ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
For more than two decades, the biennial Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition has been an important forum for scholars interested in rhetoric and the teaching of writing. This year the conference is celebrating its twentieth anniversary of providing participants with the opportunity to share ideas with leading scholars and to enjoy the intimate and informal setting of The Nittany Lion Inn on the Penn State University Park campus.
CONFERENCE THEME
Rhetorical activities have always taken place in technological contexts of one sort or another, whether a scriptorium, a traditional classroom, a state-of-the-art cybertorium, or other work space, private as well as public. In this day and age those contexts have become ever more visible because they have multiplied in number and influence, ever more involved because they increasingly encompass literate activity, and ever more contested because they embody values and aspirations. For these reasons (and a few others), technological contexts have moved toward the center of disciplinary conversations and encouraged people to think expansively and sometimes untraditionally about their practices and perspectives. The 20th Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition will address this ongoing state of affairs. Its theme will be "Rhetorics and Technologies."
The conference theme operates out of three fundamental assumptions about the nature of technological contexts. First, technological contexts encompass more than just physical devices like computers and books. They also involve systems, techniques, and methods for rationalizing work and society. As Walter Ong taught, language itself is something of a technology. Second, technological contexts are overdetermined: multiple forces and factors—historical, political, cultural, institutional, economic, and so on—shape the directions and priorities of technological projects. In other words, there is no one-to-one correspondence between technology and change, innovation, or social transformation. Third, and perhaps ironically, technological contexts bring to the surface human problems rather than technical problems, problems that inevitably draw in crucial questions of subjectivity, identity, agency, materiality, methodology, pedagogy, representation, and interdisciplinarity. As these assumptions suggest, technological contexts are decidedly rhetorical in character.
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