Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Term 2
MWF, 10:00 – 11:00 a.m.
On May 8, 2016, the main story on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver concerned scientific studies. Oliver talked about media reports of not-really-scientific studies that invite people to believe that certain findings, even in the face of completely contradictory findings, are reasonable bases for decision making, especially on matters of health. You can see Oliver’s 19-minute segment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw. Within a week of broadcast, it has had over 5 million views. English 309 takes up, among its topics, some of Oliver’s concerns; possibly, it’s not as funny.
Although we typically think of science as existing in a realm separate from the realm of rhetoric (that is, persuasion), it is actually the case that science, even when it is working very well, relies on persuasion quite a bit. In fact, persuasion occurs in spaces we don’t typically think of as rhetorical: in the pages of scientific journals, in laboratories, in working groups tasked with arriving at diagnostic categories, in meetings of the FDA, and so on. Given the prominence of health topics in public discourse currently, this course pays special attention to the rhetoric of health and medicine—and considers questions like these: What are the strategies, and what are the effects, of pharmaceutical advertising? How does the Internet help to shape the contemporary health subject? How is naturopathy, as a practice, persuasive in itself? Is the “vaccine controversy” really a controversy?
