I had a hell of a time at this year’s biennial Rhetoric Society of America Conference. Over the next few days I will post recaps and thoughts about the panels I attended, which for the most part were excellent, as well as visual rhetorical analysis of the university ads in the program, which seems to me depressingly necessary.
Minneapolis seemed like an excellent city. It reminded me a lot of a very, very large Iowa City, which is where my love for the upper Midwest began. It’s always hard to get a good impression of a city when you’re just visiting for a conference though. It’s tough to make it out of the downtown conference zone, which is usually more or less the same in most cities, particularly ones like Minneapolis that have used large, new downtown conference complexes to revitalize their downtown areas. I did make it to a Twins game with past and present UT Austin folks, which was excellent. I like the new stadium, but it’s not the best example of the retro stadium renaissance. Not surprisingly for Target Field, it feels kind of like it was bought at Target, with aspirations of class, but a cheap chipboard underneath the hardwood veneer.
I do have some unsolicited thoughts about the conference for the RSA Board (Update: Jim Brown has a similar post over at the Blogora):
- The conference has gotten too long. Four days of panels is too much, and people can’t sustain the energy to participate for that amount of time. People presenting on Friday, and especially Monday, get royally screwed in terms of both attendance and the audience’s ability to engage meaningfully. Three days, no more, no less, please.
- Stop allowing individuals to present multiple papers. I abused this myself this year, presenting two papers. Grad students, attempting to extend their CVs, tend to be the worst abusers. Limit participants to one conference paper and one super-session. One proposal per person. The multiple papers are resulting in a noticeable watering down of the conference’s intellectual content, and contributing to the length problem. RSA has been a great conference in the past because the panels were of consistently high quality and there weren’t too many different panels happening simultaneously. Please don’t let the conference bloat like 4Cs and MLA and NCA have. Please.
- Memorial Day weekend, really? I get why this is. It’s easy to track and you know nobody will be in session at their home institutions. But it’s an important holiday, particularly for spending time with family and achieving a healthier work/life balance. It’s also convenient as an organization for people to know already when the next RSA biennial conference will be held in 2012, but that doesn’t seem worth sacrificing people’s holidays to me. Also, holding the conference over a major holiday weekend significantly drives up the cost of attendance, particularly for graduate students who don’t receive travel reimbursements. Airfares for Minneapolis were ridiculous, and I bought mine more than 60 days ahead of time. Have some compassion for the financial plight of the scholars who most need the conference to establish and advance their careers.
- Get the technology already! It’s outrageous for the premier conference in our discipline to be so behind the curve technologically. A big “huzzah” for all those who brought their own technology and worked around the RSA refusal to spend money on something quite worth spending money on. Seriously, if we have to give up a night of complimentary drinks for this, I’m willing. RSA could even buy say, 10 small, portable projection and sound systems, which are very reasonably priced now, and bring them to every conference if the hotel provided technology is prohibitively expensive.
- It’s fairly easy to predict the popular panels based on the names presenting, so put them in bigger rooms. I was very disappointed not to be able to see the panel of Diane Davis, et al, because by the time I got there the tiny room was already packed with people willing to stand for two hours. Try to be a bit more savvy about the room scheduling, please. My knees won’t allow me to stand for two hours.
Unsolicited advice for presenters:
- Don’t read a lit review. This isn’t the time or place, and you should probably actually assume that your audience has read more than you have. Profs, don’t let your students read lit reviews.
- Be willing to be a bit polemical. It keeps everyone more engaged. These aren’t publications–you aren’t bound eternally to what you say. Use the ephemeral nature of speech to flap up some dust. It’s worth it to get good discussions and arguments going.
- The best conference paper advice I ever got was from Jeffrey Walker, who claims that conference papers should be arguments without evidence. It’s not literally true, and Jeff’s own papers are perfectly evidenced, but your evidence should be drawn directly from the subject of study. And lit review, if necessary, should be glossed as quickly as possible. Get through that and get to the real stuff.
- Project and enunciate. Otherwise, we can’t hear you. I don’t mind our discipline’s tendency to allow people to read papers, but if you’re going to do that you need to rehearse and pay attention to the manner and quality of your delivery. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve noticed that the communication studies rhetoric folks are generally better about this than the English studies rhetoric folks.
- It’s alright to slip in and out of a panel if you do so quietly and respectfully. But don’t keep going in and out. It’s rude.
Slightly unrelated but worth noticing: In a spirit very similar to this blog, ProfHacker recently had an excellent post about the experience of transitioning from graduate student to assistant professor in the humanities.
I’ll post much more extended thoughts about the scholarly content of the conference in the coming days. Here’s a shot from the Twins game. Sorry for the low quality. Took it with my new “smart” phone.
