Dr. Elif Guler, Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at Longwood, has recently presented her study, “The Rhetorical Understanding of Agency in The Wisdom of Royal Glory and its Implications for the Contemporary World,” at IAFOR’s International Conference on Global Studies in Barcelona, Spain (July 2018). Upon invitation to the conference entitled, “Fearful Futures: Cultural Studies and the Question of Agency in the Twenty-First Century,” Dr. Guler was also asked to serve as a senior reviewer for IAFOR and invited to publish her study as a chapter in an intercultural rhetoric book contracted with the Southern Illinois University Press.
Dr. Guler’s presentation covered some of the results of her studies recovering non-Western principles of rhetoric with a particular focus on the Turkish rhetorical tradition. Specifically, the presentation focused on an 11th-century Turkish text’s education of an ideal agent who has to study language so s/he can effectively and morally communicate with and utilize authority and power. Dr. Guler also discussed the implications of this text, which originated in the Karakhanid Empire of Central Asia, for a rhetorical construction of a collective identity–an identity which (rather than a race, an ethnicity, or being a lawful member of a society) relies on one’s act of following the tore (a certain set of moral principles that are supposed to govern an individual’s behavior).
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