04/10/2025
Thanks to everyone who presented at the UNF DHI Showcase yesterday! I wanted to present my opening remarks, here:
Thank you for coming today! I'd like to thank all our presenters and their guests, and a special thank you to Lucy Hollins, the DHI Special Projects Coordinator for making today possible. Our keynote speaker, Dr. Nashid Madyun cannot make it today. Dr. Madyun is the Director of Florida Humanities, and as the staff for the National Endowment for the Humanities has been eliminated, Dr. Madyun is attending to the care of our state organization. He asked me to share this website with you today: https://floridahumanities.org/blog/savethehumanities/
There are four calls to action from Dr. Madyun today: Donate, Call or Message your congressional leaders, Share on social media, and Write. Write op-ed letters to your local media on why the humanities matter in our communities. Of the four, my favorite, as a scholar of composition and rhetoric is the last one, we need to write. My friend, Dr. Jim Ridolfo of the University of Kentucky puts it this way, "Theorizing and understanding the ethical dimensions of composing must involve a careful examination of how digital composing intersects with violence. For us, questions arise from the massive increase in not only the available means of composition, but the potentially instant ubiquitous circulation of digital composition: what responsibilities do those of us have to anticipate and prepare students to mitigate the dark side of digital composition and rhetorical operations that are imbued with digital media?" (4).
The responsibilities we have are the very reason that Dr. Madyun cannot be with us today, that dark side of media and the use of media pressure to eviscerate the NEH and its state subsidiaries. Luckily, your posters here today provide that mitigation that Jim Ridolfo speaks of. "Rhetorical knowledge is a substantive, not merely and instrumental, component to both totalitarian regimes and to the means of resisting and dismantling them. We both make and unmake systems of domination with words" (5). Thank you presenters for the words you brought with you on your posters today, and I hope we all pay close attention to these words in the coming days ahead. Thank you.
