The Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine’s (ARSTM) Article of the Year Award committee has selected two co-winners of the 2018 award for the most outstanding article on the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine published in the preceding calendar year (2017). The committee selected Melissa Carrion for her article “’You need to do your research’: Vaccines, contestable science, and maternal epistemology,” published in Public Understanding of Science and Katy Rothfelder and Davi Johnson Thornton for their article “Man interrupted: Mental illness narrative as a rhetoric of proximity,” published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly.
The committee commends Dr. Melissa Carrion’s article for its use of argument sphere theory as a lens through which to understand how mothers justify their decision to refuse vaccines for their children, despite scientific consensus recommending otherwise. Drawing on interviews with 50 mothers, Dr. Carrion adroitly blends the testimony of mothers who made the decision not to vaccine with a theoretically-driven analysis that demonstrates the value of rhetorical frameworks for understanding public health controversies. The committee agreed that the article has considerable potential to extend the rhetoric of science’s reach outward, offering productive avenues for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization and public engagement. The article’s arguments are also so clearly and cogently presented that this piece would make a fantastic addition to the syllabus of a rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine course. Dr. Carrion is an Assistant Professor of Writing and Linguistics as well as affiliate faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia Southern University.
Katy Rothfelder and Dr. Davi Johnson Thornton’s article extends Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, or time-space arrangement, to explain how mental illness narratives can manage audiences’ sense of proximity to said illnesses. They then use that framework to analyze David Adams’s The Man Who Couldn’t Stop, a 2015 memoir about Adams’s own experience with OCD. The committee commends their work for its conceptual creativity, extending existing work in the discipline in a novel direction while offering compelling rhetorical insights into mental health discourse and the management of stigma. This article is also a notable enactment of engaged pedagogy at its best. The article is a student-faculty collaboration, initially begun when Katy Rothfelder was an undergraduate at Dr. Thornton’s institution. Rothfelder is an undergraduate major in Communication Studies, and Dr. Thornton is a professor of Communication Studies, both at Southwestern University.
The ARSTM Article of the Year Award is a highly competitive award. Criteria for selection include:
- How well the article extends and/or enacts practical and theoretical knowledge related to the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine,
- The article’s potential for cross-disciplinary fertilization and/or public engagement,
- The article’s potential for teaching future generations of rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine scholars, and
- The overall quality of writing and thinking.
Congratulations to all co-winners!