OK…so, you may have been following my trials and tribulations trying to post my first podcast episode. Well, I think I’ve got the tech part of things worked out.

So, last week I was as CCCCs in San Francisco.  It was a great conference and our panel, Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing, went extraordinarily well.  We had a pretty packed room and it was a privilege to be presenting alongside such awesome colleagues: Mary Boland, Seth Kahn, Amy Lynch-Biniek, Rachel Riedner, and Eileen Schell (our respondent).  I was also quite pleased with the vigorous discussion following our papers.  That discussion continued on over to the Serrano Hotel for our CCCCs Labor Caucus Interest Group.  Truly a great way to cap off the day. 

As you may have seen, I decided to use this year’s CCCCs to enter the world of video blogging (vlogging) on our 

composition and rhetoric blog.  That was fun and has got me on a bit of a web 2.0 kick this week (don’t even get me started about Nings).  As I wrote earlier, I’ve got a rather ambitious tech agenda for the fall and I’ve submitted a tech request for some equipment that I hope will come through.  I also found out that I still have a small chuck of money from a Teachnology Grant I received a few years ago for WritersBlogK, a project I undertook with Aaron Barlow.  So, it looks like I’m going to pick up the Snowball after all!

In the meantime, I thought I would take the leap and try my hand at podcasting this week.  After a couple days of failure, I think I’ve finally got the hang of it.  Since I just presented a paper at CCCCs, I thought that would be a good test case.  So, here it is folks: “Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures.”  In addition to the paper I presented, I also included a bunch of “notes” that were in an earlier draft but had to be cut due to time.

CCCCs Paper: “Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures.”  Click the radio or the play button to listen.

CCCCs is in San Francisco this week!

Yup, in just a few days I’ll be joining my agitating (in a good way!) composition pals in San Francisco for CCCCs.  I can’t wait to get there!  Not only am I totally excited about my panel, I am looking forward to helping reignite the CCCCs Labor Caucus!  And, how convenient is this, the Labor Caucus meeting is immediately following our panel…hmmmm, how did that happen?

Here’s the full description of our panel…come out if you can!

Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing: Possibilities and Predicaments

Session: D.22 on Mar 12, 2009 from 3:15 PM to 4:30 PM

As a field, Composition/Rhetoric attends carefully to academic labor issues, primarily regarding contingent faculty. This session highlights the limits of this focus and advocates for further action towards labor equity/justice in academia. Speakers articulate an array of labor problems, ranging from the importance of composition theory in staffing writing courses, to the abuse of immigrant labor on college campuses, and call for more aggressive, multi-layered (curricular, departmental, university-wide) labor organizing in response.

Amy Lynch-Biniek:

“When Teaching Is Generic: Connecting Composition Theory to Staffing Practices”

Administrators devalue Composition theory in order to justify staffing practices. If knowledge of Composition theory is unnecessary, if teaching becomes a generic skill, then courses may be cheaply staffed with graduate students and temporary employees who may have little knowledge of Composition. Consequently, pedagogy is less likely grounded in strong theoretical rationale. I argue that one tactic in a larger strategy for altering labor practices and improving Composition teaching is reasserting the essential role of Composition theory to composition teaching.

Seth Kahn:

“‘If I Don’t Do It, Nobody Will’”: Writing Program Faculty Fulfilling Management Responsibilities”

Growing numbers of management and shrinking numbers of full-time faculty positions significantly impact Writing Program faculty and administrators in two ways: (1) the well-documented deflection of resources away from faculty; and despite growing numbers of managers, (2) Writing Program faculty/administrators doing more management work. This presentation analyzes the second point, contending that writing instruction and program administration suffer when faculty take on management responsibilities, and that academic unions need to take a stronger stand on enabling faculty to concentrate on faculty work.

Rachel Riedner

“Immigrant Labor and Universities”

While university communities are an imagined community of students and faculty engaged in the project of education, these communities increasingly include immigrant workers. Immigrant workers are constructed to be both inside and outside the university: inside insofar as they reproduce the conditions of education for the university community, and outside insofar as they are not imagined as part of the community. This paper argues that with contracting immigrant labor comes a contracting out of community responsibility, resigning service and immigrant employees to invisibility in educational communities.

Kevin Mahoney

“Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures”

In the 1990s, labor conditions and labor organizing in higher education took center stage in rhetoric and composition. However, the field has not sought to deepen that project significantly through explicit rhetorical instruction in labor organizing and advocacy. Focusing on higher education labor organizing, this paper argues for a curricular project connecting explicit instruction in rhetorics of advocacy, new undergraduate majors in comp/rhet, and the field’s investment in critical citizenship.

Mary Boland

“Contracting Competing Interests: Unionizing and the Preservation of Academic Freedom.”

More and more academic workers are looking to unions to preserve their professional integrity. Unionizing can pose problems because the guild ideology that justifies academic freedom runs counter to the egalitarianism that underwrites unionization. The risk is that we may unintentionally redefine the terms of work in a manner that undercuts academic freedom. I illustrate how unionizing can generate competing rights among classes of laborers and jeopardize faculty freedoms and suggest that compositionists are uniquely situated to help anticipate these pitfalls.

Respondent: Eileen Schell

The second panel, Rachel’s “transnational rhetorics” panel was fab.  Rachel talked about Zapatista’s rhetorical work in constructing openings and news spaces in civil society.  Katherine Mack looked as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and how the NGO, IJR was moving it’s work in supporting transitional justice across the African continent as part of an “African Renaissance.”  Scott Wible discussed Bush’s “National Security Language Initiative and MLA’s response to it.  And, finally, Rasha Diab looked at Anwar Al-Sadat’s role in constructing the possibility of peace between Egypt and Israel in the 1970s.  Both panels were well attended and the discussion afterwards was great.  I even got to see Lu-Ming Mao at the Transnational Rhetorics panel…always great to run into folks from Miami.

Anyway, I’ll keep it brief…I’m going to meet Seth, Ann, and Rachel for dinner for some great Seattle food and continuing awesome conversation.

Still sunny, 64 degrees.  Beautiful!

I’m just about to head over to the hotel to pick up my conference materials and scout out the sessions for the day.  I will be going to Rachel’s “Transnational Rhetorics” panel at four o’clock which promises to be fabulous!  There’s also an intersting looking session at 2:15 on “Implications of the New Media” which is calling me, I think.  We’ll see.  Our panel, “Responsibilities to Whom, For What?: Complex Audiences at Cross-Purposes in Labor Organizing,” is not until tomorrow morning…

I just got off the phone with Rachel and was happy to hear that I’ll be joining her, Seth, and Ann for dinner tonight!  Yeah.  All is not lost.  Rachel promises many tragicomic tales of her trip here and I’ll get to meet Ann.  Anyway, despite what you’ve heard about Seattle:

Sunny and a beautiful 60 degrees!

That’s right folks…we’re in print. The official pub date is May 28th, but Rachel and I got our advanced copies today. It feels so great…especially after such a long process. The best part of it all is that we’ll be able to bring copies to RSA in Seattle this weekend. We planned to have a little pre-release, party Saturday night anyway…now, we’ll be able to make it official!