The Boundaries of the New Frontier: Rhetoric and Communication at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

摘要

On 19 July 2006 Joanna S. Ploeger died of cancer at the age of thirty-nine. We are lucky that she left this smart, thought-provoking book. Ploeger's portrait of the Chicago-area high-energy physics laboratory is incisive, original, and telling. Understanding Fermilab, she explains, requires confronting "its boundaries and spaces." Ploeger's intention is not only to explore the laboratory's physical borders and interiors in line with the recent scholarly trend in history of science, medicine, and technology, but also to determine the laboratory's rhetorical construction, that is, the ways in which all those connected with Fermilab-employees, visitors, politicians, taxpayers-shape definitions of the laboratory and its work through their interactions and collective experience. She argues that it is crucial to study these "rhetorical boundaries" because they "help determine the outcomes of economic, political, and symbolic disputes about the laboratory and its mission." Even more important, such boundaries "determine the power and importance of the national laboratories as institutions, justifying their work and negotiating their symbolic importance in debates about the role and reach of science in society" (p. 2).