International Rhetoric Workshop

The International Rhetoric Workshop (IRW) is an international workshop for emerging scholars and PhD students in rhetoric. The workshop offers a space for young scholars in the global rhetoric community to engage each other’s work and to connect with internationally renowned scholars. Held over the course of three days, IRW consists of: workshop sessions in which participants review and discuss drafts of ongoing research with faculty; an opening keynote address on each day from internationally renowned scholars; and faculty discussion panels engaging with topics relevant to the theme and to workshop participants’ research.

The first workshop was hosted at Uppsala University (Sweden) in 2016.
The workshop theme, Crossing Traditions: Reimagining the Political, pursued questions of how various traditions of rhetorical theory meet and merge within global rhetorical practices, and how these crossings can change and develop the concept of the political.

In 2018 the second workshop was hosted at Ghent University (Belgium).
Rhetorical Cultures: Mapping Global Publics and the Crossroads of Democracy, encouraged broad-based reflection, inquiry, and collaboration, taking stock of the emergent rhetorical practices that shape and undergird the political world today in all of its contingency and heterogeneity.

The third workshop, Interdisciplinarity, Internationality, and Rhetoric, took place online September 22-26, 2021, hosted by El Colegio de San Luis, in San Luis Potosí, Mexico.

Our next workshop will be held in July 2024 in Volos, Greece. Call for proposals and more information are coming soon!

Said about the IRW

Jessica Enoch:

The International Rhetoric Workshop offers participants the unmatched experience of international collaboration and learning within rhetorical studies. As a workshop leader, I was deeply impressed with the work students brought to our meetings and their eagerness and willingness to rethink their projects given the feedback of their peers. Most importantly, though, working with scholars from around the world allows participants to gain new perspective on their scholarship and to learn how rhetorical studies takes shape in contexts beyond their own. I learned so much. There is no doubt I will encourage junior scholars to participate in this event in 2020!

Ryan Solomon:

I can’t recommend the International Rhetoric Workshop highly enough. It provides a unique opportunity for global interaction at an intimate level. The workshop offers an experience of intellectual community where you can focus closely together on developing a project towards publication, where you can get to know other scholars, and where you can engage across interdisciplinary lines.

Elisabeth Weiser:

The IRW was certainly one of the very best organized and creatively arranged workshop experiences I have been a part of. The variety of scholars from multiple nations and multiple disciplines taught me, as a faculty member, equally as much as anything I may have contributed to the very talented graduate students, and the opportunities for informal conversation made each day both career-enhancing and fun.

Jens E. Kjeldsen:

IRW is a well planned and organized workshop. Spending time and exchanging ideas with these bright young scholars from different continents is an inspiring and uplifting experience.

Christian Kock:

The International Rhetoric Workshop 2018 brought together an impressive 50-odd PhD students in Rhetoric from c. 10 different countries all over the world. It was my privilege to participate as faculty and leader of one of the “pods” of PhD students. These all presented scholarly work of a high caliber, which was then submitted to intense feedback and discussion. The whole structure and setup of the workshop, with keynote presentations, panels, and discussions in the “pods,” interlaced with warm and friendly social and cultural events, was extremely well prepared and turned out to be wonderfully useful and rewarding for all, PhD students and faculty alike. Also, networks and personal connections were formed and strengthened during the workshop, significantly expanding the intellectual horizon of all involved. I warmly recommend a continuation of this series of workshops as now been established, and I see the Ghent 2018 event as a perfect model. Future workshops along the same lines will greatly benefit the international community of scholars in rhetoric – a discipline dedicated to the study and preservation of democratic processes.