Event: Annual Wednesday Night C’s Event: Let’s Talk About It! (4/9/25 at 6pm)

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Poster for Wednesday Night Event at Cs 2025 featuring CFSHRC logo that reads "Rhetorics from 5th Century BCE, Coalition since 1989." QRC on bottom right corner. Time, date, location included. Paragraph that reads: "All are welcome to attend the CFSHRC CCCCs Wednesday Night event, featuring conversation tables about urgent topics facing us in higher ed, followed by an hour of our annual feminist mentoring tables. Bring a friend, or two or more!"

Dear Coalition-

As you make your final preparations for CCCCs 2025, I hope you’ll come to our annual Wednesday night event from 6-8pm (Room 308), “Let’s Talk About It: Coalitional Conversations We Need to Have.” And we hope you’ll bring your friends and colleagues, too, as building community is critical to facing current challenges as well as those that are ahead.

We invite all conference-goers to make the most of this occasion to be together and attend small-group roundtable discussions about issues that help build a coalition. In the past four years, many members and colleagues in the field have expressed feeling isolated as one of a few, or maybe even the only composition and rhetoric scholar on their campuses. After the COVID closures and cancellations of 2020-2021, we sought out opportunities to gather in new ways, and we have learned to treasure the times that we are together. To that end, this event provides an opportunity for our members to get together and talk about the urgent topics of our lives.

As always, we’ll open with announcements and awards. Then, we’ll transition into 45 minutes of conversations about the topics you and other CFSHRC members said we need to talk about. Some of these conversation topics include:

  • “Anti-DEI” Initiatives in the US

  • Supporting “Controversial” Research and Teaching

  • Continuation of Restorative Circles for Attendees of Color (building on FemRhets 2023)

  • Career Isolation

  • The Closing of Departments, Programs, and Institutions

  • Declining Morale in Higher Education

  • Budgetary Cuts

  • Supporting and Protecting LGBTQIA+ Folks

  • Responding to and Surviving Climate Change Catastrophe

We’ll collect suggestions and feedback at the end of the conversations to structure CFSHRC future actions and programming. More importantly, we hope these conversations bring you together with other colleagues who are facing these challenges, so you can get more support and mutual aid.

The second hour (7-8pm) consists of our mentoring tables. This year, we’re pleased to offer mentoring tables about:

  • Entering the Job Market

  • Feminist Pedagogies and Activism in These Times

  • Submitting Journal Articles to Peitho

  • Mid-Career Planning

  • Preparing for and Problems in Academic Leadership and Administration

  • Finding Community, Finding Writing Support

  • Writing the Book and the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series

  • Early Career Life

The mentoring tables are informal conversations that allow for you to meet and learn from members who have lived experience with the selected topics.

We look forward to seeing you, meeting new folks, and having meaningful conversations with you all in Baltimore!

For those unable to attend Cs in person, we will attempt to live stream the event (contingent on conference center bandwidth/technology). To receive the Zoom link, please register at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/h3QBBub8Qi6UStHXBSB9ZA

Best wishes,

Becca Richards, President & Cristy Beemer, Vice President and Host of Feminisms and Rhetorics 2025
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