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Journal of Business and Technical Communication | 2005

Genre Theory, Health-Care Discourse, and Professional Identity Formation

Catherine F. Schryer; Philippa Spoel

This article explores the value of rhetorical genre theory for health care and professional communication researchers. The authors outline the conceptual resources emerging from genre theory, specifically ways to conceptualize social context, professional identity formation, and genres as functioning but hierarchical networks, and discuss the way they have used these resources in two separate but complementary health-care studies: a project that documents the ways regulated and regularized resources of the genre of case presentations shape the professional identity formation of medical students and a project that extends this theoretical work to observe that genres, especially policy genres, function to regularize or control other genres and shape the identity formation of midwives in Ontario, Canada. The authors also observe that the implications of rhetorical genre theory have impelled both of these studies to develop an interdisciplinary trajectory that includes members of health-care communities as participating researchers.


Technical Communication Quarterly | 2008

Communicating Values, Valuing Community through Health-Care Websites: Midwifery's Online Ethos and Public Communication in Ontario

Philippa Spoel

Drawing on the rhetorical concept of ethos, this study explores the professional identities, health-care relationships, and forms of community constructed by two midwifery websites in Ontario. Rather than facilitating communal and dialogic modes of communication with the public, these websites enact primarily a unidirectional consumption model. This design structure both reflects and reinforces the complexities of midwiferys recent shift from being an explicitly alternative form of health care, to becoming part of the dominant health-care framework.


Health | 2012

The moralization of healthy living: Burke’s rhetoric of rebirth and older adults’ accounts of healthy eating

Philippa Spoel; Roma Harris; Flis Henwood

This article develops a rhetorical analysis of how older adults in Canada and the UK engage with civic-moral imperatives of healthy living. The analysis draws on Burke’s concepts of ‘symbolic hierarchies’ and the ‘rhetoric of rebirth’ to explore how participants discursively negotiate the moralizing framework of self-regulation and self-improvement central to healthy eating discourse, in particular. Working from the premise that healthy eating is a ‘principle of perfection’ that citizens are encouraged to strive to achieve, the article traces the vocabularies and logical distinctions of ‘guilt’, ‘purification’ and ‘redemption’ in participants’ accounts of what healthy eating means to them. This analysis reveals some of the complex, situated and often strategic ways in which they rearticulate and reconfigure the normative imperatives of healthy eating in ways suited to their lived experience and their priorities for health and well-being in older age.


Environmental Communication-a Journal of Nature and Culture | 2014

Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community” in a Canadian Environmental Risk Assessment

Philippa Spoel; Rebecca C. Den Hoed

This paper addresses the issue of public engagement in environmental risk contexts through a rhetorical analysis of the key term “community” in a risk assessment of mining-caused soil contamination. Drawing on Burkes concept of terministic screens and method of cluster criticism, the analysis shows the divergent constitutions of “community” in the Sudbury Soils Studys official discourse and the citizen-activist rhetoric of the Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study. Tracing the verbal and visual clusters within each organizations articulation of “community” as place and people reveals how the official Studys technical-regulatory ideology of environmental risk and citizen participation is countered by the Community Committees contestatory environmental justice ideology. These competing views of “community” are mutually constitutive in that the official Studys mainstream risk discourse establishes the terms for the Community Committees reactive counter-discourse, thus limiting citizen participation mainly to questions of “downstream” impacts. Our rhetorical analysis of “community” suggests a generative method for understanding the complex power relations animating specific risk communication contexts as well as for potentially reinventing “community” in terms more conducive to meaningful citizen engagement.


The Journal of Medical Humanities | 2014

Rhetorics of Health Citizenship: Exploring Vernacular Critiques of Government’s Role in Supporting Healthy Living

Philippa Spoel; Roma Harris; Flis Henwood

This article explores how older adults negotiate and partially counter normative expectations of “health citizenship” that stress individual responsibility for maintaining health and preventing health problems. Based on interviews with 55 participants in Canada and the U.K. about what healthy living means to them in their everyday lives, we examine how the dominant discourse of personal responsibility in participants’ responses is counterpointed by a more muted, yet significant, alternative critical perspective on the relative roles and responsibilities of government and citizens in making healthy living possible. Drawing on Hauser’s (1999) concept of vernacular rhetoric along with recent theories of environmental citizenship, we analyze how participants exercise their civic-political judgment by using a logic of dissociation to argue that what government says about the importance of healthy living is incompatible with what government does to support citizens’ abilities to eat healthily and live actively. By deploying this technique of argumentation to address structural-political-economic dimensions of healthy living, participants enact, in modest ways, an alternative, critical-collective mode of health citizenship that complicates and, at least partially, disrupts neoliberal constructions of the individually responsible, “good” health citizen.


Health | 2017

Public health promotion of "local food": Constituting the self-governing citizen-consumer.

Colleen Derkatch; Philippa Spoel

This article explores how the recent and growing promotion of local foods by public health units in Ontario, Canada, rhetorically interpellates the “good” health citizen as someone who not only takes responsibility for personal health but, through the consumption and support of “local food,” also accepts and fulfills her responsibilities to care for the local economy, the community’s well-being, and the natural environment. Drawing on Charland’s concept of constitutive rhetoric, we analyze a selection of public health unit documents about local food to develop a textured account of the complex, multifaceted forms of health citizenship they constitute. Our analysis reveals that, despite their appeals to environmental sustainability and community well-being, these materials primarily characterize the ideal health citizen as an informed consumer who supports the interests of the neoliberal state through individualized lifestyle behaviors, consuming goods produced and distributed through private enterprise. By exhorting individuals to “buy local,” public health discourse therefore frames responsible health citizenship principally in consumerist terms that constrain the range of available options for citizens to engage in meaningful action vis-à-vis their food systems.


Environmental Communication-a Journal of Nature and Culture | 2018

Preserving Wilderness or Protecting Homelands? Intersections and Divergences in Activist Discourses About Mining in Ontario’s Far North

Philippa Spoel

ABSTRACT Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire/Wawangajing controversy constitutes a complex site of debate about the risks and benefits of mining in an area of major ecological significance that is also the ancestral territory of nine First Nation communities. This paper investigates the rhetorical alignments and divergences in public calls by Matawa First Nations tribal council and the Ontario Wildlands League for stronger environmental assessment of mining projects than that favoured by the Canadian government. Tracing the terminologies each group uses to describe the affected region and its inhabitants in its activist rhetoric about EA offers insight into the contingent, shifting ways in which wilderness advocacy and Indigenous justice discourses may speak together yet distinctly within contemporary environmental-natural resource disputes.


Canadian journal of communication | 2016

Images of Essence: Journalists’ Discourse on the Professional “Discipline of Verification”

Ivor Shapiro; Colette Brin; Philippa Spoel; Lee Marshall

The verification of factual accuracy is widely held as essential to journalists’ professional identity. Our rhetorical analysis of interviews with award-winning and semi-randomly selected newspaper reporters confirms this professional norm while revealing a preference for four types of image to describe verification methods. Spatial and temporal travel images paint verification as an embedded but adaptable heuristic process. Images of conflict suggest verification as a weapon and a shield against implied enemies. Journalists speak of vision both literally as the preeminent tool of verification, and figuratively as a metaphor for interpretation. Meanwhile, a fourth and seemingly predominant image—that of storytelling—functions to integrate the images of travel, battle, and observation and the different forms of professional identity that they connote. The quest for truth through storytelling likewise suggests a rich, if ambiguous, sense of good journalism as combining the instruments of fact with the craft of fiction.


Social Science & Medicine | 2011

Informing health? Negotiating the logics of choice and care in everyday practices of ‘healthy living’

Flis Henwood; Roma Harris; Philippa Spoel


The Journal of Medical Humanities | 2006

Negotiating public and professional interests: a rhetorical analysis of the debate concerning the regulation of midwifery in Ontario, Canada.

Philippa Spoel; Susan James

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Roma Harris

University of Western Ontario

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