A Choreography of Living Texts: Selections from the ARST Oral History Project

Abstract

Oral history projects about rhetorical studies contribute to transdisciplinary histories by creating living texts that reflect the dynamism of scholarly cultures. Through interviews conducted at the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (ARST), we chart the organizational and intellectual history of a field, its contributions to science studies, and its potential future directions. These digitized, archived oral histories serve as an articulation point for transdisciplinary reflection, but they also represent an important strand of digital humanities work that creates living texts and keeps them open for future articulations.

Notes

1. 1The authors thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Michael Zerbe, and Nathan Johnson, Lisa Keränen, and Jessy Ohl for comments and suggestions on this manuscript.

2. 2For more details on the preparation and execution of the ARST Oral History Project, and for a list of the questions at the center of the interviews, see Damien Smith Pfister, “Reflections on the ARST Oral History Project,” Prosechó, 9 March 2014. Web. 10 March 2014. Participants in the Oral History Project interviews at NCA included David Berube, John Angus Campbell, Leah Ceccarelli, Celeste Condit, David Depew, Jeanne Fahnestock, Randy Harris, Carl Herndl, Lisa Keränen, John Lynch, John Lyne, Carolyn Miller, Lawrence Prelli, Judy Segal, Greg Wilson, and James Wynn. Participants were selected in advance based on their confirmed invitation to attend the twentieth anniversary meeting of ARST held as a preconference before the ninety-eighth Annual meeting of the National Communication Association in Orlando, Florida. Our data, therefore, represent a convenient sampling of ARST affiliates. In one sense this type of nonprobability sampling can be viewed as a limitation; in another sense it serves to help hone in on a particular subset of rhetoricians, a subset that can be described as “communication-friendly” and that readily attend conferences (sometimes outside of their home disciplines) in pursuit of RSTM connections. We thank Pfister’s undergraduate research assistant Carrie Adkisson for her diligent work in editing the interviews.

3. 3Full citations for all sixteen oral history interviews are included with our references and exact quotes are time stamped in-text to facilitate easy retrieval from the video or audio sources.

4. 4For example, Heather Graves argued that Bacon’s inductive method appropriated Roman and Early Christian versions of rhetorical theories of invention that collapsed the distinctions between dialectic and rhetoric (“Rhetoric” 46–61).

5. 5This quotation has been modestly edited with the approval of the speaker.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kenny Walker

Kenny Walker is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. His research theorizes the role of rhetorical practice, visual communication, and digital media in science and environmental controversies. In particular, his work examines how, within environmental controversies, uncertainties function as dynamic and distributed cognitive sites that mediate scientific ethos, and conduct the critical work of translation. He can be reached at [email protected].

Jennifer Malkowski

Jennifer Malkowski is a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. Broadly, her research focuses on the rhetorics of health and medicine and pays particular attention to how considerations of citizenship, safety, and inequality influence health care and policy processes, especially as they relate to controversial biomedical issues. Most recently, she has employed qualitative methods of data collection and rhetorical methods of textual analysis to explore tensions between a medical professional’s obligation to safeguard public health and the rights of individuals to make decisions concerning vaccination. She can be reached at [email protected].

Damien Smith Pfister

Damien Smith Pfister is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His research examines the impact of digitally networked media on rhetorical practice, visual culture, and public deliberation. He is interested in how nascent genres of communication, from blogging and microblogging to social networking sites and memes, provide new opportunities for citizens to affect public culture. He can be reached at [email protected].