RAIL

2015 Call | NCA/AFA Summer Conference on Argumentation.

From the Conference website:

Theme: Recovering Argument

The key term recover is richly ambiguous. Its primary sense, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “to regain (something lost).” To recover argument, in this sense, might be “to bring back or restore” argumentation to human affairs, and to encourage reflection on useable traditions. Although doing so requires awareness of a past (another sense is “to remember; to recall or bring back to memory”), and although such awareness might be nostalgic, recovery can be much more complicated:

To recover is also to re-cover, “to provide with a new cover,” as when an upholstered chair is refurbished with new fabric. Recovery also may alter more than appearances. Profound, fundamental change may eventuate only from intense struggle against a past: This is the sense of “getting over,” or recovering from, as when we speak of the “recovering alcoholic.” This example, finally, speaks to argument’s therapeutic potential: To recover is also “to recuperate,” or “to restore to health” a person, or entire peoples. Without presuming any particular answers, Recovering Argument thus foregrounds questions of argumentation in time: How is argument remembered? How does argument remember? Is too little remembered, or too much? What has been/is/should be lost/forgotten? What has been/is/should be kept/remembered? What has been/is/should be overcome? and, To what ends?

Keynote Speakers:

V. William Balthrop, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Carole Blair, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

About the Conference:

The conference is the oldest gathering in argumentation studies, attracting scholars from around the world since 1979. It offers an unmatched combination of scholarship, conviviality, and fellowship in a spectacular natural setting. While international in scope, it offers an intimate experience: Attendees stay together and eat meals in common. Opportunities for direct engagement abound, both within formal sessions and without; some brilliant ideas have emerged from the hot tub! There is time for hiking and outdoor recreation in the magnificent Wasatch Mountains, and attendees and their families can take fuller advantage by arranging to arrive early or to stay after the conference concludes.

Submitting to the Conference:

Argumentation studies are a many-splendored thing. The conference welcomes and encourages submissions from all methodological approaches to argumentation, including applied, critical, cross-disciplinary, empirical, interpretive, pedagogical, philosophical, and/or theoretical. It also welcomes studies of all forms (verbal, visual, spatial, and so on) of argument in all domains (legal, political, interpersonal, scientific, and so on). The contents of previous conferences, available at http://altaconference.org/research.html, reveal a rich diversity of subjects and approaches. Submissions that engage the 2015 conference theme are strongly preferred.

Please submit electronic versions of completed papers, panel proposals, and extended abstracts to the Conference Director, Randall A. Lake. To access the submission system, go to the Conference website at