Hybrid Disciplinarity: Métis and Ethos in Juvenile Mental Health Electronic Records

Journal of Technical Writing and Communication Jul 2014

Hybrid Disciplinarity: Métis and Ethos in Juvenile Mental Health Electronic Records

Susan L. Popham University of Memphis

Abstract

Large institutions, like hospitals and juvenile mental health facilities, are often places where members from several different professions come to interact and negotiate ideological differences. This study explores the authorial identities of some of these members in the electronic charts of a large juvenile mental health facility. These charts portray their authors' ethos as that which is fluid and variable, craftily moving between the neutral observer status of scientific rhetoric and the expert blame-shifter of social work rhetoric. I argue that these multi-disciplinary identities are best understood when using a rhetorical frame of métis, a rarely studied rhetorical strategy.