This short article offers examples of how rhetoricians of health and medicine (RHM) can employ user experience (UX) design principles and practices to enhance student learning in courses that focus on scientific, health, and/or medical communication. More specifically, we propose a participatory health communication pedagogy that can help RHM educators leverage UX principles to meaningfully incorporate students’ experiences into the classroom as both content creators and content users. We argue that by framing students as both creators and users, RHM educators can enact classroom practices and approaches that more fully account for diversity and inclusivity, a process that better accounts for “racism and other forms of injustice [that] permeate health and medicine” (Scott, Melonçon & Molloy, 2020, p.vii). Drawing from two RHM courses as case studies, we demonstrate how a participatory health communication pedagogy can help educators become innovative, UX practitioners who center students’ learning experiences as they design content for health and medical contexts.

This dialogue works to situate Rhetorics of Reproductive Justice (RRJ) within Rhetorics of Health and Medicine (RHM) to explore how these two areas might enhance and inform one another. Through conversations with eight scholars who see their work as creating connections between RRJ and RHM, and through a series of reflective, interstitial comments, this dialogue examines current and future possibilities for work that bridges RRJ and RHM, and critically links RHM scholarship to social injustices reproductive bodies encounter.

Looking for ways to spread the information provided in this Toolkit? Let’s take it to Twitter. Below is a tweet for every article featured in this issue of Reflections.

Front matter for the Rhetorics of Reproductive Justice in Public & Civic Contexts Special Issue, a Toolkit.

An Annotated Bibliography on Rhetorics of Reproductive Justice is a project motivated by several overlapping exigencies. When we began our collaborative research and writing for this project in the fall of 2019, we were unaware that in the months to follow we would face a global health pandemic, accompanied by the reignition of the Black Lives Matter movement.

As we write this introduction, George Floyd’s body has just been laid to rest, protests in large and small cities around the world continue to call for the end of police violence, and the Minneapolis City Council has approved plans to defund the police. In addition to these social movements, Safer at Home orders have expired, and COVID-19 cases continue to spike in states across the nation. The suffering of Black and Brown communities is on display, and racial justice advocates are demanding action from non-Black folx. No longer can white supremacy maintain its silent power.

I come to Jenna Vinson’s book, Embodying the Problem: The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother, as anything but a teen mother. I am thirty-seven, in a tenure-track job, and pregnant with my first ch...

This article argues that rhetoricians of health and medicine can benefit from new methodological orientations that more fully account for conducting digital research within vulnerable online communities. More specifically, this article introduces a feminist digital research methodology, an intersectional methodology that helps rhetoricians of health and medicine contend with the overlapping rhetorical, technological, and ethical frameworks affecting how we understand and collect health information, particularly within vulnerable online communities. The author considers methodological shifts in Internet research ethics, rhetorics of health and medicine, and feminist rhetorics as well as definitions and conceptions of online communities and vulnerability. The author next draws from a 5-year case study of an online childbirth community to demonstrate how a feminist digital research methodology offers an alternative methodological orientation that helps researchers navigate ethical decision-making practices that arise from conducting health research within vulnerable online communities. Finally, the author outlines the broader implications of this methodology by suggesting three ways that scholars can use it within and beyond the field.

I argue in this article that digital composing practices require composition teachers to rethink the way we articulate learning outcomes and conduct classroom assessment. To accomplish this, we must revise the language we use to talk about outcomes and assessment in the context of new media. We also need to better understand how technologies are changing student compositions, thus driving the need to change our learning outcomes and assessment practices. The purpose of this article is to provide rationales and strategies for doing so, as well as classroom activities that can be used to assess new media compositions.