Plenary Presentation and Featured Workshop

We are pleased to announce Dr. Jody Shipka, Associate Professor of English at University of Maryland-Baltimore County, as the 2020 Corridors plenary speaker. In addition to Shipka's keynote, the conference program this year offers a featured workshop on "quaranzines," led by Dr. Jason Luther, Assistant Professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University.

Plenary Presentation | 1-2 p.m.

Edible Rhetoric: Making Meals that Matter

This presentation explores the rhetorical, innovative and creative dimensions of what food scholar Sherrie Inness calls “kitchen culture”--the various discourses about food, cooking, and gender roles that stem from the kitchen but that pervade our society on many levels.” (3). Drawing on an interview study designed to explore the material, technical, rhetorical, and emotional dimensions of baking and cooking, the presentation highlights some of the ways interviewees described using food to achieve various goals and purposes--to persuade, inform, instruct, memorialize, motivate, ritualize, and/or destabilize. By foregrounding the fully-embodied, multisensory, and complexly distributed aspects of the interviewees’ cooking and baking practices, the presentation also works to challenge the still too common conflation of multimodality with digital or “new media” text and practices.

About Dr. Jody Shipka

Jody Shipka's research and teaching interests include multimodal discourse, digital rhetorics, play theory, materiality, and food studies. Shipka is the author of Toward a Composition Made Whole and the editor of Play! A Collection of Toy Camera Photographs. Her work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Enculturation, Itineration, Kairos, Text and Talk, and a number of edited collections, including Writing Selves/Writing Societies, Exploring Semiotic Remediation as Discourse Practice, Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres in Student Compositions, First-Year Composition: From Theory to Practice, Provocations: Reconstructing the Archive, and Assembling Composition. She serves on the editorial board for a number of book presses and series including Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy; Studies in Writing and Rhetoric; Computers and Composition Digital Press; and The Electric Press. She is also the Special Topics Editor for the journal Composition Forum.

Featured Workshop | 10:30-11:45 a.m.

Make a Quaranzine

In this workshop, participants will learn about zines and how authors and artists draw from a range of material practices as they continue to publish them through a global pandemic. Participants will make their own "quaranzines" and discuss ways to teach with them online and in face-to-face classrooms.

About Dr. Jason Luther

Jason Luther’s research focuses on multimodal (counter)publics and DIY participatory media, especially zines. His work has most recently appeared in Community Literacy Journal, SoundEffects, and the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative. He is Assistant Professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University where he teaches about self-publishing, digital and multimodal composition, rhetorical theory, and sound writing. Luther is also the co-founder of Syracuse in Print and a public scholar for the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.