2026 Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition

Co-Facilitators:

Crystal Fodrey,  Haverford College

Kristi Girdharry, Babson College

Magdelyn Hammond Helwig, Furman University

Marit MacArthur, University of California-Davis  

As colleges and universities rapidly develop policies and initiatives around generative AI, writing studies and WAC/WID expertise is often unevenly represented in institutional decision-making. In many cases, these conversations draw on technological, legal, or administrative expertise while marginalizing or oversimplifying the knowledge long developed within writing studies and WAC/WID work. At the same time, faculty within our field remain deeply divided about AI itself: some view any institutional engagement as capitulation, while others argue that disengagement cedes authority to voices less attuned to literacy, learning, labor, and equity.

This two-day symposium brings together WPAs, WAC/WID leaders, and faculty involved in campus AI efforts to examine how disciplinary knowledge about writing, learning, labor, and equity is shaping—or being sidelined in—these conversations. Through structured collaboration, participants will work collaboratively to document and analyze how writing studies knowledge circulates—or fails to circulate—within institutional AI conversations and developed shared frameworks for future leadership work. Asking a shared set of questions during this workshop will lay the groundwork for a collective publication focused on writing studies leadership in the age of AI:

● How is writing studies expertise actually shaping AI decision-making across different institutional contexts? 

● How has the AWAC Statement on AI and Writing Across the Curriculum been taken up, adapted, resisted, or ignored across different institutional contexts, and to what effect?

● What does it mean to lead from disciplinary knowledge at a moment when public narratives about AI and education often speak for us rather than with us?

● Who is leading projects integrating AI into writing instruction, writing tutoring, etc., and how are such projects being received by faculty, students and administrators?

● How can we create spaces for collective movement on AI that acknowledge principled refusal, ethical hesitation, and genuine uncertainty without allowing paralysis to set institutional agendas?

Co-Facilitators: 

Kem Roper, Athens State University

Wonderful Faison, Jackson State University

Candis Bond, Augusta University

Joy Bracewell, Georgia College and State University

Although Writing Center directors are leaders, they are rarely acknowledged as such--neither within nor outside of writing center discourse. This two-day symposium is designed to help attendees think through how to make the invisible work of writing center administrators (WCAs) more visible.  These sessions will help WCAs and aspiring WCAs to:

(1) cultivate clear leadership identities that guide decision-making; 

(2) externalize their emotional labor and develop strategies for obtaining institutional advocacy that prevent burnout; 

(3) prioritize anti-racist practices that benefit all institutional stakeholders, and 

(4) build compelling budget proposals that identify institutional priorities, align writing center outcomes with accreditation and retention metrics, and use qualitative and quantitative evidence to demonstrate unmet needs. 

Attendees should leave with a clear sense of how their unique leadership skills can be applied to both personal and professional goals.

Co-Facilitators: 

Scot Barnett- Indiana University-Bloomington

Nathaniel Rivers- Saint Louis University

This workshop invites participants to think rhetoric environmentally and, in particular, the forms rhetoric takes–and may take–in sensitizing us to climate change in distinctly embodied ways. Rather than develop a rhetoric of the environment, this workshop seeks to imagine what rhetoric is and what it may become as a matter of environmental concern–that is, as part of the very environments we seek to understand and protect. 

The workshop will be a mix of seminar-style discussion and field work focused on the invention of new methods and modes for doing rhetoric in the midst of global environmental crises and mass extinctions. Our goal for the workshop is not simply to perform and master already existing methods for environmental rhetoric but to see how many methods we can invent over the course of our time together. 

To this end, we will read and discuss works from both inside and outside of rhetorical studies, ranging across sociology, anthropology, and environmental biology. Potential authors may include Anne Berthoff, Bruno Latour, Stephen J. Gould & Elisabeth Vrba, Ursula K. LeGuin, Donna Haraway, Peter Sloterdijk, Erin Manning, Stacey Alaimo, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Debra Hawhee, Megan Poole, Joshua Trey Barnett, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, and Noah Roderick. 

Our field work will enable participants to experiment with various modes of composing sensitivities or “ecological feelings”: e.g., expository and fiction writing, encomia, photography, digital video, poetry, collage, drawing, and/or choreography/movement. Each field work outing will iterate existing or previous modes produced during the workshop in the hope of collectively building a novel repertoire of techniques for environmental rhetorics to come. 

Co-Facilitators: 

Alex Mueller, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Megan Poole, University of Texas-Austin

Vessela Valiavitcharska- University of Maryland-College Park

Engaging in conversation. “Being there” with your subjects of study. Conveying a rich sensory experience through writing. This workshop examines how a focus on the senses achieves the kind of historical scholarship often associated with field or community-engaged research. Participants interested in rhetorical history and/or sensory rhetoric will consider: How have the senses shaped notions of style? How have style and aesthetic regimes shaped the senses? Why do theories of vision feature so prominently in histories of rhetoric? How does the dust and ephemera of archives bring history into presence?

Working together in structured, small-group collaborations, participants will apply each session’s theories, methods, or frameworks to their current works-in-progress. Session themes include 1) Education of the Senses; 2) Rhythm & Sound; 3) Proximity & Sight; 4) Agency & Touch.

Readings and topics may feature, but are not limited to, the colors of rhetoric, the art of listening, ancient theories of vision, arts of poetry, eastern medieval public ritual, and the materiality of archival records. At the close of the symposium, participants will be invited to share back their project ideas to a larger audience of rhetoric scholars that includes workshop participants from the “Pan-Historiography” workshop.

Co-Facilitators: 

Christa J. Olson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Debra Hawhee, Penn State University

This workshop takes as its starting point the book chapter, “Panhistoriography: The Challenges of Writing History across Time and Space” (published in Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, ed. M. Bailiff) in which the authors theorize the usefulness of writing sprawling, capacious histories. In the dozen plus years since that chapter appeared, rhetoric scholars have enacted, elaborated, and extended panhistoriography. 

Many of these histories grapple with contemporary crises, demonstrating the usefulness of histories that span right to the present moment and beyond. Indeed, Alex Mueller, at the outset of his own capacious history, calls for the production of histories that refuse “to accept the past as so far gone and to accept the future as inevitable.” In that spirit, this workshop will investigate not only what has become possible via panhistoriographic methods to date but also what new pathways might be created now. In doing so, this workshop continues discussions begun at the U of L’s spring (2026) symposium on Pan-history. Participants will burrow into recent panhistories of rhetoric and then consider further possibilities for panhistoriographic encounters with archives, for writing decolonized histories, and for cultivating histories across not only time and space but also medium and mode.

Workshop sessions will include:

1. Overview: panhistoriography enacted recent pan-histories

2. Archival panhistoriography

3. Decolonial panhistoriography

4. Modal panhistoriography

The final session (modal panhistoriography) will include an opportunity to gather and swap ideas with colleagues in the “Engaging the Senses in Rhetorical History” workshop.

Participants will, we hope, leave with generative, flexible tools for writing expansive histories.