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Risky Rhetoric

Author: J. Blake Scott

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780809324941

Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing is the first book-length study of the rhetoric inherent in and surrounding HIV testing. In addition to providing a history of HIV testing in the United States from 1985 to the present, J. Blake Scott explains how faulty arguments about testing’s power and effects have promoted unresponsive and even dangerous testing practices for so-called normal subjects as well as those deemed risky. Drawing on classical rhetoric as well as Michel Foucault’s theorizing of the examination as a form of disciplinary power, this study explores how HIV testing functions as a disciplinary technology that shapes subjects and exerts power over individual bodies and populations. Testing has largely been deployed to protect those defined as normal members of the general population by detecting, managing, and even punishing those diagnosed as risky (e.g., gay and bisexual men, poor women of color). But Scott reveals that testing’s function of protection-through-detection has been fueled in part by faulty arguments that exaggerate testing’s interventive power and benefits. These arguments have also created a perception that testing is a magic bullet. By overestimating the benefits of HIV testing and overlooking its contingencies and harmful effects, dominant arguments about testing have enabled a shortsighted public health response to HIV and unresponsive testing policies. The ultimate goal of Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing is to offer strategies to policymakers, HIV educators and test counselors, and other rhetors for developing more responsive and egalitarian testing-related rhetorics and practices.

The Rhetoric of Risk

Author: Beverly A. Sauer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2003-01-30

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1135654875

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This volume examines rhetorical practices relating to situations of risk, and how documents and communication succeed or fail in these contexts. For scholars in technical communication, rhetoric, and related areas.

Being at Genetic Risk

Author: Kelly Pender

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-04-27

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 027108300X

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Rhetorics of choice have dominated the biosocial discourses surrounding BRCA risk for decades, telling women at genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancers that they are free to choose how (and whether) to deal with their risk. Critics argue that women at genetic risk are, in fact, not free to choose but rather are forced to make particular choices. In Being at Genetic Risk, Kelly Pender argues for a change in the conversation around genetic risk that focuses less on choice and more on care. Being at Genetic Risk offers a new set of conceptual starting points for understanding what is at stake with a BRCA diagnosis and what the focus on choice obstructs from view. Through a praxiographic reading of the medical practices associated with BRCA risk, Pender’s analysis shows that genetic risk is not just something BRCA+ women know, but also something that they do. It is through this doing that genetic cancer risk becomes a reality in their lives, one that we can explain but not one that we can explain away. Well researched and thoughtfully argued, Being at Genetic Risk will be welcomed by scholars of rhetoric and communication, particularly those who work in the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine, as well as scholars in allied fields who study the social, ethical, and political implications of genetic medicine. Pender’s insight will also be of interest to organizations that advocate for those at genetic risk of breast and ovarian cancers.

Rhetoric in Debt

Author: Kellie Sharp-Hoskins

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2023-05-26

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 0271096527

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In recent years, household indebtedness in the United States reached its highest levels in history. From mortgages to student loans, from credit card bills to US deficit spending, debt is widespread and increasing. Drawing on scholarship from economics, accounting, and critical rhetoric and social theory, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins critiques debt not as an economic indicator or a tool of finance but as a cultural system. Through case studies of the student-loan crisis, medical debt, and the abuses of municipal bonds, Sharp-Hoskins reveals that debt is a rhetorical construct entangled in broader systems of wealth, rule, and race. Perhaps more than any other social marker or symbol, the concept of “debt” indicates differences between wealthy and poor, productive and lazy, secure and risky, worthy and unworthy. Tracking the emergence and work of debt across temporal and spatial scales reveals how it exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequities under the rhetorical cover of individual, moral, and volitional calculation and equivalency. A new perspective on a serious problem facing our society, Rhetoric in Debt not only reveals how debt organizes our social and cultural relations but also provides a new conceptual framework for a more equitable world.

The Rhetoric of Risk

Author: Beverly A. Sauer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-01-30

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1135654867

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The crash of an Amtrak train near Baltimore, the collapse of the Hyatt hotel in Kansas City, the incident at Three Mile Island, and other large-scale technological disasters have provided powerful examples of the ways that communication practices influence the events and decisions that precipitate a disaster. These examples have raised ethical questions about the responsibility of writers within agencies, epistemological questions about the nature of representation in science, and rhetorical questions about the nature of expertise and experience as grounds for judgments about risk. In The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments, author Beverly Sauer examines how the dynamic uncertainty of the material environment affects communication in large regulatory industries. Sauer's analysis focuses specifically on mine safety, which provides a rich technical and historical context where problems of rhetorical agency, narrative, and the negotiation of meaning have visible and tragic outcomes. But the questions Sauer asks have larger implication for risk and safety: How does writing function in large regulatory industries? What can we learn from experience? Why is this experience so difficult to capture in writing? What information is lost when agencies rely on written documentation alone? Given the uncertainties, how can we work to improve communication in hazardous and uncertain environments? By exploring how individuals make sense of the material, technical, and institutional indeterminancies of their work in speech and gesture, The Rhetoric of Risk helps communicators rethink their frequently unquestioned assumptions about workplace discourse and the role of writers in hazardous worksites. It is intended for scholars and students in technical writing and communication, rhetoric, risk analysis and risk communication, as well as a wide range of engineering and technical fields concerned with risk, safety, and uncertainty.

Rhetoric of InSecurity

Author: Victoria Baines

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-13

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 100040658X

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This book demands that we question what we are told about security, using tools we have had for thousands of years. The work considers the history of security rhetoric in a number of distinct but related contexts, including the United States’ security strategy, the "war" on Big Tech, and current concerns such as cybersecurity. Focusing on the language of security discourse, it draws common threads from the ancient world to the present day and the near future. The book grounds recent comparisons of Donald Trump to the Emperor Nero in a linguistic evidence base. It examines the potential impact on society of policy-makers’ emphasis on the novelty of cybercrime, their likening of the internet to the Wild West, and their claims that criminals have "gone dark". It questions governments’ descriptions of technology companies in words normally reserved for terrorists, and asks who might benefit. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book builds on existing literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences, most notably studies on rhetoric in Greco-Roman texts, and on the articulation of security concerns in law, international relations, and public policy contexts. It adds value to this body of research by offering new points of comparison, and a fresh but tried and tested way of looking at problems that are often presented as unprecedented. It will be essential to legal and policy practitioners, students of Law, Politics, Media, and Classics, and all those interested in employing critical thinking.

Topic-Driven Environmental Rhetoric

Author: Derek G. Ross

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-02-24

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1315442035

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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- List of Abbreviations -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I: Framing -- 1 Proof and Fluid Topics: Topic-Driven Environmental Rhetoric in Modern Society -- 2 Scientist as Hero, Technology as the Enemy: Commonplaces about Science in Environmental Discourses -- 3 Granola-Eating, Birkenstock-Wearing Tree Huggers Who Want to Take Your Guns: Commonplaces of the Environmentalist -- PART II: Place -- 4 Climate Crisis Made Manifest: The Shift from a Topos of Time to a Topos of Place -- 5 Victims "in" and Protectors "of" Appalachia: Place and the Common Topic of Protection in Missing Mountains: We Went to the Mountaintop, but It Wasn't There -- 6 Remembering the Alamo: Commonplaces in Texas Water Policy Arguments -- PART III: Risk and Uncertainty -- 7 Reconstituting Causality: Accident Reports as Posthuman Documentation -- 8 Toward an Apparent Decolonial Feminist Rhetoric of Risk -- 9 Designing Doubt: The Tactical Use of Uncertainty in Hydraulic Fracturing Debates -- PART IV: Sustainability -- 10 Sustainability and Sustainable Development: The Evolution and Use of Confused Notions -- 11 The Three Pillars of Sustainability as a Special Topic of Invention in the Marketing Communication of Plastic-Packaging Companies -- List of Contributors -- Index

What It Feels Like

Author: Stephanie R. Larson

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2021-07-15

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0271091703

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Winner of the 2022 Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM) Book Award Winner of the 2022 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition What It Feels Like interrogates an underexamined reason for our failure to abolish rape in the United States: the way we communicate about it. Using affective and feminist materialist approaches to rhetorical criticism, Stephanie Larson examines how discourses about rape and sexual assault rely on strategies of containment, denying the felt experiences of victims and ultimately stalling broader claims for justice. Investigating anti-pornography debates from the 1980s, Violence Against Women Act advocacy materials, sexual assault forensic kits, public performances, and the #MeToo movement, Larson reveals how our language privileges male perspectives and, more deeply, how it is shaped by systems of power—patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and heteronormativity. Interrogating how these systems work to propagate masculine commitments to “science” and “hard evidence,” Larson finds that US culture holds a general mistrust of testimony by women, stereotyping it as “emotional.” But she also gives us hope for change, arguing that testimonies grounded in the bodily, material expression of violation are necessary for giving voice to victims of sexual violence and presenting, accurately, the scale of these crimes. Larson makes a case for visceral rhetorics, theorizing them as powerful forms of communication and persuasion. Demonstrating the communicative power of bodily feeling, Larson challenges the long-held commitment to detached, distant, rationalized discourses of sexual harassment and rape. Timely and poignant, the book offers a much-needed corrective to our legal and political discourses.

Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic

Author: Huiling Ding

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2014-04-17

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0809333201

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2016 CCCC Best Book Award in Technical and Scientific Communication In the past ten years, we have seen great changes in the ways government organizations and media respond to and report on emerging global epidemics. The first outbreak to garner such attention was SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). In Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic, Huiling Ding uses SARS to explore how various cultures and communities made sense of the epidemic and communicated about it. She also investigates the way knowledge production and legitimation operate in global epidemics, the roles that professionals and professional communicators, as well as individual citizens, play in the communication process, points of contention within these processes, and possible entry points for ethical and civic intervention. Focusing on the rhetorical interactions among the World Health Organization, the United States, China, and Canada, Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic investigates official communication and community grassroots risk tactics employed during the SARS outbreak. It consists of four historical cases, which examine the transcultural risk communication about SARS in different geopolitical regions at different stages. The first two cases deal with risk communication practices at the early stage of the SARS epidemic when it originated in southern China. The last two cases move to transcultural rhetorical networks surrounding SARS. With such threats as SARS, avian flu, and swine flu capturing the public imagination and prompting transnational public health preparedness efforts, the need for a rhetoric of global epidemics has never been greater. Government leaders, public health officials, health care professionals, journalists, and activists can learn how to more effectively craft and manage transcultural risk communication from Ding’s examination of the complex and varied modes of communication around SARS. In addition to offering a detailed case study, Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic provides a critical methodology that professional communicators can use in their investigations of epidemics and details approaches to facilitating more open, participatory risk communication at all levels.