From June 18 — 21, sev­er­al of our team mem­bers will be in Croa­tia, where the 9th con­fer­ence of the Rhet­or­ic Soci­ety of Europe (RSE), organ­ized by the Fac­ulty of Human­it­ies and Social Sci­ences of the Uni­ver­sity of Zagreb, will take place under the motto "Rhet­or­ic in the Digit­al Age".

We are very pleased that the RHET AI Cen­ter will be rep­res­en­ted by Vikt­or­ija Völk­er, Fabi­an Erhardt and Olaf Kramer at this import­ant con­fer­ence for rhet­or­ic. Our col­leagues will be act­ive in sev­er­al formats: Vikt­or­ija Völker's lec­ture will be about humor in polit­ic­al com­mu­nic­a­tion, among oth­er things: "From Grim to Grin: Decod­ing Sergey Lavrov's Stra­tegic Wit". Fabi­an Erhardt will take a look at a spe­cif­ic rhet­or­ic­al epi­stem­o­logy in his lec­ture "Rhet­or­ics of Know­ledge: Prob­ab­il­ity, Plaus­ib­il­ity, and Claims to Valid­ity". On the oth­er hand, he will dis­cuss Blake Scott's book "The Rhet­or­icity of Philo­sophy" togeth­er with Blake Scott and Ruth Amossy, them­selves part of the RSE Advis­ory Board, in a pub­lic book presentation.

In addi­tion, it is also a spe­cial pleas­ure for us to have Dr. Chris­toph­er Bas­gi­er (Auburn Uni­ver­sity), Prof. Crys­tal Colom­bini (Ford­ham Uni­ver­sity) and Prof. Dr. Zoltan Majdik (North Dakota State Uni­ver­sity) join our RHET AI Coali­tion for a round table at the RSE along­side Olaf Kramer and Fabi­an Erhardt. There they will dis­cuss the top­ic "Per­suas­ive Algorithms: Explor­ing the Inter­sec­tions of Rhet­or­ic and Gen­er­at­ive AI". This will include ques­tions about the per­suas­ive­ness of AI tech­no­lo­gies, ques­tions about author­ship and the rhet­or­ic­al art of imit­a­tio and how these are chal­lenged by the use of gen­er­at­ive AI, the rela­tion­ship between meth­ods of rhet­or­ic and the applic­a­tion of prob­ab­il­ity-based sys­tems such as arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence — and much more.

We are excited to see what new insights our col­leagues will bring back from Zagreb and look for­ward to the oppor­tun­ity to con­trib­ute our research and that of our RHET AI Coali­tion part­ners to the con­fer­ence dis­course. More inform­a­tion and the con­fer­ence pro­gram can be found here: Pro­gram of Rhet­or­ic in Soci­ety 9 – Rhet­or­ic in Soci­ety 9.

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