About This Conference

The Frontera Retórica Symposium is proud to present its 2026 graduate-focused symposium, Rhetoric from the Margins: Theory, Method, Praxis. Hosted along the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, this symposium centers marginality not as a site of lack or deficiency, but as a generative location for rhetorical theory-building, methodological innovation, and ethical scholarly practice.

Frontera Retórica is the UTEP student chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA), committed to creating a material and symbolic space where knowledge of rhetoric, writing, literacy, and intercultural meaning is shared across academic and community contexts. Grounded in borderlands epistemologies, the organization foregrounds rhetoric as lived, practiced, and theorized through everyday experience, labor, language, and community engagement.

Rhetoric from the Margins foregrounds how rhetorical knowledge is produced outside dominant institutional, disciplinary, and epistemological frameworks. The symposium encourages graduate scholars to examine how meaning is created, contested, and circulated through lived experience, community practices, and everyday forms of labor and storytelling.

By emphasizing theory, method, and praxis, the symposium seeks to foster conversations that advance rhetorical studies while remaining accountable to the communities and material conditions from which such knowledge emerges. We invite work that challenges normative assumptions about where theory comes from, who produces knowledge, and how rhetoric functions across borders—geographic, linguistic, cultural, and institutional.