RSA 50th Anniversary ... 2018 Special Issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly

In 2018, the Rhetoric Society of America will celebrate its 50th anniversary!  In conjunction with a number of celebratory initiatives, the 2018 special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly will feature essays that commemorate the organization’s intellectual, scholarly, and historical achievements.

For this special issue, we invite individual proposals for reflective pieces that take stock of the past while projecting future paths.  Contributors will write not only to identify and consolidate accomplishments but also to explore ruptures, points of stasis, and ongoing debates.  Inspired by Raymond Williams’ concept of “keywords,” we invite proposals for reflection on a term, concept, genre, or figure central to the discipline and our collective identity.  What those keywords are will be open to investigation; we welcome proposals for essays that identify a key word, historicize it, contextualize it, and imagine its future.  We anticipate that the issue will make a history by rereading earlier scholarship (from ny era) so as to retheorize the organization’s and rhetoric’s past and envision its future.

We aim to feature prominent voices in all the various subdisciplines brought together in RSQ:  rhetoric, writing studies, communications, media/cultural/visual studies, and others.  While we invite all scholars across rhetorical studies to propose an abstract, an editorial review team will ultimately select from the pool of proposals we receive and will solicit full-length submissions for the special issue by invitation only.

Proposals, 100 words or fewer in length, should identify a “keyword” and describe what the contribution would entail. As you prepare your proposals, please keep in mind that invited full-length submissions will run approximately 4,000 words each. We anticipate receiving a large number of proposals for this very special special issue; brief and focused full-length submissions will enable us to invite more voices into the issue's limited page allotments. We invite both contributions that take the form of conventional academic essays and proposals for work in other genres. Collaboration is welcome. The special issue will be published in the summer of 2018.

Deadline for proposal submission: February 6, 2017.

First drafts of manuscripts for the selected proposal will be due in early fall 2017; this deadline allows time for blind review, revisions, and initial copyediting for publication. Final versions will be due March 1, 2018.

Please submit proposals electronically to:

Michelle Ballif, RSQ Associate Editor for Special Issues, mballif@uga.edu .