Rhetorical Accessability

Rhetorical Accessability is the first text to bring the fields of technical communication and disability studies into conversation. The two fields also share a pragmatic foundation in their concern with accommodation and accessibility, that is, the material practice of making social and technical environments and texts as readily available, easy to use, and/or understandable as possible to as many people as possible, including those with disabilities. Through its concern with the pragmatic, theoretically grounded work of helping users interface effectively and seamlessly with technologies, the field of technical communication is perfectly poised to put the theoretical work of disability studies into practice. In other words, technical communication could ideally be seen as a bridge between disability theories and web accessibility practices. While technical communicators are ideally positioned to solve communication problems and to determine the best delivery method, those same issues are compounded when they are viewed through the dual lens of accessibility and disability. With the increasing use of wireless, expanding global marketplaces, increasing prevalence of technology in our daily lives, and ongoing changes of writing through and with technology, technical communicators need to be acutely aware of issues involved with accessibility and disability. This collection will advance the field of technical communication by expanding the conceptual apparatus for understanding the intersections among disability studies, technical communication, and accessibility and by offering new perspectives, theories, and features that can only emerge when different fields are brought into conversation with one another and is the first text to bring the fields of technical communication and disability studies into conversation with one another.

Veterinary medicine has long been recognized as one of the more neglected areas of medical history. One of the main stumbling blocks to research is the lack of comprehensive information regarding the survival and availability of primary source material. Veterinary Medicine: A Guide to Historical Sources redresses these issues for the first time, offering researchers an unparalleled tool with which to approach the subject. The book opens with a brief history of veterinary medicine and the veterinary profession from the fourteenth to the beginning of the twenty first centuries, identifying the key dates and events that shaped their development. There then follows a chapter on the nature and uses of the records covered by the book, outlining the types of records found, the type of information they contain and their likely uses by different types of researcher. A brief user's guide then explains how to use the book. After these preliminary sections, comes the main body of the book, the lists of records. It is here that the various practices and institutions covered by the book are listed, together with the types of records they hold, the dates they cover and where they are kept. A short biographical history is also included with each entry where appropriate. Taken as a whole this volume will prove to be an invaluable aid for any scholar, researching the history of veterinary medicine in Britain.

Offering rhetorically informed strategic interventions, this innovative collection moves beyond critiques of mental health issues, problems, and care. With sections that focus on methodological, cultural and legal, and pedagogical interventions, readers will find an engaging discussion of a discrete mental health phenomenon as well as a clear interventional takeaway in each chapter. Contributors make use of critical discourse analyses, ethnographic inquiries, autoethnographic inquiries, case studies, and textual analyses to engage such mental health research topics as postpartum depression among Chinese mothers; insanity pleas; anosognosia; issues of intimacy, access, and embodiment in research projects; community support groups; Black mental health; women in Alcoholics Anonymous; and mental health in faculty workshops and university online health tools. The authors and editors create scholarship on mental health that explicitly builds productive methodological, theoretical, and practical bridges among scholars and teachers in the various specialties of writing and communication. This collection will interest scholars, students, and practitioners in health and medical humanities; rhetoric of health and medicine; health communication; medical anthropology; scientific and technical communication; disability studies; and rhetorical studies generally.

This volume charts new methodological territories for rhetorical studies and the emerging field of the rhetoric of health and medicine. In offering an expanded, behind-the-scenes view of rhetorical methodologies, it advances the larger goal of differentiating the rhetoric of health and medicine as a distinct but pragmatically diverse area of study, while providing rhetoricians and allied scholars new ways to approach and explain their research. Collectively, the volume’s 16 chapters: Develop, through extended examples of research, creative theories and methodologies for studying and engaging medicine’s high-stakes practices. Provide thick descriptions of and heuristics for methodological invention and adaptation that meet the needs of needs of new and established researchers. Discuss approaches to researching health and medical rhetorics across a range of contexts (e.g., historical, transnational, socio-cultural, institutional) and about a range of ethical issues (e.g., agency, social justice, responsiveness).

Disability Rhetoric is the first book to view rhetorical theory and history through the lens of disability studies. Traditionally, the body has been seen as, at best, a rhetorical distraction; at worst, those whose bodies do not conform to a narrow range of norms are disqualified from speaking. Yet, Dolmage argues that communication has always been obsessed with the meaning of the body and that bodily difference is always highly rhetorical. Following from this rewriting of rhetorical history, he outlines the development of a new theory, affirming the ideas that all communication is embodied, that the body plays a central role in all expression, and that greater attention to a range of bodies is therefore essential to a better understanding of rhetorical histories, theories, and possibilities.

Covering a broad range of rhetorical perspectives, Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action, third edition presents a well-grounded introduction to the basics of rhetorical criticism and theory in an accessible manner for advanced undergraduate courses and introductory graduate courses. Throughout the text, sample essays written by noted experts in the field provide students with models for writing their own criticisms. In addition to covering traditional modes of rhetorical criticism, the book introduces less commonly discussed rhetorical perspectives as well as orientations toward performing criticisms including close-textual analysis, critical approaches, and analysis of visual and digital rhetoric. The third edition includes the following features: New chapters on visual rhetoric and digital rhetoric Potentials and Pitfalls sections analyzing individual perspectives Activities and discussion questions in each chapter Glossary of important terms

In the early twentieth century, the field of anthropology transformed itself from the “welcoming science,” uniquely open to women, people of color, and amateurs, into a professional science of culture. The new field grew in rigor and prestige but excluded practitioners and methods that no longer fit a narrow standard of scientific legitimacy. In Rhetoric in American Anthropology, Risa Applegarth traces the “rhetorical archeology” of this transformation in the writings of early women anthropologists. Applegarth examines the crucial role of ethnographic genres in determining scientific status and recovers the work of marginalized anthropologists who developed alternative forms of scientific writing. Applegarth analyzes scores of ethnographic monographs to demonstrate how early anthropologists intensified the constraints of genre to define their community and limit the aims and methods of their science. But in the 1920s and 1930s, professional researchers sidelined by the academy persisted in challenging the field’s boundaries, developing unique rhetorical practices and experimenting with alternative genres that in turn greatly expanded the epistemology of the field. Applegarth demonstrates how these writers’ folklore collections, ethnographic novels, and autobiographies of fieldwork experiences reopened debates over how scientific knowledge was made: through what human relationships, by what bodies, and for what ends. Linking early anthropologists’ ethnographic strategies to contemporary theories of rhetoric and composition, Rhetoric in American Anthropology provides a fascinating account of the emergence of a new discipline and reveals powerful intersections among gender, genre, and science.

In recent accounts of rhetoric's storied productivity, commentators have implied, along systematically Kantian lines, albeit with the occasional protestation, that agency must be coextensive with subjectivity. But is that all there is (to 2,500 years' worth of hypothesizing about the ways in which communication might promote social change)? Les Belikian's answer, drawing not only on traditional and contemporary rhetorical studies but also on Deleuzean thinking, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontology, takes the form of a quadruply contrarian thesis: Rhetorical agency inheres, irreducibly so, in subjectivity, in conventionality, in transcendence, and in materiality, all of which are themselves under production. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Chapter 1: Productivity as a Context for Theorizing Rhetorical Transaction - A Miscellaneously Self-Effacing Rhetorical Agency? - Rhetoricity Bound, Unbounded, and Both - Variegation (Not Conglomeration) - Chapter 2: A Four-Folded Rhetorical Agency - Tetradic Due Diligence - Disaggregating a Constitution - A Willfully Productive Rhetorical Agency - Assemblage-Theoretical Resources - Triangulation - An Investigative Itinerary - Chapter 3: Subjectivity in the Social-Structural Landscape - Co-Constructing Constraint - Can the Speaker Speak? - An Ineffectual Agency - Subtracting from Rhetorical Practice - What Else Is Wrong with This Paradigm? - A Chimerical Agency for a Colossal Agent - Chapter 4: Conventionality in the Rhetorical-Humanistic Landscape - De-Leviathanizing the Normative - From Normativity to Shared Values - A Tribe of Equals - Keeping Shared Values between the Ceiling and the Seat - Staying the Same by Doing Something Differently - Maximizing Assent by Minimizing Recalcitrance - Still Missing So Far - Chapter 5: Transcendence in the Existential-Transversal Landscape - Existence, Transcendence, and Transversality - Philosophizing for the Living by Getting Rid of Their Materiality - The Two Styles of Transcendence - The Fideistic Appeal - Correcting Forgetfulness through a Material Phenomenology - Rhetorical Agency and the Existential Self - On Pivoting, Transcendence, and Emergence - The Rhetorical Agent and the Original Body - A Re-Corporealized Transversality - Chapter 6: Materiality in the Material-Semiotic Landscape - A Parable of Materiality-and-Relationality - Assemblaging, Stratification, and Circulating Reference - Entering at Biblical Precept - Crossing over to Race - From Race to Gender - Rescaling the Envoy - And A'n't We a Meshwork? - Chapter 7: Agency in the Rhetorical-Theoretical World - No More Homogenization Now! - On Keeping Difference Different - A Fluctuating Rhetorical Agent