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[Commlist] Call for Papers, NCA Preconference on “Rhetoric as Nature: Considering the Role of Cosmologies, Ecologies, and Economies in Honoring Place"

Wed Jul 13 11:01:22 GMT 2022




Matthew Bost: (bostmw /at/ whitman.edu) <mailto:(bostmw /at/ whitman.edu)>


Preconference Date: November 16, 2022



Deadline for Submissions: August 31, 2022


The Economics, Communication and Society division of the National Communication Association, in conjunction with the Rhetorical and Communication Theory and Environmental Communication divisions, invites submissions to an NCA preconference on the theme “Rhetoric as Nature: Considering the Role of Cosmologies, Ecologies, and Economies in Honoring PLACE”, which will take place on November 16, 2022 ahead of NCA's annual meeting in New Orleans, LA.


The concept of nature has long been subject to critical discussion across the humanities and social sciences, but the past few decades have also seen new conceptions of nature emerge, particularly in terms of cosmology, ecology, and economy. Scholars working from these perspectives have advocated for a recentering of the reciprocal obligations inherent in human relationships to other beings and phenomena—land, water, plants, and other beings that constitute the places within which communities are embedded. Pursuing newly just and equitable relations is hampered by capitalist modernity's totalizing cosmology, its denial of agency to the nonhuman, and its suppression of and attacks on difference along racial, ethnic, class-oriented, ableist, and gendered lines. The preconference embraces the challenge to cultivate an ethos responsible for all worldly actants. We invite many interdisciplinary perspectives, including theories of decoloniality, the redressing of anti-Blackness, feminisms and queer theory, critical engagements with disability, radical democracy, and ontological and political engagements with posthumanism and new materialism. We encourage contributors to consider “Rhetoric as Nature” as a provocation oriented on three key terms–cosmologies, ecologies, and economies–each of which constitute rhetorical processes that materialize out of nature and in turn transform our sense of what nature can signify and become in theory and practice.


A cosmologyin its most basic sense refers to a given people’s way of relating to a larger cosmic sense of place, functioning as a core set of doxathat structure a given culture’s imaginative horizons and the social norms and forms of conduct that are thinkable within it. Many Indigenous knowledge traditions and those of the Global South, as well as scholars working in feminist science studies, have turned to cosmologies as a way of considering the forms of relation encouraged or foreclosed in particular cosmologies, and offered cosmologies that seek to repair environmental damage as well as disrupting modernity’s totalizing (and colonizing) cosmological vision. Rhetoric as nature, viewed from a cosmological perspective, enables the exploration of both non-Western cosmologies and Western imaginaries that have been historically disparaged, asking: how can we we create a relational politics responsive to earthly and cosmic heterogeneity?

In addition to its cosmological implications, this preconference considers “Rhetoric as Nature” from the perspective of ecologies. Scholarship indebted to new materialism and various critical materialist traditions has emphasized that human rhetorical and social processes are coproduced within vast webs of more-than-human life. Such scholarship has emphasized capitalism’s creation of hierarchies between human and nonhuman being, leading to the exploitation of “nature” treated in the abstract as well as to the ongoing precarity of the majority of the world’s human population. To address this situation, other ecologically-inclined scholars have drawn attention to the interspecies relations and alternative worlds thriving throughout and alongside capitalism. Within this framework, rhetoric—another art of seeing—becomes a phenomenological practice of feeling/thinking diverse social, political, and economic relationalities. Such ecological attunements acquire particular urgency in a moment when a multitude of crises—from global pandemic and increasing precarity to the deforestation, environmental disasters, and food and water scarcity wrought by climate change—are growing ever more destructive.

Finally, this preconference invites a consideration of “Rhetoric as Nature” from the perspective of economies. While neoliberal capitalism has embraced complexity and systems theory to underwrite its ideologies of individual action and market competition, there are a number of alternative economic approaches that embrace the cosmological and ecological alternatives discussed above. Ranging from discussions of the oppressive racial order underpinning the modern political economic subject to perspectives rooted in feminist and anarchist politics of care and mutual aid to Marxian affirmations of the common as an axis for envisioning an alternative economic order, these approaches pose the question of the economic practices and forms of organization that might produce less oppressive futures. We invite engagements that further conversations between the rhetorical study of economics and the worldmaking projects of different ecologies and cosmologies, whether from the perspectives of ideology critique, biopolitics, psychoanalysis, affect theory, new materialism, theories of publics, or any of the many other perspectives that have shaped the rhetorical study of economics.


In order to prompt fruitful conversation and debate, we seek papers that respond to the provocation “Rhetoric as Nature” from within each of these perspectives, as well as by highlighting points of conversation between them. How does conceiving of rhetoric as an economic process impact the way cosmologies and ecosystems are understood rhetorically? How does approaching rhetoric in terms of cosmological or ecological processes shed new light on what different approaches to an economy can mean for the constituents that comprise it? In addition to producing connections between these perspectives, this preconference also seeks to highlight points of productive tension. For example, not only do tensions exist between different materialist approaches to rhetoric as nature (for example, between new materialist approaches that affirm the vibrancy of all matter and historical materialist approaches that focus on the figure of the human as a site of social struggle and potential emancipation), these tensions prompt further conversation between various materialist approaches to the preconference theme and approaches that affirm reciprocity with nonhuman beings through spirit and ceremony, as well as the work of scholars like Kim Tallbear and Zoe Todd, who have sought to recenter Indigenous and other non-Western thought in conversations about the nonhuman and pointed out the potentially colonizing implications of a materialist approach. These differences carry vital ethical and political implications for conversations including the relationship of vocabularies of immanence and materiality to a variety of spiritual traditions that affirm the nonhuman, the role of social movement advocacy in challenging human exceptionalism, and the desirability of “liberation” or “emancipation” as alternatives to human exceptionalism, to name just a few.


To further these conversations, we especially seek submissions that enlist cosmological, ecological, and economic perspectives on rhetoric as nature as part of critical projects that develop feminist, queer, decolonial, and dis/ability perspectives, or that examine the power dynamics of contemporary capitalism. We are further interested in papers that attempt to mark the boundaries of specific rhetorical ontologies, address how to create multiple worlds, discuss the work of rhetoric’s simultaneous meaning-making and place-making, theorize the rhetorical production of new economic models, engage the COVID pandemic, and forward Indigenous cosmologies and/or unearth alternative Western ones. Finally, we are interested in papers that address the methods, technologies, and disciplinary practices that enable diverse implementations of rhetoric as nature to flourish.

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In addition to panel discussions focused on the above themes, the preconference will host a plenary session featuring scholars in rhetoric and indigenous studies whose work stages a conversation between economic, ecological, and cosmological approaches to “Rhetoric as Nature”, bringing out resonances and productive tensions between these approaches. Our plenary speakers are Bernard Perley(Associate Professor, Critical Indigenous Studies, University of British Columbia), Thomas Rickert (Professor of English, Purdue University), and Catherine Chaput (Professor of English, Fordham University).


We will also host a keynote address byDr. Jason W. Moore, Professor of Sociology at SUNY Binghamton. Dr. Moore is the author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, coauthor (with Raj Patel) of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and editor of Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism. Dr. Moore’s work focuses on the history of capitalism from a “world-ecological” perspective that emphasizes the ways that what are often thought to be separate spheres of human action and nonhuman nature are co-produced. In considering the ways capital and colonialism extract value from life-processes that have been turned into “cheap things,” and in advocating for a reparative ecology aimed at producing less destructive forms of life beyond capital, Dr. Moore’s work cuts across both the critical projects and affirmative possibilities designated by “Rhetoric as Nature”.


Scholars interested in submitting to the preconference as a presenter should provide a presentation title, an abstract of no more than 250 words, and their author and institutional information to Matthew Bost ((bostmw /at/ whitman.edu) <mailto:(bostmw /at/ whitman.edu)>) no later than /August 31, 2022/. We also welcome those who would like to attend, but not present. Scholars interested in participating in the preconference as audience members should send their name and institutional affiliation to Matthew Bost ((bostmw /at/ whitman.edu) <mailto:(bostmw /at/ whitman.edu)>) no later than /August 31, 2022/. Participants will be notified of acceptance in mid-to-late September.

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