Frontera Retórica: Recap and Video

Frontera Retórica, UTEP's student chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America, recently completed its second annual Spring Symposium. I shot some rather haphazard video of the speaking events, and have cobbled that together here for your viewing pleasure.

The first panel highlighted undergraduate research in Rhetoric and Professional Communication, with presentations from (in order) Rene Luna, Jonathan Saldivar, and Nadia Ramirez. More detailed information on the fantastic work of these students can be found on Slideshare, where Rene, Jonathan, Nadia, and I had previously uploaded our panel proposal for the Southwest/Texas PCA/ACA conference. By all accounts, this was a fantastic, informative, and inspiring panel, one for which our students should be very proud!

The undergraduate panel was followed by presentations from three of the dissertating doctoral candidates in UTEP's nationally recognized Rhetoric and Writing Studies program. Hector Carbajal began the graduate panel with a thorough and lucid study of the "rise, fall, and re-invention of memory in the history of rhetoric." Christie Daniels, current president of Frontera Retórica, discussed her dissertation research in a presentation titled "Remapping Evil: Locating, Spatializing, and Depicting Morality." I was the last to present, and though I didn't shoot any video of myself (you're not missing anything!), the slides for my talk can be found below.

After a brief intermission of good food and even better discussion, we heard the excellent keynote presentation of Bill Hart-Davidson, co-director of the WIDE Research Center at Michigan State University. Dr. Hart-Davidson discussed his work on the "Social Writing Application Platform" (SWAP), a project developed at WIDE that can be used to "coordinate the distributed work of multiple writers" in an organizational setting. Beyond his thought-provoking keynote presentation, we simply had a great time with Bill during his visit, from dinner at L&J's to the daytrip to Old Mesilla. He's a wonderful representative of both Michigan State and the entire discipline!

A couple of notes on the video and the symposium: Carloyn Drapes and I live-tweeted Bill's talk, and the collection of those tweets can be found here. This video is intended as a representation of the full event, hence the music and the lack of discussion. Perhaps next year we'll live stream the events so that we can more fully share the scholarly discussions. Finally, I should note that I didn't shoot video of the entire space--there were easily 5 or 6 times the number of attendees that can be seen in this video. Enjoy!