Medical humanities and the rhetoric of health and medicine apply different methods to healthcare documents and discourses. This methodological reflection of a project studying cancer attitudes in Kenya describes how researchers combined practices from these disparate fields to produce more sensitive and ethical methods for studying cross-cultural contexts. By extending humanistic methods into social-science data collections, researchers were better able to ask precise questions and to perceive context-specific cues for consent and non-consent.

This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly brings posthuman perspectives to bear on the kinds of metarhetorical, organizational, and intertextual problems that are central to technical...

This study examines how a very light jet start-up, Eclipse Aviation, changed its ethos appeals in order to survive the loss of its principally declared innovation, a jet aircraft engine. Eclipse Aviation's corporate transformation from a spin-off company to a convergence-of-innovation company hinged on modifying an early marketing strategy. To overcome the loss of the jet engine, employees had to radically modify earlier expert representations and adopt rhetorical appeals that more closely parallel what Miller described as “cyborg discourse.” To understand how Eclipse Aviation survived the typically fatal loss of a stated primary innovation and to explore the implications that this particular start-up's rupture has for technology transfer and technical marketing, this study centers its analysis on a Web site that marketers used to “ventilate” the company and prevent financial collapse. The transformation in the company's marketing strategy illustrates how cyborg ethos appeals aggregate and discipline distributed stakeholder roles.