Ah…some good panels I’ll tell ya.  I ended up going to that new media panel and it was worth it.  One panelist looked at “populist rhetoric” and technology…especially in relationship to the current presidential election.  She was interested in the ways in which the “Internet candidate” seems to coincide with “the populist candidate” in the press and the rhetorical framing of the campaigns.  The second guy was interested in opening up scholarly publishing to collaborative Web 2.0 kind of texts–especially when it comes to considering those texts “legitimate” as academic and scholarly work.  And, the third panelist, an anthropologist, was looking at “the vernacular web” and some of the ways in which the new Web 2.0 is opening up more vernacular uses of the Internet.

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!

After several delays and longer than expected layovers, I’m in Seattle for RSA.  The bummer is that last night Rachel and I and a group of folks were going to get together for a little book launch celebration…but, alas, I didn’t get in until 11pm.  Good thing that Ken and Trish were around and willing to hang out for a while in the lobby of the Westin, have a few drinks, and talk the night way.

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!

So, I come home today after attending my niece’s graduation…she’s graduating from pre-school…and find a box sitting on my front porch. What was in the box you ask??? Copies of Democracies to Come from Lexington Books!!

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!

It’s true. About a week ago I laid out my little plan for conferences and publications for the next several months. Next month I am supposed to present my paper, “Save Our School: Multimodal Activism and the Struggle to Save the Early Learning Center at Kutztown University,” at the CCCCs in New Orleans. Alas, it does not look like it’s going to happen.

As much as I want to go to the conference and present that paper, I’ve had to come to terms with one pretty sobering fact: I do not have enough institutional funding to cover my expenses for two conferences this spring. Conferences are not cheap. For example, the registration fee for RSA in May was $210. Just the fee ate up all of my department funding. Given that the conference is in Seattle, my plane fare and hotel will more than eat up my university funding. In other words, I will be paying for a portion of that conference anyway. If I want to go to both conferences, one will have to come entirely out of my pocket. Given that I’ve been busting my butt for the past several years to live within my means, I’ve had to accept the fact that I simply cannot afford to go to both conferences.

That’s not easy to accept. The teaching and service load here has already taken a toll on my research and scholarship. And despite the fact that Kutztown is supposed to be a teaching intensive/focused university, there are increasing expectations to publish. The problem is that the material support for research and scholarship has not risen even close to the rate of expectations. Don’t get me wrong…no one takes a job at a teaching intensive university expecting to keep a full research agenda going. As the saying goes, something’s gotta give.

Anyway, I’m just frustrated. If we were getting strong support for teaching here, I might not be so bitter right now. But the increasing class sizes, a lack of adequate office space, and a finance-driven approach to curriculum by our current administration and State System just wears me down sometimes.

I guess I’ll just concentrate on getting that conference paper turned into an article for publication. I’ll miss the intellectual engagement of the CCCCs.

At the very least I guess I should be happy to learn that I’ve been more productive. Funny. I don’t feel more productive. I just feel tired.

So, I’m planning for conference number three this year…I thought it would be a good idea to begin teasing out the distinctions and connections among my papers. For my CCCCs paper, “Save Our School: Multimodal Activism and the Struggle to Save the Early Learning Center at Kutztown University,” I will be looking at how members of an emerging coalition of faculty, students, and parents made, in Nancy Welch’s terms, “rhetorical space through concerted, often protracted struggle for visibility, voice, and impact against power interests that deny visibility, voice, and impact” (Welch 477). In particular, this paper is interested in the “multimodal” character of that work. That is, the “Save the ELC” coalition not only made use of traditionally recognizable forms of activism like petitions and demonstrations, but also made use of new technologies and social networking software in making their case. I am also interested in how that rhetorical space took shape and how tricky it was to sustain it as the struggle to save the ELC wore on. For the record, the struggle continues and there remain serious concerns about the university’s long-term commitment to the school.

My second paper is for RSA in May: “Holding Back the Membership: Breaking Cycles of Despair and Rhetorics of Power in a Contract Negotiations Year.” This paper is part of the panel “Responsible to Whom for What?: Complex Audiences at Cross-Purposes in Labor Organizing,” with my fellow APSCUF-KU Exec member Ken Ehrensal as well as Seth Kahn and Cheryl Wanko from West Chester University. In that paper, I look at a dispute within members of our union, APSCUF, during our recent contract negotiations. I am particularly interested in the ways in which dominant and emergent concepts of unionism played out in terms of strategy and tactics and how members sought to remake a union identity.

Finally, I am now working on a paper proposal for the 2008 Watson Conference and I am thinking about similar issues. At the moment my working title (emphasis on “working”) is “Mediated Advocacy: A Look at the Impacts of New Technologies in a Campus Campaign.” We’ll see where this one goes. I just put the rough sketch of this paper together today (finally)…still very rough, but you get the idea.

As I was working on the Watson proposal today, I began to think about linkages and what shape these three papers might take as a project–both in terms of publishing, but also in terms of a direction for further scholarship. I guess I like the questions I am posing and the fact that each paper is taking up similar questions in different contexts. And all of this builds nicely, if I don’t say so myself, from Rachel’s and my forthcoming book, Democracies to Come. If there we are working through notions of rhetorical action, political-communities-in-struggle, and micro-negotiations of hegemony, these three papers seem like a fitting extension and elaboration on that work. Interesting.

Sorry for all this “insider” talk–inside my head that is. I just needed to get some of this stuff out on the page. I think it’s time to think about hitting the sack for the night. It’s a big weekend after all. My grandmother is turning 90! And she still bowls.