Neither Journalist nor Scientist: The Challenge of Science-Funded “Science Communications”

This paper proposes a heuristic of ethos indicators that could be used to shed light on how embedded science communicators juggle competing professional norms. Embedded science communicators combine often-opposing journalism, science, public and internal relations, education, and advocacy norms to create rhetorical products that may not be identified as advocacy

Is There Room for a Student of Rhetoric in a Giant NSF Grant Project?

Responding to recent movements exploring praxis possibilities for rhetoric of science scholars, my presentation shows one potential way for a student of rhetoric to be situated in a large science grant project and laboratory. This essay explores the promising benefits for rhetoric of science scholarship and grant project administration

Rhetorical dilemmas in funded science annual reporting

Scientists experience angst when faced with the task of writing the annual reports often required by their employers or funders. Although similar annual reports are widely studied in business contexts, communication and science studies disciplines have not considered annual reporting in science contexts. This is an oversight because annual reporting is one of the main ways that scientists communicate the progress of their research to stakeholders, including publics and policy-makers. Therefore, annual reporting is one way that science is guided and constrained by societal and cultural expectations. Further, existing scholarship has not considered the scientists’ frustration in reporting, which is a missed opportunity for communication scholars to engage with real, reoccurring communication concerns. Therefore, this dissertation fills these gaps by developing a deeper understanding of the experiences, issues, and challenges of science annual reporting. Specifically, this dissertation explores the ways in which scientists’ interpretations of their obligations suggest many possible rhetorical routes to fulfill report requirements, some of which are in tension with each other. It also shows strategies report writers use to make and justify their choices. The National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research for Iowa (Iowa NSF EPSCoR), a large interdisciplinary and interinstitutional grant project provides a useful case to study how annual reporting works since changing report requirements over its 5-year term led Iowa scientists and staff to regularly re-evaluate how they wrote reports. Interviews with faculty and staff, annual report documents, and other supporting documents were analyzed using grounded practical theory and rhetorical analysis. The analysis identifies the reasoned, reflective, but sometimes tension-reinforcing decisions report writers make about how to manage communication dilemmas. Although communication research generally considers transfer of known genre characteristics a way to constructively manage uncertainty in how to write, this case shows the transfer sometimes reinforces problems. Annual report writers at Iowa NSF EPSCoR experience problems largely due to the rhetorical scarcity NSF prescriptions create. Changing national requirements restrict some rhetorical choices such as word count, timing of submission, and style, while also identifying varied audiences to target and providing frameworks for organizing rich detail. These prescriptions not only conflict with each other; they also often run afoul of what report writers believe an annual report ought to be like. This leaves report writers with a dilemma in how to best write a report. In particular, requirements that ensure grant research is described in detail compete with requirements to ensure concision, such as page restrictions. As well, report writers’ perception of the annual report as a stakeholder-oriented communication with unknown public stakeholders plays a role in creating rhetorical scarcity because the rhetorical tools to target different audiences also sometimes conflict with each other, and writers are uncertain which set to use. In addition, rhetorical scarcity is felt when report requirements do not seem to allow for writers to fulfill their administrative role to support local faculty and staff fairly, for example by describing all the research in equal detail. When report writers choose any of a myriad of rhetorical techniques, such as highlighting only one research project, including figures or tables, or including prose descriptions, they show the salience of two ideal visions for the annual reports: the annual report as a comprehensive inventory of activities and the annual report as a narrative of struggle and achievement. These ideal visions are important because they are whole models of good conduct and values. Report writers use these ideals to justify their rhetorical choices during reporting. Inventory includes characteristics such as reporting data in tables and appendices, targeting evaluative audiences, and valuing numeric, comprehensive, and granular data. Report writers often describe inventorial reporting in the positive frame of “keeping track” of activities or more ambivalently as merely “collecting.” Narrative includes characteristics such as a single prose voice and temporal organization, targeting skeptical public audiences, and valuing coherence and balance. The inventory and narrative ideals imperfectly combine. This imperfect combination brings rhetorical scarcity to the forefront and reinforces frustration. Based on these results, there is a potential opportunity for communication scholars to positively engage with frustrated science annual report writers by guiding reflection about the ideals being invoked, their interaction, and their fit with stakeholder expectations. This engagement promises to help report writers better manage the frustrations of annual reporting

Bioeconomy Institute Trading Cards: Promotional Objects with Internal Purposes

This analysis of a deck of trading cards demonstrates how internal, institutional purposes are embedded in informational and promotional objects that serve multiple audiences and rhetorical situations. The institutional purposes potentially constrain and influence the agency of rhetors and their institutional and external audience

Creative Engagements: Community Management Roles for RSTEM Praxis

Established roles for praxis beyond teaching are often missing from discussions of RSTEM engagement with the science community. Although it is important to ground engagement in identifiable roles, it may be that these roles are still being conceived or need to be re-created contextually for every engagement situation. This paper grounds RSTEM engagement in one identifiable field of practice: scientific community management. RSTEM\u27s specialized attention to and understanding of how science communities and genre systems interact can provide insight into the forming of these communities and their management

Post-Normal Concerns in Science Communication Pedagogies

How might an instructor of science communication approach the post-normal issues of ethos, credibility, trust, and expertise? This analysis draws from recently published science communication course descriptions, syllabi, and pedagogical publications that describe science communication courses. Science communication pedagogies from multiple disciplines were categorized for their approach to post-normal concerns and instructional design. Examples range from no consideration to including post-normal concerns. Ultimately, this analysis complicates our assumptions since it suggests instructional design might matter more than disciplinary norms for facilitating the inclusion of post-normal concerns. This finding has practical implications for hiring, housing, and silo-breaking in the academy

Lodging Marketing Literature: Analysis of Journals

Unlike the services marketing literature, lodging research publications appear to be limited to a few general topic areas. The authors present a comparative analysis of the evolution of lodging marketing and services marketing research and provides direction for future research agendas

“Historical-Critical Ministry? The Biblical Studies Classroom as Restorative Secular Space”

This article revisits the past decades of scholarly use (or rather non-use) of Bernadette Brooten’s _Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue_ to reveal that citation practices in biblical studies—or any field—can be inherently political (e.g. misogynistic) whilst maintaining a pretense of scientific objectivity. As a corrective, the author calls for the abandonment of the myth of neutrality in the biblical studies classroom. She argues that rape is only one end of a long spectrum of behaviours that silence; at the other, more subtle end of that spectrum, and all along it, are thousands of lesser instances of silencing and diminishing that occur in the classroom, that are gentler extensions of the notion that women’s bodies do not belong to them, that men are the default human beings, and that women are valuable only insofar as they are pleasing or useful from a male standpoint. Parks advocates a biblical studies pedagogy that intentionally upholds inclusion and diversity in its curriculum, its group dynamics, and its citation practices, even (or especially) within institutions that do not. This is especially important given the prevalence of survivors of sexual assault and gender-based violence in every classroom; maintaining a neutral stance implicitly re-inscribes and encourages the status quo of rape culture

’The Brooten Phenomenon’: moving women from the margins in Second Temple and New Testament scholarship

Although at least half the scholars entering the fields of early Judaism and nascent Christianity may now be women, and although scholarship on ancient women, on biblical and apocryphal female characters, and on the construction of femininity and masculinity in antiquity is now thriving, there remains an impermeable conceptual wall between this and what is perceived as “regular” scholarship. The largely unwritten rule, that the study of women and gender is non-mainstream or “niche,” conceptually delimits investigations into ancient women, ancient female literary characters, and the construction of gender in the Second-Temple Period and early Christianity as “ancillary” and not of general relevance. Sara Parks nicknames this problem the “Brooten Phenomenon,” after the ways in which Bernadette Brooten’s work on women leaders in the ancient synagogue has been used (or not used) over the years. Using two brief case studies from Q and from the gospel resurrection narratives, she argues that scholarship ignorant of the role of women and the construction of gender is simply poor scholarship