2024 meeting

Thursday, April 4 at 6:30pm • Meeting Room 1 (Ground Floor Lobby, Davenport Grand)
TSIG.01 • Handcrafted Rhetorics SIG
This is a chance for scholars, teachers, and community organizers to converse about the relationships among craft, DIY, multimodality, making, public composition, and culture. Come and meet folks, share new projects, exchanging teaching ideas, and more!

With Megan Heise, University of Pittsburgh & Kristin Prins, Cal Poly Pomona

2023 meeting

Thursday, Feb 16 at 6:30 p.m. • Group Salon A-1 (lower level)
TSIG.06 • Handcrafted Rhetorics SIG
This is a chance for scholars, teachers, and community organizers to converse about the relationships among craft, DIY, multimodality, making, public composition, and culture. Come and meet folks, share new projects, exchanging teaching ideas, and more!

With Noël Ingram, Boston College; Danielle Koupf, Wake Forest University & Kristin Prins, Cal Poly Pomona

2022 meeting

Join us on Friday, April 15, at 1pm Pacific / 4pm Eastern! The meeting is scheduled to take 1 hour, but if the conversation is lively, we can stick around longer.

Our tentative agenda includes:

  • Introductions & overview  —  Review work people in our group have done in the past year
  • Current and future work — Discuss pedagogy, research, and publication, which may include…
    • Handcrafted Rhetorics course assignments/course designs
    • Current opportunities for publication, potentials for developing new CFPs, papers, articles, book projects, etc.
    • Current infrastructure/resources, need/potential for creating additional infrastructure for sharing resources

Sign up at https://forms.gle/rC5L4irHLGr4Nqqr7

Decorative image with SIG name, date, and time

This year’s meeting facilitators include:

  • Ashley Beardsley, University of Oklahoma
  • Jason Luther, Rowan University
  • Kristin Prins, Cal Poly Pomona
  • Kristin Ravel, Rockford University
  • Jon Thrower, Bluegrass Community & Technical College

More information about 4c22 SIGs and Standing Groups is is here:
https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/2022-cccc-standing-group-and-sig-business-meeting-information/

2021 meeting

The Handcrafted Rhetorics Special Interest Group (SIG) started at 4C19 in Pittsburg. Join us for our next meeting on Friday, April 16, at 3pm Pacific / 6pm Eastern! The meeting is scheduled to take 1 hour, but if people want to hang out longer, we’re happy to do so 🙂

Sign up at https://forms.gle/QNUF9gxsdcSKPZpy7

During this meeting, we’ll get to know each other, discuss the group’s accomplishments, and plan opportunities for research and publication.

More formally, this SIG is a chance for scholars, teachers, and community organizers to discuss the intersections among DIY, craft, multimodality, making, public composition, and culture. These issues are of great interest in Rhetoric & Composition, signaled by important books in both the public work of writing and multimodal composition, such as Jody Shipka’s Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011), Jason Palmeri’s Remixing Composition (2012), and Frank Farmer’s After the Public Turn (2013). More recently, texts like Danielle Koupf’s “Proliferating Textual Possibilities” (Composition Forum, 2017), Chet Breaux’s “Why Making?” (Computers and Composition, 2017), Harlot’s special issue on craft and DIY (2015), the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative’s blog carnival on makerspaces (2016), and Community Literacy Journal’s special issue on self-publishing (2017) have helped to signal continued and robust interest in these issues. And, of course, there are numerous others in the field who are interested in multimodal composition, making communities, embodied and material rhetoric, activism and protest, do-it-yourself publishing, and craft culture. This SIG looks to work with attendees to make the connections among these phenomena more visible and productive.

This year’s SIG meeting leaders include:

  • Sonia Arellano, University of Central Florida
  • Hannah Bellwoar, Juniata College
  • Sara Cooper, Murray State University
  • Krystin Gollihue, University of North Alabama
  • Jason Luther, Rowan University
  • Danika Myers, George Washington University
  • Kristin Prins, Cal Poly Pomona
  • Jon Thrower, Bluegrass Community & Technical College

Learn more about 4c21 SIGs & Standing Group meetings at https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/2021-cccc-standing-group-and-sig-business-meeting-information/.

2020 SIG meeting (planned agenda)

This meeting was set to run on Friday, March 27, from 3:30-4:30pm in conference room 202A but was canceled–along with the rest of 4c21 in Milwaukee–due to COVID-19.

  • Introductions
  • Making activity (buttons?)
  • Discussing our work for the next year (reading & writing groups?)
  • Move to an offsite location (TBA) for continued conversation and libations — everyone’s invited!

This year’s SIG planners include:

  • Hannah Bellwoar, Juniata College
  • Jason Luther, Rowan University
  • Danielle Knoupf, Wake Forest University
  • Kristin Prins, Cal Poly Pomona
  • Kristin Ravel, Rockford University
  • Jon Thrower, Bluegrass Community & Technical College

2019 SIG meeting

  • Introduction & overview
  • Making activity (collaborative zine!)
  • Breakout groups
  • Brainstorming future work

During our introductions and discussion, we focused on what kind of big dreams we had for the future of Handcrafted Rhetorics by focusing on the following questions:

  1. What is the social/practical role of handcrafts/DIY in the field?
  2. What are your future dreams for handcrafted/DIY comp/rhet collaborations/proposals/publications/conferences/websites/classroom stuff, etc.?

In maker-fashion, our dreaming manifested into 1-page zines (featured below) and lots of good conversations. Thanks to everyone who participated. We can’t wait to see you next year!

More about us

Beginning in 2015, we have led the Handcrafted Rhetorics workshop at the annual CCCC convention, an occasion for members of the field to discuss the ways in which certain acts of composing might be considered critical making and to see examples of its forms from local crafters, makers, and publishers working in Tampa, Portland, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh. This SIG provides a broader platform for these discussions and to plan for upcoming conferences. This SIG builds on the conversations that we have started and allows us to include many teachers and scholars who have not been able to attend previous workshops. Because our Wednesday workshops have occurred alongside ATTW, for example, some attendees who would have otherwise participated in Handcrafted Rhetorics have not been able to connect. Moreover, the purpose of this SIG is to extend our work from teaching to future scholarship, including the creation of infrastructure for sharing resources, developing CFPs, and proposing papers, articles, and possible book projects.