Teaching Rhetoric of Health and Medicine to Undergraduates: Citizens, Interdisciplinarity, and Affect

摘要

The challenge of improving the position of rhetorical studies of health and medicinernwithin the more established field of health communication suggests something of thernperils and possibilities that Condit (1990) envisioned when she imagined a rhetoricsocialrnscience mating. In this vision, social science communication is “the sanctimoniouslyrnchaste youth” and rhetoric is the slutty counterpart or “harlot” who consortsrnwith such shady figures as cultural studies and feminist studies (p. 323). In this scene,rnsocial scientists (presumably including the majority of health communication scholars)rnare purists devoted to the discovery of objective, value-free knowledge throughrnmethods as scientific as possible, while rhetoric welcomes liaisons with all sorts ofrnbedfellows in the interests of identifying, judging, and even creating values, all inrnthe heady atmosphere of open-ended humanistic inquiry.