J. Blake Scott

Rearticulating Civic Engagement Through Cultural Studies and Service-Learning

Although service-learning has the potential to infuse technical communication pedagogy with civic goals, it can easily be co-opted by a hyperpragmatism that limits ethical critique and civic engagement. Service-learnings component of reflection, in particular, can become an uncritical, narrow invention or project management tool. Integrating cultural studies and service-learning can help position students as critical citizens who produce effective and ethical discourse and who create more inclusive forms of power. Rather than being tacked on, cultural studies approaches should be incorporated into core service-learning assignments.

Kairos as Indeterminate Risk Management: The Pharmaceutical Industry's Response to Bioterrorism

The pharmaceutical industrys response to the threat of bioterrorism following 9-11 invoked the rhetorical notion of kairos as an urgent and ongoing opportunity not only to protect the nation but also to improve the industrys reputation and fortify its political power. Yet the notion of kairos as seizing an advantage—grounded in modernist assumptions about agency and control—is also complicated by the case history of big pharmas response, which left the industry vulnerable to heightened and additional risks. This case history suggests that kairos can be less about seizing an advantage than about indeterminately responding to shifting, unbounded, uncertain, unpredictable, and uncontrollable risks shaped by the processes of globalization.The pharmaceutical industrys response to the threat of bioterrorism following 9-11 invoked the rhetorical notion of kairos as an urgent and ongoing opportunity not only to protect the nation but also to improve the industrys reputation and fortify its political power. Yet the notion of kairos as seizing an advantage—grounded in modernist assumptions about agency and control—is also complicated by the case history of big pharmas response, which left the industry vulnerable to heightened and additional risks. This case history suggests that kairos can be less about seizing an advantage than about indeterminately responding to shifting, unbounded, uncertain, unpredictable, and uncontrollable risks shaped by the processes of globalization.

Sophistic ethics in the technical writing classroom: Teaching nomos, deliberation, and action

Drawing on arguments by Carolyn Miller, Steven Katz, and others, this essay claims that teaching ethics is particularly important to technical writing. Next, the essay outlines a classical, sophistic approach to ethics based on the theories and pedagogies of Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates. This sophistic approach emphasizes the Greek concept of nomos, internal and external deliberation, and responsible action or articulation. The final section of the essay discusses possible problems and pedagogical applications of sophistic ethics in the contemporary technical writing classroom.

THE PUBLIC POLICY DEBATE OVER NEWBORN HIV TESTING: A CASE STUDY OF THE KNOWLEDGE ENTHYMEME

Abstract This essay analyzes the web of persuasion named the “knowledge enthymeme”; in the public policy debate over mandatory newborn HIV testing in the United States and especially New York. Bringing together classical rhetorical theory and Foucaults theory of the knowledge‐power loop, the essay explains how the conceptual/argumentative frame of the knowledge enthymeme helped shape the knowledge‐power relations of mandatory newborn testing in dangerous ways. Ultimately, the knowledge enthymeme blocked more responsive approaches to testing by exaggerating the beneficial effects of testing and its knowledge, ignoring the contingenices of this knowledge, and bypassing the “situated knowledges “ of the women it targets.

Tracking Rapid HIV Testing Through the Cultural Circuit Implications for Technical Communication

The cultural studies model of the cultural circuit can help students track the larger circulation and transformation of technical communication in order to ethically critique and respond to it. Applying the model to specific cases of technology and its accompanying documentation (in this case the OraQuick rapid HIV test) can illustrate for students the ethical necessity of extending the usual focus on production to distribution, marketing, interpretation, and use. Students can then channel this awareness to their own writing projects, taking action to ensure that these projects are responsive and empowering to those whom they affect.

Afterword: Elaborating Health and Medicine’s Publics

This essay argues that medical and health humanists interested in the rhetorical work of publics can extend their research by attending to embodiment and infrastructure. In addition to discussing how such strategies are illustrated in the essays appearing in this special issue, I relate them to the rhetorical study of personal health records (PHRs) as described in consumer-directed arguments. I conclude by posing two questions to health and medical humanists: “How do discursive constructions of publics and more specific instantiations of embodied experiences mutually shape each other?” and “What do the infrastructures of health and medical users look like and involve in their enactment?”

Putting women and newborns to the HIV test: A case study of a public policy topos

This essay analyzes public health policy and biomedical arguments about mandatory prenatal and newborn HIV testing, focusing on the role of a special topos—the “scales topos”—in conceptually and rhetorically shaping the arguments of the debate. The essay argues that two overlapping versions of this dominant frame—one from public policy discourse and the other from legal/bioethical discourse—work together to support a web of reductive arguments that distorts issues surrounding testing and prematurely pushes the terms of the debate past careful deliberation to implementation. As a case study, this essay demonstrates how special topoi can function as restricting frames that oversimplify issues, block crucial lines of argument, and therefore help produce a range of harmful effects.

Book Review: Book Review Editor: Jeffrey Jablonski University of Nevada, Las Vegas Spinuzzi, Clay (2008) Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 230 pp

Like many of you, I am interested every time I see a new publication by Clay Spinuzzi, whose award-winning work has already taught us so much about the activities of technical communicators and organizations. Spinuzzi’s latest book, Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications, will not disappoint. In fact, you might just find it to be the most engaging—and teachable—of his scholarship so far. Earlier this year I taught this book in my PhD-level course on theories of texts and technologies, and it was one of the students’ (and my) favorite texts in the course, not only due to its lively, conversational style but also because of its rich and accessible discussion of what networks are and how they function. In Network, Spinuzzi draws on two competing theories of networks— activity theory and actor-network theory—to examine the sociotechnical activity of a telecommunications company, ‘‘Telecorp.’’ Through a series of absorbing and accessible analytic ‘‘snapshots’’ derived from Spinuzzi’s ethnographic work, the book illustrates how the company’s workers, genres, technologies, money, and other ‘‘actors’’ enact, extend, and transform Journal of Business and Technical Communication 24(2) 245-248 a 2010 SAGE Publications Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav http://jbtc.sagepub.com