Growing attention to a rift between epistemology and ontology, between words and things, sets new challenges and invigorations for a Rhetoric of Science that traditionally aims to “analyze and evaluate the persuasive communications of scientists” (Ceccarelli, 2017, para 6). Rhetoricians confront a vibrant, new intellectual space where scholars across disciplines are seeking to better account for bodies and moving to “include the materiality of our ambient environs” in their analyses (Rickert, 2013, p. x). The question, in light of material expansions, is what is a Rhetoric of Science, and what are its futures? In response to the Rhetoric Society of America’s 2018 conference call for junior and senior scholars to discuss “major developments in rhetorical studies,” we offer a Feyerabendian innovation-meets-dogma performative session: the junior scholar, representing innovation, argues that Rhetoric of Science must move aggressively beyond a study of texts and scientific language to account for continuous technological, social, and biological entanglements; specifically, to expand the field’s practices to include neuro-cognitive approaches and other forms of experiment. The senior scholar, representing dogma, expresses caution, arguing that the domain of a Rhetoric of Science is still symbols and semiosis; specifically, that looking at “ambient rhetorics” and “entanglements” is another approach, not a foundational shift.

Esperanto was conceived as a model of commercial usefulness, but also to confront the higher aims of its “internal idea.” The <em>interna ideo</em> of Esperanto has historically taken various forms, but it has most often been concerned with protecting a multiethnic world in its diversities, building bridges that allow for a more equitable coexistence of minorities. This underlying ethical thrust makes the international language a potential lever for a more just society in the current global conditions. In order to support this claim, I reconstruct the rhetorical situation of Zamenhof’s pronouncements on the “internal idea,” including Hillelism and Homaranismo. I also argue that George Orwell’s dystopic Newspeak can be considered a political commentary about what would happen to Esperanto if the “internal idea” were to be hijacked in the name of economic progress or the supposed tranquility of commerce.

The nucleic acid DNA, which contains an organism’s genetic information, consists of a four-letter alphabet that has until recently been characterized as a read-only text. The development of a quick, inexpensive DNA targeting and manipulation technique called CRISPR, pronounced “crisper,” though, has changed DNA from this arhetorical, read-only data set, as it has been characterized in the rhetoric literature to date, to a fully rhetorical text—one that can be not only read but created, interpreted, copied, altered, and stored as well. The Book of Nature, an idea with roots in antiquity but popularized during the nineteenth century, provides proof of concept in the form of an historical and theoretical context in which DNA can be viewed in this light. Once ensconced in the Book of Nature, DNA can longer be considered a code; rather, it is a text. DNA text has structural components that are similar to those of traditional text, and now, with CRISPR, it also has purposes, audiences, and stakeholders. Given the enormous potential of DNA text for both good and ill, rhetoricians of science and medicine must participate in discussions of the complex literacy, policy, and ethics issues this new form of text brings about.

In this essay I analyze a series of first-person homeless accounts and reader responses in the <em>Las Vegas Sun </em>newspaper in order to highlight the social conditions that support or inhibit empathy. I review the rhetorical study of empathy and incorporate work from social psychology and moral philosophy to identify and examine the conditions of assessing victimhood and recognizing of self-other overlap. I find the irony of empathy to be that the very social forces that would necessitate an expansion of empathy also inhibit it through increasing social division and the reluctance of readers to recognize their own vulnerabilities in the positions of others. I contend throughout that a focus on empathy as an individual experience overlooks the social production of empathy, which is more appropriately considered through a rhetorical perspective.

Volume 14, Issue 1 of POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention makes available three articles on topics of rhetoric.

A current rise in so-called “caveman” diets, books, exercise regimes and other trends demonstrates a cultural attempt to reclaim idealized prehistoric conditions for the modern human. In a rhetorical analysis of texts from this modern paleo culture, we identify what we call a “paleomyth” and illustrate how such lifestyle trends not only offer truncated understandings of evolutionary science, but more importantly how they offer a mythological narrative for paleo believers.

Except for metaphor, tropes are arguably irrelevant to the analysis of science and technology. Among tropes, moreover, hyperbole and irony seem particularly ill-suited as the former exaggerates, while the latter undermines, two strategies at odds with a language intent on closely following the contours of the world of experience. While neither hyperbole nor irony has a place in the professional discourses of science and technology, both play a role in their popular representations. Hyperbole expresses our sense that these achievements exemplify the sublime, a form of experience applied at first to feelings of awe generated by great literature, then in succession to natural wonders like the Grand Canyon, triumphs of science like Newtonian physics, and such technological achievements as the computer and the Large Hadron Collider. While the Collider, the largest and most powerful experimental apparatus ever built, is an unalloyed technological triumph worthy of hyperbole, some of the alterations in social life that the computer has ushered in are open to skeptical debate. This is especially true to the extent that computer-facilitated communication has taken the place of the face-to face interaction that makes a robust social life possible. Irony is this skepticism’s vehicle.

As a conceptual resource for rhetoric, contemporary neuroscience has considerable potential. Yet how exactly rhetoricians should deploy it as such requires careful consideration. While some engage neuroscience in a foundationalist fashion, using it to ground rhetoric in empirically tested claims, I make the case for a non-foundationalist approach, arguing that neuroscience can serve as a resource for rhetoric on the basis of epistemologies that value the speculative, indeterminate, and contingent. That is, we can use neuroscience to achieve perspective rather than proof and continued conversation rather than resolution. More specifically, I suggest placing neuroscience in incongruous contact with rhetoric, using it to achieve Burkean perspective by incongruity. I then do so in an extended example that puts Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis in incongruous contact with ancient accounts of <em>eikos</em>, thereby offering a fresh angle from which to view enduring discussions anew.

This essay uses rhetorical analysis to defend the population geneticist Richard Lewontin from accusations made by E. O. Wilson and others that his Marxist social philosophy distorts his empirical science. I suggest that Lewontin’s appeal to his own authority as an experimental evolutionary biologist supports his claim that racism has no biological justification and that it is his opponents whose assumptions about society distort their scientific arguments.

In the work of transnational feminist scholars, there is a share interest in investigating the colonial practices that affect women’s lives around the globe. In “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1986) Mohanty claims that scholars in the field should “detect (…) colonialist move(s) in the case of a hegemonic first-third world connection in scholarship” (349) in order to recognize the peculiarities of the cultures whose discourses are being created and thus, avoid the universalization and “homogenization of class, race, religious, cultural and historical specificities of the lives of women” (348). In this regard, Dingo touches upon the vital role of translations in the transcoding of arguments: “the way policy makers and development experts <strong>translate</strong> the term gender mainstreaming into policy documents should be <strong>a crucial concern for feminist rhetoritians</strong> because this act of translation demonstrates how arguments shift and change due to economic and geopolitical contexts and thus <strong>shows how power informs rhetorics</strong>” (2012: 31). Dingo´s conceptualization of the term “translation” is ambiguous, sometimes used to refer to “transcoding” (resituate a taken-for-granted term within the same language in order to fit certain ideologies, 31) and other times as the transfer of words from the source language to the target language (104). In this article, I aim to investigate the “transcoding” of the concept "women empowerment" as it is translated from English to Spanish and vice versa with the attempt to “make visible the ways in which all of our knowledge is mediated” (Queen 2008: 486) from the perspective of a post-colonial theory of translation.

For the literary translator, the question arises as to how she might approach the delicate task of migrating texts that resort largely to “a purely intensive usage of language,” while acknowledging that such texts share a mode of expression that transcends historical or critical periodization. If one is to focus on fidelity or equivalence, the aim should not be the production of a text that translates some underlying meaning or sense where signification and representation are fixed. Rather, the aim should be the meticulous rendering of its surface expression so that the text’s performative capacity can be realized anew in the target language and culture. The focus on what “might be” in language invites a parallel with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic genre in theatre and a rhetoric of translation that reflects the aporia of the source expression, in stark contrast to the centrality of the logos to traditional Western rhetoric. While ultimately unattainable, an approach to text as a Deleuzean “map” would seem an appropriate means for the translator to remain true the “<em>intentio</em>” of postdramatic texts. <strong></strong>

From early romanticism to more recent post-structuralist and post-colonial studies, all the possibilities and impossibilities that are inherent in translation have fueled debate about authorship, intent, readership, functional equivalence, world view, the building of national literatures, power differentials, ethics, and gender issues—among many others. And, of course, about the nature of “meaning,” as the alleged sole legal tender of “all things translation.” Translation has less often been scrutinized as a form of rhetorical transaction: fundamentally, all translations are attempts, in and of themselves, to persuade their readership about some degree of correspondence with their source. However, the relationship between Translation and Rhetoric surpasses this ontological threshold of persuasion and metatextual transcendence in a far more sophisticated way, exceeding also the sheer plane of textual mechanics. This paper seeks to demonstrate how a systematic inclusion of rhetoric-centered approaches in Translation Studies, and vice versa, would cross-fertilize not just those two fields, but how it also would help to shed light on some areas where a monolingual focus has all too often imposed significant limitations to progress. It will also provide a quick overview of what I define as a “Rhetoric of Meaning in Translation Studies,” and will also explore how the study of rhetorical correspondence at the micro level in source and target languages and texts may be substantially hindered by significant structural disparities at the macro level that may have not been systematically or successfully incorporated in the wider theoretical framework of Translation Studies.

In October of 2016, an international symposium was held on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington, devoted to the belatedly emerging work of the early twentieth-century author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. The phenomenon of Krzhizhanovsky’s re-discovery and introduction to English readers as a major figure of European Modernist literature, hidden from the world until the last decade of the twentieth century, provides an ideal scenario for how the institutions of publishing—through selection, translation, editing, design, and marketing—help to shape our understanding of which texts are included within the category of “world literature,” along with the very idea of what “world literature” means.

This essay, which pertains to translation studies, presents a reflection aiming at defining intersections between the areas covered respectively by rhetoric and by <em>skopos</em> theory, which, in the field of translation studies, is one of the most frequently used theoretical frameworks that structures practice, and therefore teaching. It aims to lay the foundations of a translatorial theoretical framework based on an extension of the <em>skopos</em> model including the stylistic elements of classical rhetoric, and perhaps also on an extension of the rhetorical model to embrace a wide range of text types.

Established roles for <em>praxis</em> beyond teaching are often missing from discussions of RSTEM engagement with the science community. Although it is important to ground engagement in identifiable roles, it may be that these roles are still being conceived or need to be re-created contextually for every engagement situation. This paper grounds RSTEM engagement in one identifiable field of practice: scientific community management. RSTEM's specialized attention to and understanding of how science communities and genre systems interact can provide insight into the forming of these communities and their management.

Scientific research demonstrates that monosodium glutamate (MSG) is neither solely found in Chinese food nor a cause for health panics. Nonetheless, such a narrative still persists in the public sphere. I conduct a rhetorical analysis of the original debate on MSG to illuminate how the process of genre uptake – the process of information selection and translation from medical discussion to popular news – facilitated this prejudiced understanding. In the original debate about MSG’s effects, doctors trivialized this issue via satire that was based on latent stereotypes of Chinese identity. Although performed as insider humor, these responses were sufficiently aligned to genre expectations so as to appear to outside readers as unquestionable medical fact. As this knowledge was taken up and disseminated in the public sphere, the markers of humor disappeared, but the prejudicial views remained. This case demonstrates how the process of genre uptake can perpetuate prejudiced ideological narratives even in the absence of overt discrimination.

Rhetoric, as a discipline, can and should play a part in helping (re)formulate and (re)frame approaches to human trafficking because of the potential for such change to ripple through cultural discourse, leading to shifts across public understanding, law, and policy. Specifically, I argue that a Cultural Rhetorics approach is both necessary for and best suited to initiate the building of new communication spaces to address the issue of human trafficking. Indeed, the lens of Cultural Rhetorics reveals new priorities for scholarly intervention. This work must be rooted in and driven by attentiveness to and careful handling of stories. Such an alternate approach might more closely consider and account for the stories that individuals tell about themselves, the stories that survivors tell about their lived experiences, and the stories that institutions put forward about human trafficking. In so doing, we might then be better able to evaluate how these stories interconnect and constellate not just with each other, but also with a range of cultural influences.

This article argues for an engaged rhetoric of science, technology, engineering and medicine (RSTEM) that collaborates with science in the development and execution of research projects. It traces the emergence of an engaged RSTEM through recent disciplinary history and identifies Bruno Latour and Harry Collins and Robert Evans’ work as watershed moments that influence this commitment to collaboration. In reviewing the history of critique in the discipline, it argues that we have practical and political common ground with science that can supersede the necessity of critique. Finally, it addresses the difficult questions of why we as a discipline and as individual scholars would engage with science, what we have to contribute to scientific projects and where engaged scholars fit into interdisciplinary projects and into the credit cycle of the research university.

As we enter an era of so-called Do it Yourself health, “patient agency” has become a dominant theme in public discourses of health and medicine. Despite increased salience, patient agency remains a vague term that is capable of being operationalized and moralized in ways that escape attention. To illustrate this, I chart common rhetorical configurations of patient agency in public discourses of health and medicine, and in doing so find that patient agency is commonly rhetoricized as one of three overlapping patient capacities: the capacity to know, the capacity to prevent, and the capacity to decide. Ultimately, I argue that these three rhetorics of patient agency can be deployed to cultivate health subjectivities imbued with untenable ideals of individual control that constrain, rather than open, patients’ rhetorical choices.

In this article I describe a type of hyperbole which does not add certainty to a technical claim by removing qualifiers and hedges to make boring science exciting. Rather, paralogical hyperbole overstates while jumping from one line of reasoning to another. For example, citing technical science to argue publicly that the “missing link” has been found is exaggerative, and in a direction illogical, given its starting premise, born of a technical sphere, which actually identifies “missing links” as indefensible claims. From an analysis of the popularization efforts of a few scientists regarding Darwinius Marsillae, a fossilized lemur-like skeleton first described in the technical scientific journal PLoS ONE, I show that paralogical hyperbole can result in discourses that are unnecessarily polarizing regarding scientifically-opposed publics, and can pose threats to broader public understandings of science. I close with a discussion of the rhetorical practices of dissoi logoi and prolepsis as means by which to more consciously experience and represent scientific rhetorics characterized by parlogical hyperbole.

This 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 <em>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</em>. In the afternoon, participants convened in discussion groups around four <em>topoi</em> that emerged from the morning’s presentations: automation, biopolitics, publics, and risk. Groups were tasked with answering three questions about their assigned <em>topos</em>: 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 <em>topos</em>. 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.

Three 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.

For 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.

This 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.

Five 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.

This 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.

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Analysis 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.

The 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.

In “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.

Protein 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.

Symposium on the Lamberti, University of Northern Iowa.The emphasis in these contributions on a topic of growing interest to on the experience of food production and consumption and the subtlety of food's meaning to individuals and groups of