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ARSTM at the Rhetoric Society of America

The ARSTM Preconference will be held on May 21th, 2026.

ARSTM Preconference 2026 Call For Papers

Theme: IMPACT

Dates:

  • Abstracts due Saturday, November 15
  • Decisions by Friday, January 30, 2026
  • Date of pre-conference: May 21, 2026

The Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM) invites submission of individual papers, paper sessions, and panel discussions for the 2026 RSA preconference.

The theme of this year’s pre-conference is impact. The etymological origins of impact trace to seventeenth-century Latin for “push into, drive into, strike against.”[1] In today’s universities, impact often functions like a “god term,” invoking an unquestionable and much-sought but ill-defined good. Universities want more and more impact, often defined by the number of citations accrued by the most prestigious scientists. But counter-movements to this reductive understanding of impact are underway. For example, the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) emphasizes the limitations of citation counts as a measure of research quality and enjoins global stakeholders to seek alternative measurements of scholarly impact that achieve “consistency and transparency” and “directly address the structural inequalities in academia.”[2] In the first place, then, by theming the pre-conference around impact, we invite submissions that interrogate the measures currently used to evaluate research and community engagement as well as those that articulate  more just rubrics for distributing institutional resources, with specific attention to inequities arising from race-, gender-, geography-, and class-based disparities in scholarly publishing.

Rhetorical scholars of science, technology, and medicine have provided important historical insights that enrich our understanding of impact as operationalized in today’s academy. For example, Carolyn Miller (1994) used kairos to explain how Watson & Crick’s 1953 “discovery” of DNA had a broader scientific and cultural impact than Avery’s 1944 publication, which communicated similar ideas but received far less attention.[3] Along these lines, we might consider how Miller’s elaboration of kairos helps us understand current information environments in which retracted journal articles can garner immense public attention and continue to accrue citations even after the scientific community has declared their findings invalid, if their findings resonate with particular audiences. More broadly, impact also attunes our pre-conference to foundational questions about the role of science, technology, and medicine  amidst rising mistrust of experts and anti-expert conspiracy. In the US context, as national grants for scientific research continue to be dismantled and research agendas that violate executive dictates are pushed out of the academy, researchers now face potentially career-ending questions about  whether to produce scientific scholarship with potentially important communal impacts or to settle for researching politically safe topics.

As these examples suggest, rhetorical scholars have a lot to offer conversations about impact, and the discipline may  benefit if we intervene in them. In theoretical terms, a rhetorical perspective on “impact” may further illuminate the term as it intersects with such concepts as kairos; magnitude or megethos; scale; telos; power and rhetorical force, among others. If rhetoric is, as Thomas Farrell wrote, “the art, the fine and useful art, of making things matter,” then what does an examination of the many uses of “impact” offer rhetoricians of science, technology, and medicine?[4] Furthermore, in line with counter-movements such as DORA, as rhetorical scholars, we can work to expand impact to encompass broader means of assessing scholarly work’s value, including its impact on students as well as other community stakeholders.

In line with the RSA conference theme of Rhetorical In/Dignities, we invite authors to consider how rhetorical scholars can join cross-disciplinary efforts to expand understandings of impact in ways that work to address in/dignities that exist in the academy and in society. Submissions may cover any area of the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine, but priority will be given to submissions that articulate a strong connection to the preconference theme and suggest a rhetorical project that is theoretically and methodologically sound.

Potential Topics

  • How is historical work in rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine relevant to current scholarly discourses around, and cross-disciplinary initiatives aimed at expanding understandings of, impact?
  • How can rhetorical scholars achieve impact that extends into the future by supporting efforts to preserve scientific information, knowledge, and practice?
  • How can scientific communicators intervene to ensure that public audiences have a full understanding of the scientific information that is available to them?
  • How does the academic race for impact compare/contrast to the “influencer” phenomenon in which social media figures seek to garner likes and shares?
  • How does the scholarly race to achieve impact intersect with the proliferation of anti-vaccine arguments and other forms of anti-science content?
  • How do different rhetorical genres, such as environmental impact statements, contribute to or shape scholarly understanding of impact?
  • How can early career rhetorical scholars pursue impactful community-based research unrewarded by traditional metrics of academic success such as tenure requirements?
  • What extant rhetorical theories or traditions might assist  in studying science’s impact, and what does our research add to those theories and traditions?

Individual abstracts or panel proposal submissions should detail in 500 words or fewer how papers will address the pre-conference theme. Panel proposals should include three or four presenters and an additional 100-word rationale for the panel that details how each paper contributes to the panel’s overall focus. Authors of accepted proposals are expected to register for and attend the pre-conference to present their papers in person. To facilitate diversity of ideas and panelists, we encourage panels that include speakers from multiple institutions or organizations.  

Submissions should be sent as an attachment without any identifying information to arstmrsa2026@gmail.com by Saturday, November 15, 2025. 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. Any questions about the ARSTM preconference at RSA may also be addressed to arstmrsa2026@gmail.com.

The Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine Preconference will be held at the 22nd Biennial Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America on May 21, 2026, in Portland, OR, USA.

The pre-conference is co-chaired by Amy Koerber (Texas Tech University), Allyson Gross (University of Wisconsin), and Benjamin Firgens (Mount Saint Mary’s University)

For more details about the preconference, please subscribe to the ARSTM listserv and sign up for ARSTM Membership.

[1] Origin and History of Impact. (n.d.). Etymonline. https://www.etymonline.com/word/impact

[2] About DORA. (n.d.). Declaration on Research Assessment. https://sfdora.org/about-dora/

[3] Miller, C. R. (1994). Opportunity, opportunism, and progress: Kairos in the rhetoric of technology. Argumentation, 8(1), 81-96.

[4] Farrell, Thomas B. (2008). The Weight of Rhetoric: Studies in Cultural Delirium. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 41 (4), 470.