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Winner of the 2007 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Award for Best Collection of Essays on Technical and Scientific Communication The first book to focus on the intersection of cultural studies and technical communication, Critical Power Tools draws on various traditions of cultural studies to develop new or expanded theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical approaches to technical communication. Offered as a sourcebook for the field, the book is organized into three parts. The first section, emphasizing theory building, reconceptualizes key concepts or practices, such as usability, through a cultural studies lens. The second section illustrates alternative research methods through several case studies. The third section offers critical and productive pedagogical approaches, including specific assignments, applicable to both undergraduate and graduate courses.
Despite--or because of--its huge popular culture status, Peanuts enabled cartoonist Charles Schulz to offer political commentary on the most controversial topics of postwar American culture through the voices of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts gang. In postwar America, there was no newspaper comic strip more recognizable than Charles Schulz's Peanuts. It was everywhere, not just in thousands of daily newspapers. For nearly fifty years, Peanuts was a mainstay of American popular culture in television, movies, and merchandising, from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to the White House to the breakfast table. Most people have come to associate Peanuts with the innocence of childhood, n...
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 indi...
Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine charts new methodological territories for rhetorical studies and the emerging field of the rhetoric of health and medicine. It advances the larger goal of differentiating the rhetoric of health and medicine as a distinct but pragmatically diverse area of study.
Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies collects original scholarship that takes up and extends the practices of inventive theorizing that characterize Sharon Crowley’s body of work. Including sixteen chapters by established and emerging scholars and an interview with Crowley, the book shows that doing theory is a contingent and continual rhetorical process that is indispensable for understanding situations and their potential significance—and for discovering the available means of persuasion. For Crowley, theory is a basic building block of rhetoric “produced by and within specific times and locations as a means of opening other ways of believing or acting.” Doing ...
After World War II, an unprecedented age of global development began. The formation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund allowed war torn and poverty stricken nations to become willing debtors in their desire to entice Western investment and trade. New capital, it was foretold, would pave the way to political and economic stability, and the benefits would "trickle down" to even the poorest citizens. The hyperbole of this neocolonialism, however, has left many of these countries with nothing but compounded debt and unfulfilled promises. The Megarhetorics of Global Development examines rhetorical strategies used by multinational corporations, NGOs, governments, banks, and othe...
Naming What We Know examines the core principles of knowledge in the discipline of writing studies using the lens of “threshold concepts”—concepts that are critical for epistemological participation in a discipline. The first part of the book defines and describes thirty-seven threshold concepts of the discipline in entries written by some of the field’s most active researchers and teachers, all of whom participated in a collaborative wiki discussion guided by the editors. These entries are clear and accessible, written for an audience of writing scholars, students, and colleagues in other disciplines and policy makers outside the academy. Contributors describe the conceptual backgro...
Reflecting the current state of research into the communication aspects of HIV/AIDS, this volume explores AIDS-related communication scholarship, moving forward from the 1992 publication AIDS: A Communication Perspective. Editors Timothy Edgar, Seth M. Noar, and Vicki S. Freimuth have developed this up-to-date collection to focus on today’s key communication issues in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Chapters herein examine the interplay of the messages individuals receive about AIDS at the public level as well as the messages exchanged between individuals at the interpersonal level. Acknowledging how the face of HIV/AIDS has changed since 1992, the volume promotes the perspective that an understand...
Offering rhetorically informed strategic interventions, this innovative collection moves beyond critiques of mental health issues, problems, and care. With sections that focus on methodological, cultural and legal, and pedagogical interventions, readers will find an engaging discussion of a discrete mental health phenomenon as well as a clear interventional takeaway in each chapter. Contributors make use of critical discourse analyses, ethnographic inquiries, autoethnographic inquiries, case studies, and textual analyses to engage such mental health research topics as postpartum depression among Chinese mothers; insanity pleas; anosognosia; issues of intimacy, access, and embodiment in resea...
This book explores rhetorical ethos and its ongoing role in patients’ credibility and in misdiagnoses stemming from gender, race and class-based biases. Drawing on the concept of ethos as a theoretical framework, it explores health and mental illness across different conditions and across different methodological approaches. Extending work on ethos in clinical encounters and public discourse about biomedicine and presenting new research on the rhetoric of mental health, stigma and mental illness, the book explores how bias in clinical settings can lead to symptoms labelled "in the patient’s head" masking treatable medical problems. This notable contribution to the rhetoric of health and medicine will be of interest to all researchers and graduate students of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, medical humanities, communication, and psychology.