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Rhetoric, Ebola, and Vaccination: A Conversation Among Scholars
Get PDFFive scholars who study the rhetoric of health and medicine share our diverse perspectives on the Ebola outbreak that began in West Africa in March 2014. Using a unique multi-vocal approach, we raise questions for future research on the rhetoric of vaccines and vaccination, such as the role of visualizations in risk perception, the individuation of blame, the role of genres in vaccine development, and the rhetorical presence of material conditions that promote disease transmission. Our overall goal is to initiate scholarly conversation about Ebola specifically and about outbreaks and vaccine development generally. Through our conversation, we explore subjects such as risk perception and data visualization, individuation of blame, genre systems, and the materiality of outbreaks. Together, our analyses suggest that vaccines, while a highly effective means of disease prevention, can also function rhetorically to draw attention away from the broad array of material and socioeconomic conditions that lead from a single infection to an outbreak. But by investigating what is revealed, what is concealed, who is blamed, and who is exonerated in discourses about vaccines and outbreaks, rhetoricians can contribute to the development of effective—and ethical—medical and communicative interventions
“Out of Her Safety into His Hunger and Weakness”: Gendered Eating Spaces in Eudora Welty’s “A Wide Net” and “Flowers for Marjorie”
Get PDFIn “Flowers for Marjorie” and “The Wide Net,” Welty adopts masculine vantage points from which she explores denials of feminized civility. The similarities of these stories allow for a discussion of three major elements: First, the gendered eating related to a pregnancy; second, the refusal to eat in the homespace in favor of eating in spaces of homosocial bonding; and third, the partaking of liquor and the gendered alignment that signifies. Leslie Fiedler’s landmark article “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in Huck Honey!”—and many theorists who have come after him—suggests that male figures in American literature seek out spaces in which they can commune with other men and avoid the traditional responsibilities of the homespace (providing for a household, being responsible to a family, etc.). These male characters cannot avoid the home-space forever, though, and must eventually return to the realm they perceive to be primarily feminine. In light of such arguments, this article examines Welty’s male characters’ evasions of and returns to the homespace as they relate to Southern foodways
Theory in a Transdisciplinary Mode: the Rhetoric of Inquiry and Digital Humanities
No full textThe sciences and humanities have long been regarded as discrete intellectual cultures, separated by a sharp epistemic divide. Recently, however, turns toward "transdisciplinarity" have intimated the growing importance of overcoming disciplinary boundaries. The Rhetoric of Inquiry and digital humanities are two transdisciplinary projects that have attempted, respectively, to bring humanistic inquiry to the sciences, and to bring scientific inquiry to the humanities. This paper attempts to trace the parallel genealogies of both projects in an attempt to theorize some common traits of theory in a transdisciplinary mode. I suggest that articulating these projects with one another enables us to suppose that building transdisciplinary theory will entail a heightened reflexivity concerned with questions about scope, methods, and epistemic values
Racialized Rhetorics of Food Politics: Black Farmers, the Case of Shirley Sherrod, and Struggle for Land Equity and Access
Get PDFAnalysis of food from its production side is still a comparatively rare topic in rhetorical studies. By analyzing how radical rhetorics in food- and agriculture-related discourses enable economic and political disparities between African-American and Caucasian farmers, this article reveals how such discourses have affected the U.S. public’s understanding of the federal government’s farm subsidy programs
