Research Interests
[A] legitimate bone of contention can be summed up in the following proposition: practicing scientists are only a fraction of those who contribute to what science is. The other contributors are not just those people who use science more or less as scientists intend, such as technologists, physicians, and policymakers. [Science and Technology Studies] also takes seriously the rest of the population who consume science by reading The Tao of Physics, watching “Tomorrow’s World,” and eating fat-free muffins.
—Steve Fuller, The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies
I begin with the above epigraph by philosopher of technoscience, Steve Fuller, because it serves to identify the scope of my own research in rhetorics of technoscience. If I could identify a single concept that lies at the heart of technoscience studies, it’s interdisciplinarity—both in terms of methodological approaches and scope of research. Fuller’s epigraph is an argument of demarcation—it hopes to distinguish technoscience studies from traditional approaches to science studies that investigate the culture and discourse of scientists, the science/policy interface, and the underlying philosophies of science. In contrast philosophers, sociologists, historians, and rhetoricians of technoscience capitalize on shared research methods—ethnography, critical analysis, discourse studies—to investigate the entire cultural matrix surrounding technoscientific networks. Despite my invocation of Fuller, however, I do not view this differentiation as oppositional. Rather, I hope to pursue a long-term research agenda in the rhetoric of technoscience in such a way that it constitutes an integrated interdisciplinary partnership which both includes and challenges the rhetoric of science as traditionally conceived.
My approach is designed to capitalize on both the strengths of traditional rhetorical inquiry and the insights from technoscience studies. The extension of the scope of inquiry to include a wider array of cultural artifacts allows the rhetoric of technoscience to explore the relationship between discourse and context in a more nuanced fashion. In so doing, it can transcend the traditional approach and avoid the theoretical/ideological problems sometimes found in traditional rhetoric of science, such as valorization of science, and focus on “great rhetors in science.” Finally, in both critical and practical ways, rhetoric has the opportunity to contribute to what Donna Haraway identifies as the “high-stakes game” of “shaping technoscience.” Rhetoric of technoscience can use its critical resources to expose the discursive mechanisms of technoscientific hegemony. Additionally, rhetoricians can help scientific practitioners see the problems that arise from the continued use of enlightenment linguistic resources. In so doing, rhetoricians may be able to help eliminate dangerous and unproductive assumptions about the nature of scientific knowledge and its relationship to technology, policy, and the public. For example, through deconstructing the assumption that science and policy should occur in sequence, rhetoricians may be able to help foster an escape from the dangerous paralysis in climate change regulations which arises from concerns about the uncertainty of predictive climate modeling. Under this rubric, my scholarship focuses on the rhetorics of medical science and policy. In particular, I am dedicated to exploring the discursive mechanisms of interdisciplinarity and agency in technoscientific contexts. While much of health communication often focuses exclusively on the doctor/patient relationship or ethics of care, my research (while it includes this at times) extends its inquiry to FDA and DEA regulation, the insurance industry and big pharmaceuticals. This extension is especially important given my interest in agency. Certainly, there has been a great deal of research in history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and rhetoric of science on incommensurability, theoretical paradigms, and the challenges they pose to agency and change. However, in grounding my research in rhetorics of technoscience, I can expand my projects to explore not only the rhetorical practices and forms of scientific communication, but also the hindrances to agency that arise from legislation, regulatory policy, and corporate interests.
Most recently, I have been investigating how these challenges to agency manifest themselves in the medical-industrial complex. The medical-industrial complex exerts considerable inertia on medical theory and practice in much the same fashion that the oft-interrogated military-industrial complex exerts pressure on particle physics. The sometimes coordinated and sometimes conflictual practices of insurance companies, the FDA, medical education, and professional organizations provide significant challenges to interdisciplinary medical practice and new medical innovation. Using the resources of rhetorical criticism, Foucauldian analysis, and ethnographic investigation, I attempt to interrogate the discursive mechanisms with either inhibit or foster agency within the medical-industrial complex. For example, in my forthcoming “Agency and the Rhetoric of Medicine: Brain Scans and the Ontology of Fibromyalgia,” I explore how the demands of medical science and the FDA for objective evidence prevented the acceptance of fibromyalgia—a chronic pain disorder—as a legitimate disease. However, these very same discursive structures grounded in Western sciences’ underlying epistemology of ocular centrism actually paved the way for rapid acceptance of fibromyalgia, once it could be demonstrated through the agency of neuroimaging.
Extending the research from this article, my dissertation, “Rhetorics of Pain: Agency and Regulation in the Medical-Industrial Complex” explores multiple facets of medical-industrial complex and how they either inhibit or enable agency in pain medicine. In particular, this project focuses on two years of ethnographic research on the attempts of an interdisciplinary healthcare organization to found a new approach to pain. In recognizing explicitly and on their own that the foundations of modern medicine and the division of medical specialties are grounded in and reinforce the Cartesian body/mind dichotomy, these clinicians are hoping to build a new theoretical and practical approach to pain that rejects that binary. Their emerging interdisciplinary discourse on pain conflicts with the discourse and methodologies of the group members’ individual disciplines. My research studies the efforts of these clinicians to overcome their disciplinary preconceptions, to understand alternative perspectives and to forge a new interdisciplinary discourse on pain which, following Latour, I refer to as a non-modern science. Additionally, the dissertation chronicles my investigation of the external hindrances to this process: insurance companies reimbursement policies that find interdisciplinarity too expensive, FDA regulations that challenge the legitimacy of pain disorders, pharmaceuticals companies that aggressively pursue corporate interests over health, and the effects of the DEA and the war on drugs on narcotics prescriptions.
This project has proved itself incredibly productive in allowing for multiple conference presentations, at least one article publication, and another under review at the moment. I believe the scope of the project will allow me, with continued research, to revise my dissertation into a book covering much of the same material. Additionally, my dissertation project has provided a foundation for several other research projects. During my dissertation research I collected numerous artifacts on a relatively new medical innovation called neurostimulation. Neurostimulation is a medical practice that requires intense interdisciplinary cooperation among various disciplines to implant computerized healthcare interventions into patients. Though there is not enough room left in the dissertation to include this research, I plan to continuing exploring this case-study as an excellent example of interdisciplinary practice. I also intend to continue my investigations into neuroimaging. As a master’s student, I specialized in rhetoric, semiotics, and new media. My MA thesis incorporated dialogic theory from the Sophists to Bakhtin in the study and pedagogy of new communications technologies. Using that history as a foundation, I would like to explore the semiotics, representational logics, generic conventions and cultural impacts of neuroimaging technologies such as PET scans, CT, and MRI. Finally, I am currently working on (and plan to continue with) various projects exploring agency and change within technoscientific communities. Currently, I am pursuing research projects at Iowa State that focus on sustainable agriculture and theoretical foundations for rhetorics of technoscience. While the move to a new department may not allow me to continue precisely these projects (particularly the one on Iowa agriculture), they are representative of the types of research I find productive and illuminating.