The ideal of sapere aude (“do dare to know”) has been known since antiquity. However, the conceptualization of the Knowledge Society is relatively recent. Knowledge, as one of the key concepts in modern society, may also be viewed from a rhetorical perspective. Knowledge is created within discourses and articulated in texts. These texts contribute to creating the very concept of knowledge and its internal qualifications such as scientific and non-scientific knowledge. The texts persuade the audience to various knowledge claims and dissuade it from others.

The goal of the conference is to articulate ways in which knowledge is conceptualized and made manifest through different rhetorical practices in various contexts of communication within society. We invite papers that address at least one of the two notions of ‘rhetoric’: rhetoric as an object of analysis and rhetoric as a theoretical and methodological framework. Rhetoric as an object of analysis may include, e.g., texts constitutive of academic discourse, scientific popularization, expert discourse, lay discourse on knowledge and dealing with knowledge, as well as representations of knowledge in literature, advertising, art, or humor. Rhetoric as a theoretical and methodological framework encompasses the conceptual and methodological tools elaborated within the long tradition, from the Aristotelian naturalist model of rhetoric to modern developments and innovative approaches that foster the theoretical progress of the discipline.

Proposals may include, but need not be limited to, such areas as:

• rhetorical strategies involved in the creation, transmission, criticism, and evaluation of knowledge in academic and non-academic settings
• rhetorical features of texts qualified as conveying scientific knowledge, pop-knowledge, folk-knowledge, common knowledge, pseudo-knowledge
• the rhetorical analyses of discourses on and carried out within institutions of knowledge (e.g. universities, schools, museums, think-tanks)
• social mobilization of emotions related to knowledge (e.g. concepts of risk society; confidence or diffidence towards experts; appreciation or depreciation of the humanities)
• knowledge and power (“disciplinarization” through knowledge vs. empowerment through knowledge; policies of knowledge)
• knowledge and knowledge workers as object of cultural representations in literature, art, film, humor, advertising.