Theme: Fail/Safe
Denver, Colorado, USA
Dates
- Abstracts due: Monday, December 4th, 2023
- Date of preconference: Thursday, May 23, 2024
The Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM) invites the submission of individual papers, paper sessions, and panel discussions for the 2024 RSA preconference.
This invitation comes as we gather in Denver, CO, near the former site of a nuclear arsenal facility now known as the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Once a facility that refined plutonium into nuclear bomb cores, its presence today is particularly inviting for ARSTM scholars because it relies on rhetorical strategies of openness and conservation to protect people from its past. This positioning is not without controversy as local groups still question the EPA’s efforts at remediation. However, the question of whether the refuge has been returned to a “safe” condition and for whom it is “safe” is still being asked of nearby residents and citizens. Even further, questions over who has been failed by policies and rhetorics surrounding nuclear waste still swirl. This scenario serves as a prime example of the ways science, technology, and health/medicine intersect with civic and personal concerns.
The history of Rocky Flats seems emblematic of many of the challenges we face in our time with dangers from the past returning to haunt us and numerous planetary thresholds met or exceeded nearly every day – global temperatures, CO2 emissions, ubiquitous plastics, etc. Billionaires like Stockton Rush of the OceanGate submersible to Elon Musk’s failed transparency at Twitter mark an overly optimistic technofuturism alongside record shattering ocean temperatures, brutal simultaneous heatwaves in both hemispheres, and the resurgences of violence in places like Darfur, Niger, and Yemen. Films like Oppenheimer extoll the conscience of one man, yet neglect any conscience toward the poor people of color who were dispossessed of their homes, livelihoods, and health during the creation of the atomic bomb. Furthermore, unethical distortions of science such as Robert F. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine statements or Jordan Peterson’s anti-trans arguments point to an urgent need for understanding and improving critical decision-making about technological issues.
This year’s preconference theme, “Fail/Safe,” borrows from the scientific, technical, and medical perspectives and histories, which constitute a common ground or topos of concern illustrated by Rocky Flats. We invite inquiries into how rhetorics of science, technology, and medicine figure in both our sociotechnical failures (e.g., Covid, mis- and dis-information, the Anthropocene), our current programs and infrastructures for safety (e.g., access to and within technologies, information literacy, cultural safety), and how civic deliberation might act as a kind of fail/safe against technofuturist optimism, disinformation, and social violence. We especially invite investigations into who is made safe and/or allowed to fail in certain contexts and amid certain political, cultural, technological, and social conditions and what the consequences may be of such designs. That is, how can our scholarly inquiries spotlight the social and material ecologies of failure and safety, echoing Cicero’s question, “cui bono”? ARSTM@RSA invites papers to discuss the potential and capacity of rhetorics of science, technology, and medicine to act as a fail/safe or comment on failure or safety in its many facets.
Submissions may cover any area of the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine, including but not limited to the rhetorical analysis and criticism of (1) scientific, technological, and medical texts, materials, practices, and genres from any culture or tradition; (2) the production, deployment, invocation, and contestation of scientific ideas and technological visions in political, cultural, professional or disciplinary, and literary or social contexts (e.g., policy debates, controversies, popular culture); (3) discourses of reason and rationality, including reflexive engagement with the rhetoric of science as a field; and (4) issues of social justice as they intersect with problematic areas in science, technology, and medicine.
Potential Topics
- What fail/safe systems might rhetoric provide science, technology, or medicine?
- How have the rhetorics of science, technology, and medicine led to or established safety and/or fail/safe procedures?
- What critical evaluations of failure or safety might rhetorics of science, technology, and medicine offer?
- What stories have been left out and/or what perspectives have been dismissed or ignored that aren’t grounded in a Western approach?
- How might rhetorical inquiry shed light on inequities on medical, technological, or scientific safety? How might rhetorical study help equalize the imbalance?
- What lessons might we draw from refusals to heed alarms or practice safety?
- In what ways can we ethically manage failure and risk?
- What role might rhetorics of science, technology, and medicine have in helping heal what has been damaged?
- How can rhetorical work – field-based, case-based, theoretical, historical, etc. – shift failing systems toward safer modes of operation?
- How have rhetorics of science, technology, and medicine affected those fields they take as sites of inquiry? How has our scholarship aided inquiry elsewhere in terms of developing fail/safe responses to contingency?
- How do we understand and define failure and safety in particular contexts and environments? How are these concepts rhetorically constructed?
- How are failure and safety influenced by racial, cultural, gender, and/or socioeconomic considerations? What can be done to address injustices in these areas, and what kinds of disciplinary work is needed?
- What political, philosophical, or ideological factors influence and shape failure and safety?
Submissions may be in the form of individual abstracts or panel proposals, and should detail in 500 words or fewer how papers will address themes of failure and/or safety. Panel proposals should include three or four presenters and an additional 100-word rationale for the panel that carefully details how each paper contributes to an overall argument. To facilitate diversity of ideas and panelists, we encourage panels that include speakers from multiple institutions or organizations (e.g., different universities or a combination of scholars and external organizational clients and collaborators).
Submissions should be sent as an attachment without any identifying information to both conference organizers, David M. Grant and Candice Welhausen by Monday, December 4th, 2023. Please use “ARSTM Preconference Submission” as your email subject and provide your preferred contact information and the contact information for any co-authors in the email body. Submissions and questions about panels or topics should be directed to both conference organizers, David M. Grant and Candice Welhausen. Any questions about the ARSTM preconference at RSA may be addressed to Nathan Johnson at nathanjohnson@usf.edu.
The Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine 31st Anniversary Preconference will be held at the 21st Biennial Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America on Thursday, May 23, 2024 in Denver, CO, USA.
For more details about the preconference, please subscribe to the ARSTM listserv and sign up for ARSTM Membership.M