See Video Here: Storytelling as Social Justice: With Voice of Witness Book Series Managing Editor and Education Program Director
Dao Tran, managing editor of the Voice of Witness Book Series, and Cliff Mayotte, Education Program Director at Voice of Witness (co-founded by novelist Dave Eggers), provided a fantastic workshop and a lecture related to oral history methodologies and discussed VOW support of “Resettled: Beginning (Again) in Appalachia,” a local oral history project conducted through CRS. Those interested in working on this project should contact Katrina Powell at kmpowell@vt.edu.
Guest Speaker: Annette Vee
On 25 September 2018, our guest speaker, Dr. Annette Vee gave an lecture titled “Artificial Intelligence, Automatic Writing and the Displacement of Rhetoric in the Law.” Dr. Annette Vee is the author of Coding Literacy. She is an Associate Professor at the Department of English in the University of Pittsburgh.
Refugee Project: Data for Smart Policy Brief Launch
VT’s International Refugee Research Project was prompted by discussions about the refugee crisis of 2015 among the following international partners: the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, Bundeswehr University/Munich, Akademie für Politische Bildung, Tutzing Germany, University of Kent, Brussels, and the University of Bucharest, Romania. The project is driven by a mandate to produce research to inform policy decisions related to refugees, at all levels of social and political activity. The project operates on two-year research cycles, with partners undertaking field research on an agreed common research question, the coming together to report their findings in an international conference. For this first research cycle, the research question was measurement of the level of refugee integration in host communities.
Join the project at the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at Virginia Tech as it launches a policy brief on refugee integration. The findings of the research, the result of two years of work with international partners from Germany and Belgium, are impactful on a global scale and includes recommendations for governmental and non-governmental agencies working on refugee issues. September 5, 2018, Multipurpose Room, Newman Library, Blacksburg Campus.
Remembering Home, Building Future Outreach
CRS partners with several community organizations and volunteer networks to hold workshops for newly resettled families in the area. In addition, the Center serves as a space for English language and high school tutoring during the summer months.
Guest Speaker: John Muckelbauer
In April 2018, the Rhetoric Club and the Center for Rhetoric in Society hosted Dr. John Muckelbauer who provided a lecture titled, “Thinking Through Style: Derrida’s Unteachable Pedagogy.” Dr. Muckelbauer is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina.
Guest Speaker: S. Scott Graham
In February 2017, the Rhetoric Club (with generous support from the Center for Rhetoric in Society and the English Department) hosted guest speaker S. Scott Graham, director of the Public Engagement and Science Communication (PESC) Laboratory and an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Over the course of two days, Dr. Graham met students and faculty, visited a class on contemporary rhetorical theory, and gave a talk titled “Conflicted: Big Pharma and the Guardians of Public Trust.”