For most of the past two centuries, the scientific study of fungi was little more than a small, inconspicuous subfield of plant biology. Today, that is rapidly changing, as mycologists and their objects of study (fungi) are increasingly attracting young scientists and occupying the public sphere in both medicinal and environmental contexts. At the root of mycology’s popular ascendance is Paul Stamets, a self-trained mycologist, author, entrepreneur, and frequent public spokesperson. This essay offers a rhetorical analysis of Stamets’s most influential public appearance—a 2008 TED talk entitled “6 ways mushrooms can save the world”. In particular, I draw on theoretical frameworks in rhetoric and studies of expertise and experience (SEE) to explain how an amateur scientist holding no credentials beyond a bachelor's degree developed an authoritative voice as a thought leader in his field.

In this essay, I examine the film Johanna d’Arc ofMongolia (1989), made by German director Ulrike Ottinger in the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I argue that it can be read as an anti-authoritarian articulation of a desire for radical public spheres better suited to serve minority interests, particularly at a time of drastic transformations of social and political conditions. The film’s narrative ambiguity should be read in the rhetorical situation of radical fairy tales in West Germany and their attempt to develop counterpublic spheres to resist the organization of experiences by the consciousness industry. Ottinger’s film, while shot mostly in Inner Mongolia during the crucial year for the reunification of Germany, is far from being escapist. The shock of the displaced lower-class heroine, so different from the “happy ending” imperative of traditional fairy tales, unveils the fiction of a neoliberal economy that considers people and land as mere commodities. Like Karl Polanyi, Ottinger wants to empower people to question the assumption that they had to accept major displacements and flexibility in the name of a self-regulating market. The fairy tale, as a contested genre related to education, is a primary field for this struggle.

Grounding assumptions about the function of public discourse are critical to the formation and functioning of society. One way of examining those assumptions is through analyzing how public discourse gets represented in popular culture. Patricia Roberts-Miller’s (2004) taxonomy of models of public spheres serves as a template for the analysis of the film Thank You for Smoking (2006). This analysis demonstrates how the film both advocates for and contributes to the evolution of a post-truth public sphere by obscuring the historical controversy over tobacco. Truth and knowledge are not merely hidden or ignored but neutralized, and “spin” is therefore normalized and ultimately justified as a necessary protection of individual rights in a libertarian democracy.

The phrase “It’s just a cycle” is commonly articulated in coastal resilience efforts and it also shapes broader public debates about climate change. Identifying the structure of arguments around cycles is a useful starting point for defining differences in perspective, but there is more to competing claims about cycles. It is this more that this essay aims to explore, starting with an opening example from an engaged rhetorical ethnographic project with Maine’s clam fishery. The example helps set up a methodological orientation to working with cycles within resilience-focused collaborations that draws from aesthetics and poetics. This approach aims to show how cycles shape world making and how attending to cycles as a trope can create a space for critical disruptions of colonial patterns. This is a space of intimate connection that allows cyclical rhythms, like those of tides, to help reveal a passageway to resilience.

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.

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 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.

Man's view is always reduced to man's mind.For this is the part of himself he values most.THE MIND.intellect and its powers.narrator above all to renew his mind and exercise power through his intellect.and feel,' his task, he believes, is to ease the passage of the story from mind to mind -What is the role of museums in sphere?Committed to the centrality of rhetoric in deliberative democracy, Alan Gross has extend museum exhibits.wartime atrocities foregrounds a notion of learning that is often tacitly articulated in the acts of remembrance.George Yudice write, "Histori contemporary moment, but in reaction to the past.[...] The past's commemoration in museum form is rendered as a strictly delimited ethical zone, a space that divides worthy and unworthy conduct."(Miller and Yudice, 2002, 14 museum sites thus raises questions concerning its moral dimension in relation to civic virtue and responsible citizenship.can museum exhibits animate discourses, make political and cultural norms visible, and problematize the ways in which we conduct our lives?"consciousness raising," to borrow Habermas's phrase, so tha will not repeat history?exhibits with a more or less explicit moral agenda, framed by a vision of social progress?museums have a critical role to play in the shaping of memory, what is the underlying critique on which this assumption 1 Toby Bennett traces the emergence of pedagogy of citizenship.See Museums as Our New Epic

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.

Since 1984, academic essays addressing the public rhetorics of science and technology have embodied at least four purposes: theory-building, discounting scientific representations, deprecating scientific influence, and strategizing to improve the efficacy of scientific rhetorics. Some of these purposes are in conflict with each other, but there has been little explicit discussion about the purposes for ARST studies. This essay argues in favor of a synthetic vision that places humanistic, social scientific, and natural science endeavors as part of an over-lapping set of practices, each of which demonstrably makes distinctive positive contributions to globalizing human consciousness. The essay argues that the few existing studies illustrate how increased internationalism in ARST studies is not only important in its own right, but also could provide one academic route for expanding the imagined relational possibilities among humanistic "critics," the natural or social sciences, and broader societies.

That's what the movies do. . . . They give us lines to say, they assign us parts:

If we are to believe Cicero’s reports in his Brutus, sentimental discourses were a staple of Roman legal and legislative proceedings. For example, he praised Servius Sulpicius Galba as an orator “who inflames the court, ” thus accomplishing “far more than the one who merely instructs it. ” When charged with massacring Lusitanians, “with tears in his eyes [Galba] commended to [the Roman people’s] protection his own children as well as the young son of Gaius Gallus. The presence of this orphan and his childish weeping excited great compassion ” (xxii, 89-90), and of course Galba was acquitted. Even casual readers of the Iliad discover speeches full of invective (Achilles ’ rage), patriotic encomium (Hector’s battle cry), and sententious disquisitions on the nature of life, love, death, and sociality (Achilles ’ vision of Patroclus). These can unify a people around sentiments of duty, patriotism, fidelity, and amity (books 1, 12, and

If ethos is the word for our previous issue of Poroi (3, 2, December, 2004), pathos is the word for this one. Pathos appeals to passions; it stirs sentiments; it mobilizes emotions. All the essays in this sixth issue analyze public forms and personal capacities of pathos. Together they argue powerfully for greater attention to political aesthetics, particularly in coming to terms with public arguments. These reach from cultures to technologies and from campaigns to sciences.