Defining the “rhetoric of technology” encounters the challenges scholars have identified when defining both “rhetoric” and “technology,” and it raises issues about how to demarcate the rhetoric of technology from media studies and other cognate fields. One distinguishing feature of both rhetoric and technology is the focus on invention. Giving priority to invention highlights the liminal positionality of a rhetoric of technology, which lies betwixt and between science and commerce, and novelty and familiarity. Considering invention further encourages interdisciplinary reflexivity about the decisions made in technological development and dissemination.

In this short response to the papers in the “Horizons of Possibility” group, I first identify a dialectic between calls to disciplinarity and calls to engagement. Then, instead of offering a transcendent synthesis, I point to two recent narratives suggesting that stakeholders in scientific debates are starting to seek out rhetoricians as resources.

Today I am almost equal to you. Almost, but not quite. I am more equal today than I was yesterday. I am more equal today than I was four years ago. What will I be tomorrow? Will I be more equal? Or less?

According to Webster's dictionary a pessimist (PES-uh-mist -noun) is "a person who habitually sees or anticipates the worst or is disposed to be gloomy" or "an adherent of the doctrine of pessimism".

The following is a prose piece focusing on one woman’s disillusionment with a false American Dream. She discusses graduating from the University of Iowa at the brink of the economic collapse, returning to classes four years later, the disparity of wealth between herself and the Presidential candidates, and an increasing feeling of not belonging within the dual spheres of our flawed political structure. The ending encourages Iowans to focus on their state in the next four years, as state politics are one of the few places to actively see change in political involvement.

This poem demonstrates the importance of the Latino/Latina vote in this election year. The reader will be able to find that the Latino experience described in the poem resonates with many other Latino/Latina experiences within our families, communities and society.

A prediction of the next twenty year under a re-elected Barack Obama: an Obama victory has the potential to inspire increased community involvement and shift some policy making. It comes with a great deal of individual and collective exertion and no small amount of luck. These institutional forces can create, at best, moderately positive outcomes. The alternative to an Obama victory is a future barely worth contemplation. However, there are problematic aspects to Obama's leadership. These aspects will continue to work at the disadvantage for the vast majority of Americans as well as global powers. Aggressive foreign policy and the curtailing of individual freedom is the disastrous hallmark of the American presidency, and it is not limited to Obama. Rather, the current power structure and economic drives reinforce institutional and global inequalities. Never trust a person who has an intimate knowledge of policy development and still wants to go into politics.

This is a

Silver rays of early sunshine reflecting off fully ripe golden corn.Slight, light fog lying over unkempt creek beds.Pale blue sky, on the horizon almost white blue, and not a single cloud.With the clearest, crispest air, one can see for miles over rolling fields.Orange maples and circular grain bins mark homesteads With barbed wire fence lines as relics of roaming livestock: A silent symphony played on God's rich earth, Celebrating Iowa's yearly harvest.

The 2011-12 U.S. presidential campaign was the most expensive and broadly troubling contest in the country’s history. “Perdition” provides a doubly apt metaphor for assessing its place in cultural history. The gangster film “Road to Perdition” (2002), a “blood” or “revenge” tragedy, captures the sense of inter-necine warfare that the GOP primary and caucus battles enacted. John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (1667) parallels the public’s sense of the country’s descent into a state of darkened disgust and despair. The unexpected con-sequences of the ‘70s party structural reforms, the fracturing of the Republican base in the 2010 bi-election, the number of increasingly acrid GOP debates, and the sheer amount of money spent by candidates, PACs, and especially anonymous superPACs during the electoral contest are explored as accounts for the aptness of the metaphors. Calls for reform complete the analysis.

In this report, we summarize several projects exploring h develops and deploys resistance to scientific and technical expertise.

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is widely recognized as the worst oil spill in international history (Oceana: Protecting the World's Oceans, n.d.). Within days of the April 20, 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig that had killed 11 people, remote underwater cameras revealed the BP pipe was leaking oil and gas on the ocean floor about 42 miles off the coast of Louisiana ( National Museum of Natural History, n.d.). Since the explosion, teams of researchers and scientists have begun studying the disaster and its impacts.

In this analysis of the intelligent design theory textbook, Of Pandas and People, I seek a better understanding of how the authors propose intelligent design as a legitimate science. By looking at this text through the rhetorical concept of imitation, I show how the authors attempt to validate the text for uses in public education classrooms. In doing this, the authors of the text attempt to imitate science, scientists and science textbooks, but do so in ways that reveal their teleological position to the scientific and legal community and alienate their creationist progenitors.

Our lived worlds are systematized technologies that organize the information that to inform themselves about subjects as diverse as politics or energy consumption

David Clanaugh, Michigan Technical University, and Hamilton Bean, University of Colorado, Denver, on the distorted ways in which risk is measured, assessed, and communicated, especially with a view to hiding the influence of private interest.

Our blind spot as a "risk definitions of risk are communicative claims that have constitutive force They create the very uncertainty 1994). Acccordingly, "fabricate risk analyses produce risks" (Russell & Babrow, 2011, p. 24 entrapment that Luhmann t circular process by which we are taken in by 2002). We contend that a may offer analytical tools in for setting aside the scientization constructs in favor of empirical examination of risk as an in emergent, and shifting dynamic of uncertainty

Volume 8, No 1, of POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Analysis and Invention, offers three essays and, in accord with our practice, summaries of the Proceedings of 2011 Preconference of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (ARST).

Analysis of the evolution and practice of ad watch journalism during the 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential campaigns suggests a robust level of ad watch activity, fostered in part by advances in communications technology and the proliferation of actors with means and motive. The efforts of ad watch practitioners to police egregious distortions and deceptions continue to provide an important baseline in the broader discourse surrounding the veracity of campaign claims. Efforts to place the transgressions of campaign spots in a proper context, however, have been met with at best, mixed success. Among the principal challenges to building a better ad watch for the 21st century are engaging the way audiovisual elements of ads advance their case by evoking readily accessible narrative frames grounded in popular culture; developing the multiple metrics by which candidates’ fidelity to the truth over time can be effectively evaluated; and addressing arguments about the character of candidates, arguments often ostensibly framed in overtly policy terms.

Young appears coy here about the status of his sexuality. He seems invested in rendering a story that highlights how he is constantly perceived as a "faggot" due to his failed performance of proper (black) masculinity and his ability to speak WEV. But he never explicitly claims a gay identity, leaving the reader to speculate.

Through the usage of academic autobiography, this paper examines the difficulties inherent to embodying seemingly incongruous identities outside of the mainstream. Examining metrics for inclusion often utilized in the black, feminist, queer, and BDSM communities, I attempt to locate where women with intersecting identities find and build networks that enable them to both “belong” and to fully express the complexities of their subjectivities without compromise.

This paper examines the sexual politics of the Spike Lee film She Hate Me (2004). The film’s director and collaborative writer attempts to integrate the memory of the initial whistle blower of Watergate, the Black American security guard Frank Wills, with a contemporary Black corporate hero story. She Hate Me also includes a subnarrative of sexual surrogacy and Black female sexuality, which emerges as the central narrative by the film’s end. I argue that the film presents a phantasmagoric fantasy, which postulates normative conceptions of sexuality, while purporting to represent the non-normative Black female sexual imaginary in a sympathetic way. I build upon this argument by addressing the following questions: How does the dominant narrative of She Hate Me reify conservative notions of the conjugal family? In what ways does Lee’s construction of Black sexualities undermine the cultural politics of Frank Wills’s memory? How does Lee’s compilation of sexual iconography serve the purpose of sensory stimulation, rather than a serious contemplation, of the parameters of sexual identities? Through my exploration of the homonationalist ideology upheld in the film, I assert that Lee’s stale illusion of sexual representation and underdeveloped political narrative creates a nebulous sexual and political phantasma of representation.

‘Here’s a Chance to Dance our Way Out of our Constrictions’: P-Funk’s Black Masculinity and the Performance of Imaginative Freedom” considers the ways that George Clinton’s two funk projects, Parliament and Funkadelic, create new spaces for nonnormative heterosexuality and creative production. I explore issues of embodiment , sexual fluidity, and community in P-Funk’s iconography, lyrics and sound and then consider ways that black male fans have gained a sense of imaginative freedom from their music. P-Funk’s solidly funking music, hallucinatory and often politicized music, experimental cover art and wildly threatrical stage shows create a new a queer space for black heterosexual men. Most significantly, P-Funk’s music explores black experience, particularly bodily, sexual and sensual experience at points of ambiguity, vulnerability, pain, desire, and laughter, using tools of music that speak to their listeners individually and internally, as well as collectively. This power to harness emotionally strong and sometimes inchoate feeling had a powerful effect on its audience—prompting some to find unity and empathy with other black men.

In 2009, the public witnessed an upsurge in media discussions about the lower marriage rates of professional black women. In the Unmarriageable Professional Black Woman discourse, the alleged pathological behavior of black men or black women causes marriage disparities, despite the fact that demographic data that can largely account for differences in marriage rates. This paper explores articulations of a heterosexual, and somewhat heteronormative, black female romantic imagination in the twenty-first century, and unpacks how the ideals and pathologies that subjects with various agendas attach to this imagination reveal the complex interplay of western romantic love narratives, black feminism, legacies of the Moynihan Report, and liberal individualism. Through discussions of three prominent examples representing the romantic desires of ambitious and successful black women in popular discourse, I explore how the heterosexual African American woman’s romantic imagination has been idealized and derided, with the idealization reflecting the ways in which feminism has done significant work in updating the romantic fantasy even as patriarchy’s presence is transparent, and the derision illustrating the disciplinary work of patriarchy and a broader national ideology that suggests that individuals are always responsible for not attaining their heart’s desires.

Public engagement in science and technology, defined as citizens' active involvement in the development of socio-technical trajectories, especially in policy setting and decision making, is considered to be critical by researchers across the disciplinary divide. This is particularly true when the scientific-technological endeavor is innovative, pertains to risk or uncertainty, and has caught the attention of politicians and the public because of its importance and relevance. Two prime examples of these scientific technological endeavors are nanotechnology and the science behind climate change. There are some good reasons for actively engaging the public in such endeavors, including gaining legitimacy or public trust, achieving better results when it comes to implementing new policies related to endeavor, and adhering to the normative commitment of democratic societies to abide by free flow of information and open processes of decision-making.

The essay argues that Edmund Burke's differences from Adam Smith on government-sponsored assistance for the unemployed is rooted in their differences about the nature of government, not in their economic theories. Burke, unlike Smith, cannot free himself from the violent display of power on which he thinks political legitimacy rests. In this way, his work testifies to the insights of Michel Foucault. Smith has a different, more bourgeois ideal and a higher estimate of the "bourgeois virtues" of the common person.

Few popular science news articles today attract as much attention or are communicated with as much flamboyance as those involving the neurosciences. Catchy but charged headlines such as "Obese Teens May Be Lacking in Brain Size, Not Willpower" These popular accounts present rhetoric scholars with numerous opportunities for interrogating scientific understandings of the brain and their development through the discourses, practices, and materials of neuroscience. However, a strictly deconstructive approach, as Bruno Latour (2004) notes, can be viewed as intellectually hostile to the efforts of scientific researchers (p. 225-228). Because neuroscience is a relatively new and diverse field, it is important to

Contrary to critics and scholars interested in the series’ therapeutic value, Harry Potter encourages post-9/11 subjects to neither heal nor mourn. Instead of taking up the potential pain and transformation in realizing and coming to terms with the deaths of his parents, Harry’s reattachment to the institution precludes his abilities to mourn constructively and his orphanhood effectively gets effaced over the course of the series. This article suggests that the therapeutic value ascribed to Harry Potter indicates a hope that it will serve as a pedagogical device to produce loyal, patriotic citizen-subjects that will hold on to rather than mourn loss.

As the U.S. population both increases and ages over the next 40 years, the numbers of patients requiring healthcare for both crisis-oriented and chronic conditions will grow in tandem (USHHS, 2009). This growth requires that healthcare practitioners and patients master new methodologies for communicating about care. Among these methodological possibilities are new and social media, such as websites, mobile phone text messaging, interactive websites, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Here, communication and rhetoric of science scholars can help shape the future efficacy of Web 2.0 healthcare communication and the strategies its practitioners use toward patient activation.

From fundamentalist views that wish to ban the books for their use of magic, to perspectives that the books are a modern-day expression of good Christianity, controversy around the rhetorical implications of faith in Harry Potter has become critical to the culture of the book. With its focus on these questions of religious rhetoric in Rowling’s texts, this article centers specifically on the theological thread that runs through C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Harry Potter series. Lewis’s deeply embedded use of the trilemma “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?” — the question that haunts Narnia as Edmund plays the Judas to Aslan’s existence and resurrection — also winds its way through the unfolding plot of the Harry Potter series. Rowling’s narrative, however, takes its own rhetorical path. Defying and confusing traditionally stark boundaries between good and evil, mortal and immortal, Harry Potter is not the tidy story of clear ideological divisions. Rather, Rowling’s use of Lewis’s trilemma serves to complicate and illustrate the dialectic of faith and doubt, as well as the moral complexities of “good” and “evil,” in order to address an audience not necessarily Christian, but decidedly human.

The discoveries of science and technology are accelerating. The choice of how to regulate and react to scientific and technological innovations relies heavily on the notion of risk. The emergence nature contemporary science and technology (i.e., complex systems that are not reducible to the simple physical and chemical processes from which they arose) confounds risk studies Indeed, whether to embark on a particular path of scientific inquiry or proceed with a technological development depends on the ability to calculate the amount of risk associated with the endeavor. We are, however, ill-equipped to resolve the demands of risk analysis with certainty.

Meaning is the product of dialectical negotiations of competing meanings that have their origins in cultural, subcultural, and idiosyncratic differences. Below obvious, surface, or dominant understandings, latent meanings wait to bubble up. This dynamic process of meaning-making suggests that language is, to a certain degree, uncontainable and very lively. Donna Haraway's work can be characterized by an attention to this 'latency' in language. I argue that Haraway’s use of language is not merely a way of communicating ideas, but constitutes a methodology, theory and praxis all at once, because she obtains “data” by mining latency, because she theorizes the significance of undercurrents and assumptions in phenomena, and because her writing itself demonstrates the very latency she is keen to explore. Here, language demonstrates an immensely generative capacity, such that we can understand language as being “living” – perhaps a companion species, and not merely dead “meat.” Through an analysis of American meat culture and what I call “meat heroism," I mime the infinite recursion in Haraway’s work, adopting her praxis in order to illuminate her praxis in order to illuminate her method which illuminates her theory. This paper is about language, failure, humour, cowboys, hero sandwiches, Martin Luther King Jr., and protein.

This paper examines the ways in which social scientific discourse and classification interact with the objects of social scientific investigation. I examine this interaction in the context of the traditional philosophical project of demarcating the social sciences from the natural sciences. I begin by reviewing Ian Hacking’s work on interactive classification and argue that there are additional forms of interaction that must be treated.

In 2003, the U.S. Air University published “The Role of Rhetorical Theory in Military Intelligence Analysis: A Soldier’s Guide to Rhetorical Theory” written by Air Force Major Gary H. Mills. In this essay, Mills argues that the rhetorical theory of French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault “serves as a powerful military-intelligence force multiplier.” Foucault is described by Mills as a “reluctant, unintentional military tactician.” Likening Foucault’s rhetorical theory to a weapon used by a combat force might strike rhetorical and critical scholars as bizarre given Foucault’s theoretical and political project. Therefore, in this essay, I attempt to understand the meaning and accuracy of Major Mills’s claim, as well as consider the broader implications of Foucault’s rhetorical theory in relation to U.S. intelligence and national security organizing.

In this paper I analyze strategies policy scientists use to bolster their ethos with American policymakers and the public in the International Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group I Summary for Policy Makers (SPM), from their Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007. Specifically, I treat the visualizations of computer climate models included in the SPM as technologies that the IPCC authors used to re-integrate their paradoxical ethos: commissioned to give policy guidance on the basis of their scientific reputation, these authors nevertheless field ethical attacks if their guidance runs counter to prevailing political winds. The visualizations perform continuity between the authors' traditional scientific ethos and their policy ethos. They also shift the locus of persuasion in the SPM from ethical questions to appeals to values and logic (e.g. the results of the climate models).

This essay looks at the articulation of Black identity in personal and online contexts. Following Omi and Winant's argument that racial formation is a matter of racial representation within social structures, I examine the Internet as a "third place" for the online representation of Black identity by Blacks and by non-Blacks following two critical incidents in recent public culture: Kanye West's Hurricane Katrina speech and the Rev. Joseph Lowery's inauguration benediction. As a third place, the Internet encourages intimate discursive interaction, similar to the way Black barber shops and beauty salons allowed private spaces for identity discourses between Black men and women. The Internet also opens these formerly private spaces to non-Blacks, who contribute to the articulation of Black identity online.