Lauren Mitchell Passes Exams

Congratulations to third-year RCID doctoral candidate and S3S vice president, Lauren Mitchell for passing her comprehensive/qualifying exams!  On Tuesday, March 13, in the beautiful new Lee Hall addition, Lauren delivered her "4th Exam" multi-modal presentation of her project, titled "TRANSITIONING URBANISMS: the fringing benefits of rhetoric in architecture."


Lauren's study draws on a provocative mixture of elements, including her architectural background, rhetorical theories of electrate invention, and her time in Myrtle Beach, SC.  Through her dissertation, Lauren will defend the claim for architecture that, "without balancing our emphasis on design as making form as well as making forms of knowledge, the field will progressively make less and less impact in public environments." 

"Similarly," Lauren contends, "without learning to speak to a wider audience, making engagements with fields that are already steeped in practices of making and designing objects, rhetoric scholars will continually miss out on productive bodily engagements capable of accelerating the expansion of the field.  It is specifically on the topic of invention within both rhetoric and architecture where the two can begin to enfold each other in mutually productive ways."


To see photos of Lauren's exam presentation, visit the RCID News Blog.

Carolina Rhetoric Conference a Success!

In February, S3S successfully hosted the Carolina Rhetoric Conference, inviting graduate students interested in rhetoric from across the Carolinas to participate in two days of  networking and idea sharing.  The conference included a wide variety of rich panel presentations, professionalization workshops, a keynote/webinar presentation, and a digital showcase.

READ MORE at the Clemson Grad School News Site: HERE.

S3S wants to thank all of the supporters, including the Rhetoric Society of America, Clemson Graduate School, Graduate Student Government, Dean's Office in the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities, The Campbell Chair of Technical Communication, Parlor Press, the Hendrix Student Center, and the many faculty, friends, and students of RCID.

The 2013 Carolina Rhetoric Conference will be hosted by the graduate students at North Carolina State University.

RCID Research in the News

Rock Hill, SC's newspaper The Herald is running full spread features as part of their promotion for the traveling Peanuts Naturally exhibit coming to the York County Museum. As part of their first feature, Herald editor Paul Osmundson recently spoke with RCID PhD candidate Stephen Lind about his dissertation research on the Peanuts franchise. Read the full interview HERE.

Jimmy Butts passes "strange" Exams

Third-year RCID doctoral candidate Jimmy Butts passed his comprehensive/qualifying exams this past Leap Day, finishing with his multi-modal/oral presentation (fourth exam) titled: "Seven Strange Attractors: How to Repent! and Be Unbaptized!"

Jimmy's dissertation topic explores how Victor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization functions rhetorically across different forms of composition and media. The ethics underlying his writing works against the flood of totalizing immersive media when they elicit only automatic or anesthetized responses from their contemporary audiences.

The project hopes to complicate expectations of standardization by seeing both potential and problems in normative and unusual compositions. He will work through seven forms of inventional strategies for strangeness including figural shifts in media, time traveling, replacement, addition & subtraction, negation, glossolalia, and exponentiation.

During a short reception in Clemson's Class of 1941 Studio, those in attendance were invited  to "strange" the familiarity of stones, followed by Jimmy's aesthetically moving multi-modal performance.

Congratulations, Jimmy, from S3S!