Mere Rhetoric

[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to Mere Rhetoric: a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, movements, and people that have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren.  Last time we did a podcast, I was at the Rhetorical Society of America's biannual meeting in San Antonio. Well now that the conference is over and everybody is home, I thought I might go through a few of the things that happened at this conference.  The conference lasted from Friday all the way to Monday afternoon, and included a lot of interesting presentations. If you've never been to a rhetoric conference before, it can be kind of daunting to see all of the different types of papers. For example, we had papers on things like "Bordering on Obsolescense: The Fate of Race-Based Affirmative Action After Fisher v. Texas", "Queer Technotopias: Technology, Cyberspace, and Queer Politics in the Digital Age", or how about "The Gendered Borders of Sports Rhetoric". What about something a little bit more traditional, like "Rhetoric, Poetic, Aesth