| Main History of ARS ARS rationale and goals Michael Leff: ARS is an umbrella organization designed to facilitate communication and research among existing societies that are devoted partly or wholly to the study of rhetoric. As an association of associations, it has four principal functions: (1) to help coordinate the scheduling of conferences and other activities of member organizations, (2) to compile and make accessible information about work done in rhetoric across the disciplines, (3) to focus attention on agenda-setting issues for the field, and (4) to enhance the visibility of rhetorical studies in the academy and among the general public. More detailed information will be available on the website, http://www.rhetoricalliance.org, which is still being constructed, but should be open soon. The main impulse behind the founding of ARS was the need to establish a point of coordination and concentration for rhetorical studies and to bring rhetorical scholars working within different disciplinary settings into better contact with one another. ARS inception and development Michael Leff: The origins of ARS arose from discussions that Fred Antczak, then president of the Rhetoric Society of America, had with scholars in both Communication and English. Among the people Fred encountered, Robert Gaines of the University of Maryland was an especially strong advocate of the coordinated effort and he also provided a number of concrete suggestions for realizing this end. Gaines and others expressed concern about the status of rhetoric in the academy and the absence of any agency capable of coordinating scholarship scattered across several disciplines. At the RSA meeting in 2000,
Fred organized an evening session devoted to this issue. More than one
hundred people attended, and there was strong sentiment in favor of moving
ahead with some project that would help coordinate work in the field.
It was decided to appoint a steering committee that would meet the next
summer at Northwestern University. When the committee met in June of 2001,
it concluded that the best course of action was to establish an umbrella
organization (an association of associations) rather than another conventional,
free-standing academic society. Fred invented the name Alliance of Rhetoric
Societies (ARS), and the committee decided that the Alliance should sponsor
a conference to advertise its existence and open the interdisciplinary
discussion. Jerry Hauser, who was then president of RSA, took a leading
role in promoting the conference. |