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.

While Louis Pasteur’s germ theory functions as one of the foundational concepts of modern medicine, resistance to COVID-19 prevention measures reveal a rejection not just of government mandates, but of germ theory as well. Therefore, this article seeks to trace the rhetorical linear of rejections of germ theory denialism through an examination of primary and secondary texts from Pasteur’s contemporaries, through the development of chiropractic, and into the COVID-19 pandemic. The author finds that the denial of viruses offers a peculiar form of biorhetoric that invokes absence and invisibility, rather than presence, as rhetorical grounds for rejecting public health directives.

A tick-borne illness has spread throughout the eastern United States, causing victims to develop a spontaneous allergic reaction to eating red meat. This condition’s etiology intersects with notable recent cases of porcine xenotransplantation: the insertion of organs from genetically altered pigs into human hosts. The antagonist in these scenarios is the sugar alpha-gal, which is naturally present in most mammals although not humans. This article draws from Bruno Latour’s depiction of modernity as an engine that produces contradictory hybrids to examine the capitalist ethic impelling cultural engagements with alpha-gal, in which the bodies of pigs and humans are cyclically conflated and differentiated as medical and edible commodities—both forms of sustenance. The consumption of these resources has a Gothic cast, which provides insight into their strange appeal, affect, and implications. This kind of quotidian Gothic invisibly pervades contemporary life, becoming palpable only through novelty, as transient examples emerge and dissipate while eliciting little sustained consternation. 

This article uses the example of nootropics—a flexible term that capitalizes on the flexibility of the brain—as a category to describe how seemingly oppositional tropes, or turns, can occupy the same rhetorical topos, or space, and produce distinct ethos, political identity, and commitment within that space. It considers two dialectical, gendered tropes in nootropic discourse. The tropes are a falsely binary and highly problematic set of subjectivities, a Gothic masculine and an ostensible Gothic feminine. These two tropes exemplify how rhetorics of wellness produce identities whose turnings towards a politics does not map cleanly onto electoral politics or even identity politics in the US and Canada.

Medical documentation--i.e., charting--is widely known to be crucial for patient care, billing, and legal protection, but it is simultaneously largely viewed as tedious, time-consuming busywork that takes clinicians away from patients, especially in the era of electronic health records (EHRs). There has been excellent but limited research on how writing skills (and thus, explicit writing instruction) influence both the charting experience and charting outcomes (Schryer, 1993; Opel & Hart-Davidson, 2019). In this project, I investigate how progress notes within EHRs could be improved if medical providers had more training in rhetoric and technical writing. Specifically, I focus on primary care, as primary-care providers have been shown to spend the most time on EHRs (Rotenstein et al, 2023). I draw upon a corpus of de-identified primary-care progress notes and the insights of primary-care providers, both sourced from clinics in rural Oregon. My major conclusions are that primary-care providers would benefit from being taught how to write with attention to audience and purpose and that rhetoricians of health and medicine have an opportunity to help improve patient charting.

Recent work across disciplines has examined the current post-truth climate and various types of information disorders which have permeated the internet. Scholars have made significant progress in defining and theorizing information literacy and its various aspects, as well as in designing programs to help students acquire the relevant skills for evaluating information. Nevertheless, further exploration is needed, for example to understand the roles of criteria in information evaluation. The present study draws on scholarship in discourse and rhetoric studies to suggest how discursive strategies, a key concept in these convergent areas, can inform approaches to information evaluation. To illustrate this improved approach, this study explores the case of a recent piece of fake news that involves both text and image and has circulated widely as a digital flyer on social media.

In this paper, we explore the gendered aspects of scientific controversy in the digital age. This project makes use of Leah Ceccarelli’s seminal work on manufactured scientific controversy by considering its implications for the discourse on GMOs and food additives published on digital food and lifestyle blogs. We perform a discourse analysis of several blogs to look at the ways that gendered online discourse and performance influences modern anti-science rhetoric, particularly that which emanates from the sphere colloquially known as crunchy living. We look at the ways the intimate and personal feminine style of digital platforms offer experiential knowledge as a substitute for science. In the current political climate of alternative facts and fake news, this study leads to broader implications about the impact of gendered discourse on the assessment of credibility in online sources.

In this review essay, we look back at the evolution of the rhetoric of science by reviewing the Case Studies and Issues and Methods volumes edited by Randy Harris. We conclude by reflecting on the past, present, and future of the discipline.

This paper discusses three position papers presented at the vicentennial conference of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (ARST) concerning the disciplinary prospects of rhetoric of science and technology as a field. It identifies common themes among the three papers, including a theoretical focus on rhetorical invention, the prospects for viable responses to institutional changes and pressures in the academy, and the possibilities for interdisciplinary and public engagement by rhetoricians of science. It also identifies points of departure among the three papers, including their respective foci on globalization, the place of style in invention, and the interaction of the technical and public spheres.

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.

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.

1 This riddle's shelf-life would appear to have run out on November 1, 2004. But in fact, it is a perennial -or more accurately, a quadrennial. When I first heard it in 1980, the three men in a boat were Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and John Anderson.

1 The first shot fired in the intellectual property wars -the first one I heard, at least -happened during a skirmish between Island Records and Negativland, the sound-collage collective.In 1991, the corporate goliath took aim at the group's record -titled, simply, U2 -and blew it off the face of the earth.As a nerdy, motley crew of San Francisco Bay Area artists, weirdoes, and computer programmers, Negativland wasn't even a blip on the pop-culture radar, leaving it an unlikely target for a major lawsuit.So what would prompt one of the "Big Seven" record companies (now four, controlling 80% of global record sales) to use its full legal and economic might against, essentially, the world's tiniest band?As you may have guessed from Negativland's album title, it made the mistake of sampling the music of U2: the crown jewel in Island Records' multi-platinum crown.Poroi, 2, 2, November, 2003England, and WHO GIVES A SHIT? Just a lot of wasted names that don't mean DIDDLEY SHIT!" To add insult to injury, Negativland also mixed in a speech by U2's lead singer, Bono, which made the self-important Nobel Peace Prize nominee sound pious and ridiculous. 14 The record was released with little fanfare on SST Records, a small independent punk-rock label.But within four days of its release, Island Records and U2's song publisher, Warner-Chappel, came knocking to serve legal papers. 2Recognizing that it was a small fish compared to this oceanic multinational corporation, Negativland sent out a press release that stated, "Preferring retreat to total annihilation, Negativland and SST had no choice but to comply completely with these demands." 3 Even though Negativland had a strong fair-use argument, primarily based on parody, it didn't have the resources to fight a prolonged court battle.Instead it agreed to a very unfavorable settlement, a decision that haunts it to this day.Negativeland seems never really to have recovered.