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

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.

.

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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