Looking Forward: 25 Years of CFSHRC
The 25th anniversary special issue of Peitho edited by Jess Enoch and Jenn Fishman
Contributors: Cheryl Glenn and Andrea A. Lunsford; Nan Johnson; Stephanie L. Kerschbaum; Megan McIntyre; Staci Perryman-Clark; Elizabeth Fleitz; Maureen Johnson, Daisy Levy, Katie Manthey, Maria Novotny; Heather Brook Adams, Holly Hassel, Jessica Rucki, aand K. Hyoejin Yoon; Stacey Waite; Jessica Restano with Susan Lunday Maute; Adela C. Licona and Karma R. Chavez; Jordynn Jack; Patricia Bizzell and K.J. Rawson; Nicole Khoury; and Alexandra Hidalgo
Editors’ Introduction
The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition celebrated its 25th anniversary at the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Indianapolis, IN, and in just a few weeks, Coalition members will travel to Arizona State University for the tenth biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference. These milestones represent a quarter century of vibrant work. From the start, the group Kathleen Ethel Welch conjured has been a learned society of dedicated “scholars who are committed to feminist research throughout the history of rhetoric and composition” (“Our Mission”). Since Welch, Marjorie Currie Woods, Winifred Bryan Horner, Nan Johnson, and C. Jan Swearingen signed the Coalition’s constitution, the organization has upheld a two-fold mission: “the advancements of research throughout the history of rhetoric and composition” and “the education of women faculty and graduate students in the politics of the profession” (“Our Mission”). With the act of coalition as its techne, the CFSHRC has always been engaged in moving the field of feminist rhetoric and composition forward and supporting and mentoring feminist scholars along the way.
In this special issue of Peitho, we mark and celebrate the Coalition’s achievements. Rather than offering an extended retrospective, however, we take a different tack. Together with our thirty-six contributors and Peitho’s editorial staff, we invite you to join us in looking ahead to the next 25 years as we ask, “What should our shared concerns, priorities, and prerogatives be? What topics should we address? Where should we direct our attention—and that of others—and why?” At first, this invitation to consider the future may seem strange, especially since we include the term “history” in the title of our organization. A retrospective of any sort might thus make more sense. However, as Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo note in their introduction to the first peer-reviewed issue of this journal, Peitho shares in the Coalition’s mission to promote feminist research that connects the past to the present as a means of envisioning the future. In our case, working together on this issue has heightened our awareness of our field’s deep and abiding investment in the transformation of now into then, today into yesterday, last month into last year or the last 25 years, and so on. In Electric Rhetoric, Welch reminds us, “‘New rhetorics’ have proliferated at various moments in the 2,400 year construction of traditional Western rhetorical theory,” and the work we include here testifies to their proliferation in the twentieth and early 21st centuries (53). Of course, history is a cumulative process, and Welch gives us the phrase “next rhetoric” to name each wave, acknowledging its relationship to both previous rhetorics and forthcoming ones.