Jordynn Jack

“This is Your Brain on Rhetoric”: Research Directions for Neurorhetorics

Neuroscience research findings yield fascinating new insights into human cognition and communication. Rhetoricians may be attracted to neuroscience research that uses imaging tools (such as fMRI) to draw inferences about rhetorical concepts, such as emotion, reason, or empathy. Yet this interdisciplinary effort poses challenges to rhetorical scholars. Accordingly, research in neurorhetorics should be two-sided: not only should researchers question the neuroscience of rhetoric (the brain functions related to persuasion and argument), but they should also inquire into the rhetoric of neuroscience (how neuroscience research findings are framed rhetorically). This two-sided approach can help rhetoric scholars to use neuroscience insights in a responsible manner, minimizing analytical pitfalls. These two approaches can be combined to examine neuroscience discussions about methodology, research, and emotion, and studies of autism and empathy, with a rhetorical as well as scientific lens. Such an approach yields productive insights into rhetoric while minimizing potential pitfalls of interdisciplinary work.

A Pedagogy of Sight: Microscopic Vision in Robert Hooke's Micrographia

Robert Hookes Micrographia (1665) holds an important place in the history of scientific visual rhetoric. Hookes accomplishment lies not only in a stunning array of engravings, but also in a “pedagogy of sight”—a rhetorical framework that instructs readers how to view images in accordance with an ideological or epistemic program. Hooke not only taught his readers how to view a new kind of image, but recruited potential contributors to the program of natural philosophy. In particular, Hooke taught his readers to see microscopic specimens as mechanical bodies, as evidence of divine creation, and as pleasant entertainment.

Mapping the semantic structure of cognitive neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience, as a discipline, links the biological systems studied by neuroscience to the processing constructs studied by psychology. By mapping these relations throughout the literature of cognitive neuroscience, we visualize the semantic structure of the discipline and point to directions for future research that will advance its integrative goal. For this purpose, network text analyses were applied to an exhaustive corpus of abstracts collected from five major journals over a 30-month period, including every study that used fMRI to investigate psychological processes. From this, we generate network maps that illustrate the relationships among psychological and anatomical terms, along with centrality statistics that guide inferences about network structure. Three terms—prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and anterior cingulate cortex—dominate the network structure with their high frequency in the literature and the density of their connections with other neuroanatomical terms. From network statistics, we identify terms that are understudied compared with their importance in the network (e.g., insula and thalamus), are underspecified in the language of the discipline (e.g., terms associated with executive function), or are imperfectly integrated with other concepts (e.g., subdisciplines like decision neuroscience that are disconnected from the main network). Taking these results as the basis for prescriptive recommendations, we conclude that semantic analyses provide useful guidance for cognitive neuroscience as a discipline, both by illustrating systematic biases in the conduct and presentation of research and by identifying directions that may be most productive for future research.

Gender Copia: Feminist Rhetorical Perspectives on an Autistic Concept of Sex/Gender

The prevalence of nontraditional gender identities in many autistic people raises provocative questions for feminist scholars. In particular, autistic writers often invite alternative understandings of sex/gender as a multiple, rhetorical phenomenon. Autobiographies, blogs, and Internet posts show how autistic individuals view gender as a copia, or tool for inventing multiple possibilities through available sex/gender discourses. Four particular discourses emerge through which autistic people understand gender: identification, neurodiversity, performance, and queer identity.

Leviathan and the Breast Pump: Toward an Embodied Rhetoric of Wearable Technology

In this essay, I develop a feminist framework for analyzing wearable technologies as embodied rhetorics, one that considers (1) how wearable technologies enable micro-performances of gender, status, and identity; (2) how wearable technologies are embedded in policy/political frameworks as well as scientific/medical ones; (3) how wearable technologies are embedded in spatiotemporal networks of actors, objects, and so on; and (4) how the design of technological objects themselves do or do not live up to the promises of wearability and mobility. Using an analysis of the breast pump as my case and drawing from interviews with women about their experiences, I show how the breast pump crystallizes a network of rhetorics that is both disruptive and productive of gendered differences. In particular, the breast pump presents rhetorical arguments for returning to work soon after childbirth while performing a professional role. At the same time, this technology makes an argument for including nursing bodies on college campuses, spaces that have not historically considered those bodies or their needs.

Gestational Diabetes Testing, Narrative, and Medical Distrust

In this article, we investigate the role of scientific and patient narratives on perceptions of the medical debate around gestational diabetes (GDM) testing. Among medical scientists, we show that the narrative surrounding GDM testing affirms that future research and data will lead to medical consensus. We call this narrative trajectory the “deferred quest.” For patients, however, diagnosis and their subsequent discovery that biomedicine does not speak in one voice ruptures their trust in medical authority. This new distrust creates space for patients to develop a Frankian quest narrative where they become the protagonist in their story. Additionally, across these different narratives, we observe how character is constructed and employed to negotiate trust. We conclude that healthcare providers should assess the narrative trajectory adopted by patients after diagnosis. Also, we suggest that providers acknowledge the lack of medical consensus to their patients. This veracity would foster women’s sense of trust in their provider as well as allow women to be active interlocutors in a debate that ultimately plays out in their deliberation about their body, pregnancy, and risk.

Advancing Pre-Health Humanities as Intensive Research Practice: Principles and Recommendations from a Cross-Divisional Baccalaureate Setting

This essay argues that pre-health humanities programs should focus on intensive research practice for baccalaureate students and provides three guiding principles for implementing it. Although the interdisciplinary nature of health humanities permits baccalaureate students to use research methods from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, pre-health humanities coursework tends to force students to adopt only one of many disciplinary identities. Alternatively, an intensive research approach invites students to critically select and combine methods from multiple (and seemingly opposing) disciplines to ask and answer questions about health problems more innovatively. Using the authors’ experiences with implementing health humanities baccalaureate research initiatives at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the authors contend that pre-health humanities programs should teach and study multiple disciplinary research methods and their values; examine how health humanities research might transfer across disciplines; and focus on mentoring opportunities for funding, presenting, and publishing research. These recommendations have the potential to create unprecedented research experiences for baccalaureate students as they prepare to enter careers within and beyond the allied health professions.

Mapping Rhetorical Topologies in Cognitive Neuroscience

Many tools that neuroscientists use to trace the complex topography of the human brain draw on the neuroscience literature to yield “metanalyses” or “syntheses of data.” These approaches conflate rhetorical connections in the literature with physical connections in the brain. By contrast, the model presented in this chapter seeks not a topography of the brain but a topology of neuroscience. A social network analysis of titles and abstracts for cognitive neuroscience articles yields a topology of brain regions and functions. This map can help researchers identify underresearched areas (e.g., the thalamus) or areas that are oversaturated (e.g., the amygdala). The map also helps researchers identify subdisciplines, such as “neuroeconomics,” that have not yet integrated with the broader field—“islands” where rhetorical work could yield benefits.

Healing Arts: Rhetorical Techne as Medical (Humanities) Intervention

ABSTRACT To forge collaborative ties among the rhetoric of health and medicine, the medical humanities, and medicine itself, scholars need shared terms. We argue that techne can unite researchers from across these disciplines. To demonstrate, we discuss our interdisciplinary research study, Writing Diabetes. By learning about the techne of rhetoric and writing about diabetes, participants became more attentive to the techne of their health experience—or “health techne”—enabling them to invent new ways of “doing” diabetes.

Book Review: The Languages of Edison's Light:

“Hurry up the machine. I have struck a big bonanza.” That was the urgent message Thomas Edison sent to William Wallace, developer of a powerful electric generator, on September 13, 1878. Edison needed this machine to complete his latest project, begun only that August: the incandescent lightbulb. On September 16, in an article published in The Sun, Edison claimed that he had already developed a working model. His first patent for electric lighting was already in the works. However, it would take four more years of intensive work in and out of the laboratory for Edison’s system to be ready for implementation. What does this story have to do with rhetoric? After all, Edison is popularized as an American icon: a skilled inventor, scientist, and businessman. None of these roles, on the surface, seems to have much to do with language. The Languages of Edison’s Light, however, shows that Edison’s lightbulb did in fact emerge from a host of written texts: telegrams, patent applications, newspaper articles, journals, personal correspondence, laboratory notebooks. In his study, Charles Bazerman exposes the crucial role language played in the development of the lightbulb. The Languages of Edison’s Light has four parts. The first, “The Opening Scene,” outlines the story of the electric light and examines some of the first reactions, public and private, to Edison’s outlandish initial claim about his “big bonanza.” In the second part, “Establishing Meanings in Evolving Systems,” Bazerman describes the rhetorical strategies Edison used to position his emergent lightbulb within preexisting discourse communities—in the newspapers, financial systems, the laboratory, the patent system, the technical press, and the marketplace—even before it had been fully tested and refined as a technology. The third section, “Making It Real: The Rhetoric of Material Presence,” explains how Edison promoted his now functional