The ARSTM Book Award Committee is pleased to announce the winner of the 2021 ARSTM Book Award:
Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood, by Allison L. Rowland (The Ohio State University Press, 2020)
Book cover of Rowland’s Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood
Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood embodies the future of rhetorics of science, technology and medicine for the ways it thoughtfully connects rhetorical theory with foundational texts across disciplines and for its methodological and critical nuance. Offering rhetorical scholars a suite of constructs that can be mobilized in a range of projects, each of the book’s case studies – microbial life (at the American Gut Project), fetal life (at the National Memorial for the Unborn), and vital human life (at two of the nation’s premier fitness centers) — are rich inquiries into what Rowland elegantly refers to as “body-forging that occurs in the crucible of empire” (p. xii). Building on the necropolitical concept that we are constantly parsing populations into worthy lives, subhuman lives, and lives sentenced to death, Zoetropes analyzes the discursive practices that impact entities’ inclusion into humanhood.
Please join us for the presentation of the award at the ARSTM’s business meeting during the National Communication Association conference on November 15, 2021 (time and location TBD).
During the meeting, we will also acknowledge the two finalists who advanced to the final round of judging:
- Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age by Nathan R. Johnson (University of Alabama Press, 2020)
- Vaccine Rhetorics by Heidi Yoston Lawrence (The Ohio State University Press, 2020).