Previous Rhetoric and Communication Studies Forum Speakers
Fall 2012 Event
"Unlike Any Other Presidential Debate in History": Reflections on the 20th Anniversary of the 1992 Richmond Town Hall Debate
Thursday, October 18, 2012, 5:00PM
Alice Haynes Room, Tyler Haynes Commons
Spring 2011 RHCS Research Forum
Dr. Mari Boor Tonn
"'From the Eye to the Soul': Industrial Labor's Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones and the Rhetorics of Visuality and Performance."
Monday, January 17, 2011 4:00 p.m.
Brown Alley Room
The industrial labor movement was among the first social movements to exploit the visual and performative for social critique. Dr. Tonn’s lecture focuses on one principal figure--an elderly widow and the movement's most beloved and effective agitator--Mary Harris " Mother" Jones and two key events: the heavily photographed controversy surrounding the Colorado Coalfield War of 1913-14, especially the atrocities at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914, and Jones's earlier 1903 publicity march of Philadelphia mill children across three states to lobby for federal child-labor reforms. This lecture explores Jones's commitment to visuality's rhetorical force and also how visuality in her hands may function for varied audiences.
Fall 2010 RHCS Research Forums
Dr. Blake Abbott
"The Problem of Walking Away: A Rhetorical Crisis at Home"
Thursday, Nov. 11, 2010 at 4:30 p.m.
Weinstein Hall, Room 314
Dr. Abbott will discuss the recent trend in homeowners strategically defaulting on their mortgage as a rhetorical crisis. He traces the development of the relationship between housing and citizenship in the United States as a way to understand both the housing crisis that began in 2007 and the popularity of strategic mortgage defaults.
Dr. Nicole Maurantonio
"Law, Disorder, and Philadelphia's Police Advisory Board"
Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2010 at 9 a.m.
Weinstein Hall, Room 314
Dr. Maurantonio's talk will explore the ways in which news discourse surrounding the 1964 riots in Philadelphia ultimately led to the undermining of the city's precedent-setting Police Advisory Board. She argues that the unintentional effect of local print coverage of the riots was to provide a language of police paralysis that provided fodder for law and order advocates throughout the city.
Spring 2010 Research Forum
"Framing Feminism: Mass Media, Social Movements, and Women's Liberation"
Dr. Bonnie Dow
Monday, April 5, 2010 at 4:00pm
Brown Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Bonnie J. Dow is Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Studies and Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women's Movement Since 1970 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), and the co-editor (with Julia T. Wood) of The Sage Handbook of Gender and Communication (2006). She is also a co-editor of The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th -19th Centuries (Aunt Lute Books, 2004). Dow's research interests include the rhetoric and representation of the first and second waves of feminism in the United States, and her current book project is tentatively titled Framing Feminism: Television News, Women's Liberation, and 1970.