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

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.

We report on the Teaching Responsible Communication of Science project at Iowa State University. This NSF-supported work will produce nine case studies focusing on the ethical challenges that arise when scientists communicate with the public. These case studies promise to add a normative dimension to the practical communication training offered to scientists, while at the same time contributing a rhetorical perspective to the interdisciplinary scholarship on science communication.

Contemporary concerns about public engagement in science communication collaboratives are a pressing area of praxis in rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine. This short paper describes the rhetorical engagements in a science and environmental communication program at the University of Arizona called the Carson Scholars Program. I argue an applied research program on the rhetorical properties of scientific uncertainties is one angle of inquiry where rhetoricians can make valuable contributions in these outreach efforts.