Scientific Futures for a Rhetoric of Science: "We do this and they do that?" A Junior-Senior Scholar Session, RSA 2018, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; 1 June 2018

Abstract

GRUBER: To start, I want to say that Rhetoric of Science [RoS] is understudied even by rhetoric scholars. In graduate school, I was one of maybe two pursuing it, and it’s never felt central to the field; perhaps, this is because it requires knowing about a very different and often derided disciplinary area. To do RoS, you have to learn the science. Lots of Rhetoric scholars have to become interdisciplinary; those in Rhetoric of Medicine, for example, have to do a lot of background work, but RoS has been particularly good at examining how scientific experiments are made and justified, whereas other areas might focus more on the way that X is applied or sold to the public. The distinction that I’ve just made there is intended to drive at a key point: science, in the lab and on the initial inventional and conceptual level, remains understudied. And I think the lack of work within the scientific process indicates a problem of how we, as rhetorical scholars, think about ourselves. Overall, I want to argue that we imagine ourselves talking about science mostly after-the-fact, after the press release, after the popular media presentation, and not sitting in and amongst the working processes of shaping science.