Rhetoric, Precarity, and mHealth Technologies

Christa Teston The Ohio State University

Abstract

Wearable technologies in general and mHealth data in particular are championed frequently for ways they afford individual agency and empowerment and promote what the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) calls a “culture of health.” This article complicates such epideictic rhetorics based on results from a situational analysis of the RWJF’s Data for Health listening events, which incorporated panelists from the RWJF, JawBone, Inc., the Quantified Self, and other mHealth technology organizations as well as audience participants who work in community health. Given panelists’ and audiences’ diverging claims about how mHealth data either succeed or fail in creating a culture of health, I mobilize precarity as an analytic construct for critiquing the coexistence of technoscientific progress alongside the persistence of health disparities among vulnerable populations.

Journal
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published
2016-05-26
DOI
10.1080/02773945.2016.1171694
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (19)

  1. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
  2. Communication Design Quarterly
  3. Communication Design Quarterly
  4. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
  5. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
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  1. Written Communication
  2. Computers and Composition
  3. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
  4. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  5. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  6. Rhetoric Review
  7. Communication Design Quarterly
  8. Communication Design Quarterly
  9. Communication Design Quarterly
  10. Communication Design Quarterly
  11. Communication Design Quarterly
  12. Technical Communication Quarterly
  13. Technical Communication Quarterly
  14. Communication Design Quarterly

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