Who are the users of synthetic DNA? Using metaphors to activate microorganisms at the center of synthetic biology

Abstract Synthetic biology, a multidisciplinary field involving designing and building with DNA, often designs and builds in microorganisms. The role of these microorganisms tends to be understood through metaphors making the microbial cell like a machine and emphasizing its passivity: cells are described as platforms, chassis, and computers. Here, I point to the efficacy of such metaphors in enacting the microorganism as a particular kind of (non-)participant in the research process, and I suggest the utility of employing metaphors that make microorganisms a different kind of thing—active participants, contributors, and even collaborators in scientific research. This suggestion is worth making, I argue, because enabling the activity of the microorganism generates opportunities for learning from microorganisms in ways that may help explain currently unexplained phenomena in synthetic biology and suggest new experimental directions. Moreover, “activating the microorganism” reorients relationships between human scientists and nonhuman experimental participants away from control over nonhuman creatures and toward respect for and listening to them, generating conditions of possibility for exploring what responsible research means when humans try to be responsible toward and even with creatures across species boundaries

Through the grapevine: In search of a rhetoric of industry-oriented science communication

Rhetorical features of industry-oriented science communication texts structure meetings between science and industry communities and, consequently, structure research industry relationships. Industry-oriented science communication, however, remains dominated by metaphors of technology transfer and research utilization which continue to enact deficit model paradigms by drawing on essentially positivist constructions of scientific knowledge. In so doing, these models limit the capacity for science communication texts to make research relevant to industry practice and to facilitate research-industry collaboration as multidirectional knowledge sharing. Better metaphors for more relevant and more collaborative communication can, I argue, be found in material semiotic paradigms which would have science communicators align and overlap the multiply practiced worlds of science and industry instead of transferring acontextual, would-be universal knowledge to deeply emplaced sites of utilization. In interviews with and surveys of winemakers and growers in Washington State and New Zealand, I find that technology transfer paradigms configure wine industry members' interactions with research in ways which systematically eliminate moments in which this public participates in scientific processes. Winemakers and growers generally value and seek out scientific information, but also tend to perceive scientific and industry knowledge as complementary, with industry knowledge having the epistemic authority to judge new scientific findings. Textual analyses of research dissemination in these two settings outline science communication texts which limit valid knowledge to scientific knowledge alone, manifestly ignoring industry knowledge and the context-dependency of knowledge-making practices for industry use. These texts construct research practices as above and distant from the world of winemaker and grower practices rather than making scientific and industry practices adjacent and proximal. Material semiotic paradigms would in contrast have science communicators align and overlap the multiply practiced worlds of science and industry. Instead of transferring acontextual knowledge to sites of utilization, science communication would make it possible for industry readers to locate scientific knowledge practices with respect to their own practices, making science relevant to industry by drawing relationships amongst them. A collaborative rhetoric of industry-oriented science communication would, therefore, communicate scientific research as locatable practice in the context of its generation, recognizing the meaning-making practices of industry audiences and their potential contribution to the iterative process of creating applied scientific claims valid in both scientific and industry spaces

Extension resource use among Washington State wine makers and wine grape growers:A case for focusing on relevance

Interview and surveys were used to understand Extension relevance in the context of overall information resource use among Washington State wine makers and wine grape growers. Relevance, rather than adoption, is suggested as a frame for assessing Extension communication with these practitioners. Results suggest that Extension resources are used and valued, but not always perceived as relevant. Moreover, practitioners\u27 resource use preferences were diverse but tended to fall into three categories: science driven, value driven, and utility driven. Appreciating differences in how these groups perceive Extension resources as relevant may be useful in framing more efficient and effective communication with them

Beyond student writing why writing across the curriculum needs disciplinary discourse

The writing across the curriculum (WAC) movement has largely been about writing to learn, bringing novel pedagogical techniques to perhaps less-progressive disciplines. I argue that, both to become maximally useful to the non-English disciplines it claims to serve and to remain relevant and sustainable, WAC as a movement should refocus its attention on helping nonEnglish disciplines teach a rhetorically-aware command of disciplinary discourse to their apprentice-colleague students. Understanding WAC as a means of educating students in disciplinary discourse compels a vision of WAC initiatives as genuinely collaborative enterprises between composition scholars and non-English disciplinary faculty, recognizing the latter as experts in writing in their fields, and calls for assessment at the direct level of student writing rather than the abstracted level of faculty attitudes. I illustrate one way of imaging what writing instruction is taking place, in upper-division courses in the biological sciences, by cataloguing instructor commentary on student writing assignments and find that the vast majority of instructors of these courses are not responding to student writing effectively per contemporary composition scholarship. Interviewing members of the minority of biology instructors who do v use writing in especially effective ways, I identify ways in which these instructors’ selfexpressed writing pedagogies align with recommendations from contemporary composition scholarship and suggest that these instructors may act as the nexus of productive WAC collaborations. Finally, I address concerns that employing WAC initiatives to teach disciplinary discourse works against the goal of interdisciplinarity, arguing that interdisciplinarity – which implies the reduction of differences in disciplinary discourse to lowest common denominators – is impossible, but that WAC initiatives focusing on disciplinary discourse can productively move toward a culture of transdisciplinarity – communication across disciplines via explicit rhetorical awareness of discourse communities – in which students become powerful communicators within and outside their disciplines