EVENT DETAILS

Persuasion: A Multi-Disciplinary Symposium

The Office of the Campus Writing Coordinator is hosting a symposium on persuasion as a problem and a possibility for multi-disciplinary study. Although saddled with negative (and even oppressive) connotations, persuasion is also suggestive of open-mindedness and tolerance towards different viewpoints and beliefs. To be persuadable is to be gullible and naïve. But, just the same, to be persuadable is to be flexible and impartial. Persuasion operates both internally and externally, and in spaces both private and public. It operates between and among and within people, but also between and among and within species, environments, and things.

While historically the preoccupation of rhetoricians, persuasion is today a concern for researchers in many fields. Gorgias, an ancient Greek sophist, understood persuasion to be a force that, when paired with the spoken word, molds the mind of a listener to the will of a speaker. Contemporary research in neurobiology seemingly confirms this ancient wisdom, finding that the feeling of being persuaded is tied to the stimulation of a specific neural network. Persuasion, then, quite literally, involves the molding of the mind. Taking this as one example, we wonder: What other cross-disciplinary connections can be forged?

We are bringing together scholars from across the UCI campus to share insights about how persuasion operates in different fields of study. What is persuasion? What methods and methodologies can be marshaled to help us understand how persuasion works in our contemporary moment? Looking to the past, what should we know about persuasion and how it worked (or didn’t work) in certain historical circumstances? Looking to the future, what can we speculate about how persuasion might change and evolve?

Schedule:
Welcome (10:30am-10:40am)
Jonathan Alexander

Opening Talk (10:40am-11:10am)
Stergios Skaperdas, “Persuasion as an Instrument of Power”

Panel – Designing/Reading/Performing Persuasion (11:15am-12:00pm)
Daniel M. Gross, “Jane Austen and the Sciences of Persuasion”
Jeanne Scheper, “Queer Persuasions”
Josh Tanenbaum, “Design Fiction as Persuasion: Positioning Rhetorics of Possible Futures in Movies, Books, and Games”

Lunch (12:00pm-12:30pm)

Panel – At the Limits of Persuasion (12:30pm-01:15pm)
Keith M. Murphy, “Ambient Persuasions”
Antoinette LaFarge, “Unpersuaded: An Aesthetics for Participatory Media”
Carol Burke

Panel – Persuasion and Politics (01:15pm-02:00pm)
Amy Wilentz, “Persuasion and Belief: Getting to the Other Side”
Jeff Wasserstrom, “Pervasive Images and Persuasive Images”
Keith Topper

Keynote (02:05pm-3:00pm)
Susan Jarratt, “‘Brilliant Radiation’: Persuasion at the Source”

Reception (03:00pm-4:00pm)

The event is sponsored by the Office of the Campus Writing Coordinator. Please RSVP here by April 28, 2016.