Resilience Rhetorics in Science, Technology, and Medicine

Abstract

Rhetoric is a resilient art. Its stability and mutability across centuries attest to its dynamism as a domain of knowledge production and engaged practice. While resilience is understood differentially across scholarly and popular domains, it nearly always addresses questions of how to respond, adapt, and persist through adverse circumstances (for a review of this diverse literature, see Flynn, Sotirin, & Brady, 2012). For example, resilience has become a key trope for describing the practices of (bio)security, sustainability, human health, child development, infrastructure, technological systems, and other common sites of study in rhetorics of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM). Recently, rhetoricians have also taken up resilience; these scholars are interested both in using rhetoric to understand resilience and using resilience to understand rhetoric.