ekaterina v. haskins, ph.d. associate professor of rhetoric and graduate program director, Communication and Media, Rensselaer
My New Book!
I am excited to announce the publication of my new book, Popular Memories: Commemoration, Participatory Culture, and Democratic Citizenship (University of South Carolina Press, March 2015).
In the last three decades ordinary Americans launched numerous grassroots commemorations, and official historical institutions became more open to popular participation. In this first book-length study of participatory memory practices, I critically examine this trend by asking how and with what consequences participatory forms of commemoration have reshaped the rhetoric of democratic citizenship. Approaching commemorations as both representations of civic identity and politically significant sites of interaction among strangers, the book investigates four distinct examples of participatory commemoration: the United States Postal Service's "Celebrate the Century" stamp and education program, the September 11 Digital Archive, the first post-Katrina Carnival in New Orleans, and a traveling memorial to the human cost of the Iraq War. For a complete description and reviews, go here.
Rhetorical Studies Thriving in Scandinavia
In mid-October 2014, I delivered a keynote lecture at the Fifth Nordic Conference on Research in Rhetoric at Lund University, Sweden. My lecture, "Spectatorship, Embodiment, and Democratic Publicity," addressed the notions of publicity and spectatorship as important components of democratic citizenship. While in Lund, I also taught a short graduate seminar "Rhetoric, Democracy, and Participation" that drew graduate students from Lund's own doctoral program in Rhetoric as well as from several other Swedish universities.
ASHR Symposium Keynote
In late May 2014, I traveled to San Antonio, Texas, to give a keynote talk at the Symposium of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. The Symposium's theme was "Rhetoric and Freedom", and in my talk I reflected on how spatial freedom--or lack thereof--has influenced public rhetoric from classical Athens to contemporary sites of political protest. A version of this talk, focusing on the Russian activist group Pussy Riot, is forthcoming in October 2015 in the special issue of Advances in the History of Rhetoric, edited by Susan Jarratt.