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The Limits of the Rhetorical Analysis of Science
Get PDFThree case studies explore the limits of the rhetorical analysis of science. The first is a case in which scientific facts and theories eventually reach a stage where they are beyond argument and, as a consequence, beyond rhetorical analysis. The second is a case where a work is scientific, that is, moving toward facts and theories beyond argument and is, at the same time, an example of deliberative rhetoric whose claims, of course, can never be beyond argument. The third is a case in which, although the science in question is now beyond argument, its policy implications remain, and will continue to remain, well within the realm of rhetorical analysis
The Great Chain of Being: Manifesto on the Problem of Agency in Science Communication
Get PDFThis manifesto presents positions arrived at after a day-long symposium on agency in science communication at the National Communication Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, NV, November 18, 2015. During morning sessions, participants in the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine preconference presented individual research on agency in response to a call to articulate key problems that must be solved in the next five years to better understand and support rhetorical agency in massively automated and mediated science communication situations in a world-risk context. In the afternoon, participants convened in discussion groups around four topoi that emerged from the morning’s presentations: automation, biopolitics, publics, and risk. Groups were tasked with answering three questions about their assigned topos: What are the critical controversies surrounding it? What are its pivotal rhetorical and technical terms? And what scholarly questions must be addressed in the next five years to yield a just and effective discourse in this area? Groups also assembled capsule bibliographies of sources core to their topos. At the end of the afternoon, Carolyn R. Miller presented a reply to the groups’ work; that reply serves as the headnote to this manifesto
Harnessing Agency for Efficacy: “Foldit” and Citizen Science
Get PDFProtein folding is an important area of research in bioinformatics and molecular biology. The process and product of protein folding concerns how proteins achieve their functional state. A particularly difficult area of protein folding is protein structure prediction. There are many possible ways a protein can fold, and this makes prediction difficult, even with the aid of computational approaches. Protein folding prediction requires significant human attention. Foldit, an online science game, provides an innovative approach to the problem by enlisting human beings to solve puzzles that correlate with protein folding possibilities. Such work aligns broadly with emerging trends in citizen science, where non-experts are enlisted for productive alliances. We examine Foldit, commonly looked at as a dynamic community, and suggest such communities actually have potential to be relatively static and to reproduce and maintain a set of power relations. We make this argument by combining perspectives from Rhetorical Genre Studies and Actor-Network Theory
The Rhetorical Work of Science Diplomacy: Border Crossing and Propheteering for U.S.-Muslim Engagement
Get PDFThis essay critiques science diplomacy discourse generated by President Obama’s “New Beginning” speech at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, which launched a program of action in education, science, technology, and innovation to build trust between Muslim-majority countries and the United States. I contend that the Cairo Agenda sparked parallel dialogues, carried out in two separate loci of discourse: the official public sphere through which the Cairo Agenda was promoted, and a reticulate public sphere dedicated to Muslim science. My critique explores the quality and substance of the border crossings between these two arenas. I introduce science diplomacy’s value as a strategy for cross-cultural engagement, then illustrate and comment on the dialogues taking place within the Cairo Agenda and Muslim science arenas. I conclude with observations and recommendations to build and strengthen the lattice work between these arenas, and prospects for creating a cross-cultural ethos to guide the purposes and practices of science
Turning the Prophetic into Civil Religion: Barack Obama's March 4, 2007 Sermon in Selma, Alabama
Get PDFThis essay analyzes Barack Obama’s March 4, 2007 sermon in Selma, Alabama that helped to position his candidacy for president in relationship to the civil rights movement. I argue that Obama’s sermon helped to move black theology from its prophetic orientation to serve the model of radiant whiteness that black liberation theologian James Cone attributes to U.S. civil religion
Recalibrating the State of the Union: Visual Rhetoric and the Temporality of Neoliberal Economics in the 2011 Enhanced State of the Union Address
Get PDFFor the first time in the history of the address, the 2011 State of the Union was accompanied online by an enhanced version, which gave viewers the option of experiencing the speech alongside a display providing images, charts, graphs, outlines, and data visualizations. This paper examines the visual rhetoric of President Barack Obama’s 2011 enhanced State of the Union, locating this rhetoric in an aesthetic regime of neoliberal temporality. I argue that the visual rhetoric of the Enhanced Address articulates between conservative and progressive temporalities in order to promise a future economic victory prefigured by the economic logics of the past. Working between Svetlana Boym’s understanding of a restorative nostalgia that seeks to return to a lost, mythic origin, and a reflective nostalgia which looks to the past to open up new possibilities for the future, I argue that the temporal rhetoric of neoliberalism stylizes the return to the past as modality of progression in the future. I draw on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sarah Sharma to argue that the aesthetics of the enhanced State of the Union invite viewers into a recalibrative nostalgic temporality which works reciprocally between restoration and reflection, allowing viewers to adjust their relationship to a deflated political scene without fundamentally altering the political coordinates that produce the conditions of economic exchange
