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.

This essay, which pertains to translation studies, presents a reflection aiming at defining intersections between the areas covered respectively by rhetoric and by skopos theory, which, in the field of translation studies, is one of the most frequently used theoretical frameworks that structures practice, and therefore teaching. It aims to lay the foundations of a translatorial theoretical framework based on an extension of the skopos model including the stylistic elements of classical rhetoric, and perhaps also on an extension of the rhetorical model to embrace a wide range of text types.

Established roles for praxis beyond teaching are often missing from discussions of RSTEM engagement with the science community. Although it is important to ground engagement in identifiable roles, it may be that these roles are still being conceived or need to be re-created contextually for every engagement situation. This paper grounds RSTEM engagement in one identifiable field of practice: scientific community management. RSTEM's specialized attention to and understanding of how science communities and genre systems interact can provide insight into the forming of these communities and their management.

In Poroi’s 2013 special issue “Inventing the Future: The Rhetorics of Science, Technology, and Medicine,” Lisa Keränen reflected on the variety of purposes contributing authors ascribe to the scholarship and practice of rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM).1 Keränen especially noted the distinction Randy Harris, Lynda Walsh, and Carolyn Miller draw between studying persuasion and making persuasion happen. As Harris puts it, it’s the difference between “the impulse to understand persuasion and the impulse to achieve persuasion” (Keränen, 2013, para. 7; emphasis in original). The latter is the active choice, which Keränen refers as “engagement,” a term she equates to “public intellectualism.” As a lens through which to imagine possibilities for our work, however, “engagement” can be much more than merely doing scholarship in public. I don’t intend to wax pedantic here about precise interpretations of engagement. However, as Kenneth Walker and Sara Beth Parks show, without some definitional work “engagement” risks being reduced to only one of its many facets, which include not only public engagement (Berube, 2013; Ceccarelli, 2013; Keränen, 2013), but also classroom teaching (Ceccarelli, 2013) and transdisciplinary research with—rather than focused on—STEM practitioners and related stakeholders (Walker, this issue; Parks, this issue; Druschke, 2014).

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.