Dr. Lisa Flores.
Lisa A. Flores is the Josephine Berry Weiss Chair of the Humanities and Professor in the Departments of Communication Arts and Sciences and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching interests lie in rhetoric, critical race studies, and gender/queer studies. Her current work explores the spatiotemporalities of rhetorical race making, asking how we consider the simultaneity of mobility, containment, space, and temporality. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Association, the Rhetoric Society of America 2021 Book Award for Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of Mexican ‘Illegality,’ (Penn State UP, 2020), and the Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award from the National Communication Association (NCA). Her new project, Static Mobilities: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Containment, examines what it means to think race at the intersections of mobility and stoppage. She is Co-Editor, with Christa J. Olson, of the Pennsylvania State University Press book series, Troubling Democracy. An advocate of professional service, Lisa is now or has been active with the National Communication Association, the Rhetoric Society of America, and the Western States Communication Association.
Keynote:
“Urgency, Care, and the Spatio-Temporalities of Spectacular Border Crisis”
In recent years, U.S. public discourse has narrated border crisis at the intersections of spectacle and temporality, with urgency quickly emerging as the temporal frame of border crisis. The frame of urgency, or what I will name as the Now-ness of rhetorical crisis, extends beyond conversations of border crisis to a range of other national and international concerns. Given the contemporary salience of urgency and its rhetorical potency, I reflect on urgency as a rhetorical temporality and ask what it offers, what it erases, and what it might mean to locate urgency at the intersections of both singular moments and long histories.
