The Great Chain of Being: Manifesto on the Problem of Agency in Science Communication
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-2016
Keywords
rhetorical agency, rhetoric of science, science communication, automation, biopolitics, publics theory, risk
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1246
Abstract
This manifesto presents positions arrived at after a day-long symposium on agency in science communication at the National Communication Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, NV, November 18, 2015. During morning sessions, participants in the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine preconference presented individual research on agency in response to a call to articulate key problems that must be solved in the next five years to better understand and support rhetorical agency in massively automated and mediated science communication situations in a world-risk context. In the afternoon, participants convened in discussion groups around four topoi that emerged from the morning’s presentations: automation, biopolitics, publics, and risk. Groups were tasked with answering three questions about their assigned topos: What are the critical controversies surrounding it? What are its pivotal rhetorical and technical terms? And what scholarly questions must be addressed in the next five years to yield a just and effective discourse in this area? Groups also assembled capsule bibliographies of sources core to their topos. At the end of the afternoon, Carolyn R. Miller presented a reply to the groups’ work; that reply serves as the headnote to this manifesto.
Rights Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Poroi, v. 12, issue 1, p. 1-16.
Scholar Commons Citation
Johnson, Meredith A. and Johnson, Nathan, "The Great Chain of Being: Manifesto on the Problem of Agency in Science Communication" (2016). English Faculty Publications. 242.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/eng_facpub/242
Comments
Full author list:
Carolyn R. Miller, North Carolina State University, Raleigh emerita
Lynda Walsh, University of Nevada, Reno
James Wynn, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
Ashley Rose Kelly, University of Waterloo, Ontario
Kenneth C. Walker, University of Arizona, Tucson
William J. White, Pennsylvania State University, Altoona
Emily Winderman, North Carolina State University, Raleigh
Contributing Authors: Oren Abeles, Nathan H. Bedsole, Maryn Belling, Matthew P. Brigham, Danny Card, Danielle DeVasto, Jean Goodwin, S. Scott Graham, Chris Ingraham, Molly Hartzog, Chad Iwertz, Meredith Johnson, Nathan Johnson, Sean Kamperman, Molly Kessler, Candice Lanius, Zoltan Majdik, Jennifer Malkowski, Sara Parks, Alex C. Parrish, Pamela Pietrucci, Aimée Kendall Roundtree, Dawn Shepherd, Karen Taylor, Bonnie Tucker, Ron Von Burg, Greg Wilson