How do we move forward when the legality of teaching and learning about social justice research is called into question by the state? This article demonstrates the efficacy of collaboration as a form of institutional critique that made it possible to provide a comprehensive graduate education following the emergence of anti-DEI legislation in Florida. To teach and learn in a tumultuous legal landscape without sacrificing rigor, eliding DEI-oriented scholarship, or violating state law, we piloted a collaborative disciplinary meta-analysis project that enabled students to study social justice research along with the field’s other major research topics. This portable approach allowed us to meet the professional and ethical imperative to engage research that has been targeted by state officials but remains foundational for disciplinary expertise. It also demonstrates the futility of removing politically unfavorable scholarship from curricula. After sharing an overview of the results of our meta-analysis project, with a special focus on our field’s take on social justice and collaboration, we reflect on the rhetorical strategies those of us working in highly politicized educational climates have deployed to manage increased oversight from zealous state legislatures challenging the legitimacy of disciplinary expertise.

The concept of collaboration lies at the heart of this special issue of Poroi. This issue is rooted in the papers and discussions that emerged from the co-sponsored 2023 preconference of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM) and the National Communication Association's Environmental Communication Division (NCA-ECD). The collection brings together scholarship that examines, theorizes, and enacts collaboration from a variety of perspectives. The preconference served as an important space where scholars and practitioners from rhetoric, environmental communication, science and technology studies, and related fields engaged with the pressing challenges and opportunities of working together across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. 

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.

In contemporary science outside purely theoretical physics collaboration is a way of life.An article with a dozen authors is the rule, not the exception.In scholarship within the humanities, by contrast, seldom does one encounter journal articles or rese monographs with more than one author.My scholarly collaboration with Alan Gross is thus somewhat unusual.It is even more unusual in that within the span of two decades, it has yielded four books published by university presses, with a fifth nearing a sixth in the planning stages.The books we have written together differ significantly, for the better, from what either of us could have produced alone.

In 2003, National Institutes of Health director Elias A. Zerhouni called for the development of innovative research methods that more effectively connect medical research findings to clinical care. His call and the transformative institutional and funding changes it has wrought have opened up an exciting opportunity for rhetorical scholars to join the interdisciplinary project of improving medical research and delivery. Responding to this opportunity, this paper articulates one vision for the rhetorician turned health services researcher. This vision is rooted in Richard McKeon’s insight that in addition to the analysis of discourse and the promotion of good communication practices, the art of rhetoric may also play a role in arranging human knowledge to catalyze the transformation of larger social, political, and scientific enterprises. His work suggests that this “architectonic” function of rhetoric is suited to the highly complex and technological modes of knowledge creation now prevalent in medicine and other artistic and scientific domains. Following his lead, this paper builds the case for an “architectonic” view of the role of rhetoric in interdisciplinary collaboration that is responsive to the “rhetorical situation” emerging from the problems and possibilities of 21st century healthcare.

There is a necessary and growing preoccupation in rhetoric of science with the real-world consequences of our work and with the mediating role rhetoric should play at the nexus of science-publics-policy. Emerging from these discussions are calls by Gross, Ceccarelli, and Herndl for thoughtful and practical action. This paper builds from this preoccupation with thoughtful praxis, highlighting three funded collaborations that offer a vision for engaged, mutually beneficial, consequential collaborations in rhetoric of science. Taken together, these collaborations constitute an argument for Herndl’s “applied rhetoric of science.” They move beyond transactional models of collaboration and posit a transdisciplinary vision for rhetoric of science as an integral part of the practice of science itself.

Rhetoricians involved in funded collaborative research with scientists have discussed some of their own rhetorical choices in conveying to their research partners the unique and valuable contributions made by rhetorical inquiry. But different definitions of what expertise is offered by someone trained in rhetoric as a field of study shape their conclusions, as does the fact that most are in the early stages of this collaborative work. They have provided an energetic start to what promises to be a spirited, valuable, and lengthy conversation about how rhetoricians of science might think about the broader impacts of their research.

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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.