the prompt to compose as animals helps to infuse early rhetorical education with more than low-stakes fictitious play; the animals, rather, function more generally as an other—an other to humans, and uniquely, an other to children. A look at animals in these ancient school exercises begins to expand rhetoric from the art of observing the available means of persuasion to, more generally, an art of becoming someone—or something—else.