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Keynote Speakers
Jacqueline Jones Royster (she/her)
Pic: Courtesy of Georgia Tech
Jacqueline Jones Royster
From Story to Transformation in Theory and Practice: The Value of Personal Narrative in the World of Academia
Drawing on ideas seen sprinkled through works like Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literary Studies, "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own," and "'Ain't I a Woman': Using Feminist Rhetorical Practices to Re-Set the Terms of Engagement for an Iconic Text," Royster argues for the power of using personal experience to reveal new lines of inquiry and issue within the field of rhetoric and composition. She also details how valuing personal experience in academia may be an avenue through which voices of minorities, women, and others once unheard can be represented, centered, and empowered in ways never before seen.
Adrienne Rich
Experience Today, Activism Tomorrow
In her keynote address, Rich details her creative process as a writer and discusses the importance of including and utilizing personal experience in her work. Through discussing her process of writing Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, a book that combines Rich's personal experience of motherhood with scholarly queries of it, she argues that using the personal is a way to create scholarly and non-scholarly works that allow one to become an activist and inspire activism.
Adrienne Rich (she/her)
Pic: Courtesy of Eammon McCabe/Popperfoto via GettyImages
Victor Villanueva
Memoria & the Personal: Invaluable Sites of Invention
In this speech, Villanueva will draw on ideas presented in his article "Memoria is a Friend of Ours: On the Discourse of Color" to argue that memory and personal experience are highly important as sites of invention for rhetoric, discourse, and writing. His argument will advocate for the centering and valuing of memory and personal experience as sites of invention and a methodology for research in the field. Through discussing the value that the personal has brought to his own work, Villanueva will also discuss how utilizing it can make the teaching of and participation in rhetoric and other communicative acts more inclusive of minorities, women, and others who rely on lived experience to order their discourse and sense of the world.
Victor Villanueva (he/him)
Pic: Courtesy of Washington State University
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