Category: Health Communication

NCA’s Golden Monograph Award

This past fall I was so excited to receive the National Communication Association’s Golden Monograph Award for an article I published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2022 entitled, “Re-envisioning fertility science: From J. Marion Sims’s invasive gynecology to Sophia Kleegman’s ‘conservative surgery’ hermeneutic.” I am so lucky to have a community of people…

Olivia begins the new year doing excellent community-based, health communication research

Lots of fantastic projects are on the agenda for M.A. student, Olivia Webster, this semester, and she’s able to take it all on with a cat on her head! 🙂 More specifically, she is continuing work with faculty member Marcie Young Cancio and Amplify Utah on a journalism-based storytelling project concerning those experiencing homelessness, and…

Dr. Madison Krall wins the OSCLG Dissertation Award

Please check out this article featured in The Setonian about Madison’s recognition as recipient of a 2023 Cheris Kramerae Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender: Dr. Krall Wins Kramerae Dissertation Award – The Setonian Madison received this recognition for her fantastic dissertation, U.S. Medical Controversy and Its…

Women & Language Forum + OSCLG Conference

Last spring, my wonderful graduate student, Gia Almuaili, and I had the opportunity to contribute to a fantastic forum in the journal Women & Language on the overturning of Roe v. Wade and what the new legislative landscape may entail. It was an absolutely wonderful experience led by W&L editor, Siobhan E. Smith-Jones, and you…

New Advisee Olivia Webster’s Successful Program of Study Defense

My newest advisee, Olivia Webster, successfully (more than) passed her Program of Study Defense earlier this week. She is exploring the area of critical disability and race studies, as well as health and science communication and community-based methods. Her committee members were all so excited to see the progress that Olivia has made toward her…

Research Meeting

On September 1st, I met with a group of awesome reproductive health students and researchers to begin a new collaboration on the communication of reproductive health information in the secondary-school sex education classroom. Dr. Madison Krall, Ph.D. student Gabby Garza, advanced undergraduate researchers Jasmine Aguilar Lopez and Miya Jordan, and I talked about coding and…

Grad School Days and 75th Anniversary Talks at UIUC

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit my old grad-school stomping grounds at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This had me going back down memory lane and looking up artifacts from those good days past. For instance, this photo of several lovely grad students in the program willing to come together…

New Article Published in the American Journal of Public Health

My new article on Dr. Hannah Mayer Stone’s work to create medical contraceptive care in the early-to-mid-twentieth century is out in the American Journal of Public Health! The complete article is available to read here. Jensen, R. E. (2023). The First Publication on Contraception in a US Medical Journal, 1928: Hannah Mayer Stone’s Case for…

St. Patty’s Day Chemical Rhetoric Group Coding Meeting

A subset of the Chemical Rhetoric Group has been working on a project that has required lots of coding. Fortunately, we are all up for finding ways to make that process fun with a nod to St. Patty’s Day and a killer data management system (as you can see below). We should have used shades…

Finding Science in the Special Collections

This week, members of our Rhetoric of Science graduate seminar had the fantastic opportunity to visit the Marriott Library’s Special Collections. Original Cataloger for Special Collections, Allie McCormack (pictured below in the front of the class), prepared an engaging and illuminating presentation about archival search engines, theory, and analysis, and she let us page through…

Dr. Amanda Boyd’s Research on Health Inequities and Community Participatory Research

The University of Utah has been such a hotspot for amazing speakers lately. We were so lucky to have Dr. Amanda Boyd, member of the Metis Nation of Alberta and Associate Professor in The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, give the B. Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecture on October 27th. She…

Gia Almuaili joins the Chemical Rhetoric Group

I’m so pleased to announce that Gia Almuaili has joined us here this fall as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication and that she has already gotten involved with Chemical Rhetoric Group projects. Gia, who is originally from Kuwait, received both her bachelors and her masters degrees in Strategic Communication from the University…

Essay on shifts in gynecological “vision” published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech

I’m really excited that an essay coming from my time as a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellow has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech. This essay follows the changes in gynecological “vision” instituted by the scientific, pedagogical writings of Dr. Sophia Kleegman in the mid-twentieth century, and it compares Dr. Kleegman’s…

Dr. Melissa Carrion quoted in the New York Times

Dr. Melissa Carrion, my fantastic former advisee who is now an Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was interviewed extensively in a recent article published in the New York Times. They Did Their Own ‘Research.’ Now What? – The New York Times (nytimes.com) She discussed research she published…

Introducing Dr. Madison Krall, in-coming Assistant Professor of Communication at Seton Hall University!

Several weeks ago, Madison entered a Zoom room with her Ph.D. Committee Members and, about two hours later, she left the room having earned a Doctorate of Philosophy (aka, a Ph.D.). She defended her dissertation research beautifully, and her excellent committee members (featured below) offered her amazing feedback and a double dose of CONGRATULATIONS because…

Teaching Classes on Science, Health, and Environmental Communication, and on Feminist Communication in U.S. History

For the Spring 2020 semester, I’m teaching COMM 3115: Communicating Science, Health, and the Environment which focuses on the idea that communication plays a fundamental role in public perceptions of science, health, and the environment. This class provides students with an overview of how these topics tend to be communicated in contexts ranging from the…

Madison is Elected Secretary of ARSTM at NCA 2021

At the National Communication Association Conference in November, Madison Krall was elected to the position of ARSTM Secretary. ARSTM stands for the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and I am very excited that Madison will be taking on a leadership role in this vibrant and growing group of scholars.

Archival Gems: Remembering Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi

I found this little gem a few years back at the Schlesinger Library (pardon the poor photography). The library didn’t end up having much on Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi’s communications concerning infertility and reproductive health, which is what I was looking for, but it did have this excerpt from an obituary written about Jacobi on…

Madison Krall named a Steffensen-Cannon Fellow for the 2nd year in a row

This past spring, Madison learned that she was awarded a Ellen Christina Steffensen Cannon Scholarship for the second straight year to complete her dissertation project exploring regulatory rhetoric, thalidomide, and women’s reproductive health and medicine. Find out more about this outstanding recognition, which is bestowed on those pursuing “excellence in their chosen fields of Education…

Celebrating the Elements (and Coding) on Zoom

Last week, members of the Chemical Rhetoric Group met via Zoom to do some coding and celebrate the elements. Of course we dressed up. Below you will see (clockwise): -Me as boron: element number 5 (usually gray-ish in color, this metalloid produces bright green flames when set on fire). -Megan Cullinan as mercury: element number…

Dr. Mann presents a Top Paper at NCA 2020

Ben’s paper, “Theorizing Intersectional Stigma Management Communication at the Crossroads: LGBTAIQ+ and Autistic Subjectivities,” was featured on the Disability Issues Caucus Top Paper Session at the National Communication Association Conference this year. This research comes out of Ben’s dissertation work and draws from 30 interviews Ben did with individuals who are both LGBTQIA+ and autistic…

(Virtual) Keynote Address for Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science’s 5th Annual Women in Science and Healthcare (WiSH) Symposium

On September 10, 2020, I was honored to give the keynote address for Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science’s 5th Annual Women in Science and Healthcare (WiSH) Symposium. This was especially exciting in this particular year because the symposium was celebrating what would have been crystallographer Rosalind Franklin’s 100th birthday, and Rosalind Franklin’s niece,…

National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship

At the beginning of the year, I learned that I had been awarded a 2020-2021 National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship. I am so excited to have the support of the NEH as I work on my next book project. For more information about the project and the award, see the College of Humanities…

Dr. Benjamin W. Mann

You can call him Dr. Mann! In mid-December, Benjamin Mann successfully defended his dissertation, “Intersectional Stigma Communication, Demi-rhetoricity, and Critical Health Communication: Affirming (Neuro)queer Subjectivities.” His committee members agreed that he had put together an important project grounded in interviews with hard-to-reach and often overlooked individuals and that his research would go a long way…

The Chemical Rhetoric Group publishes its study on “brain chemistry” and medicalizing news coverage!

We are excited that our article, “Medicalization’s Communicative Infrastructure: Seventy Years of ‘Brain Chemistry’ in the New York Times” is now published in the journal Health Communication and available here. In this piece, we trace the rhetorical strategies used across time and diagnoses to situate social conditions within the medical domain. This was a project…

The Chemical Rhetoric Group’s Article on Rosalind Franklin is hot off the press!

Our article, “Mapping Nature’s Scientist: The Posthumous Demarcation of Rosalind Franklin’s Crystallographic Data,” is available here from the Quarterly Journal of Speech. We began the research for this piece at our 2017 Writing Retreat in Park City, UT, and it is so much fun to see it published after lots of hard work. We hope…

Madison A. Krall wins a Rhetoric Society of America Institute Graduate Development Grant!

This summer, Madison won an RSA Institute Graduate Development Award to support her archival research and her travel to the RSA Institutes’ Seminar on Medical Rhetoric in the Archives. And, in other great RSA news, the University of Utah chapter of RSA–Retorica Elevada–was recognized at this year’s Institutes with the Outstanding Student Chapter Award for…

Madison Krall and Robin Jensen take part in RSA’s “Medical Rhetoric in the Archives” Seminar

In the beginning of June, Madison and Robin headed to the University of Maryland to take part in a Rhetoric Society of America Institute Seminar entitled, Medical Rhetoric in the Archives. Robin worked with the amazing Professor Jordynn Jack to lead the seminar of about 30 scholars through a variety of readings, discussions, and activities…

2018 NCA Conference Brings Many Top Paper Recognitions for Current and Former Students!

My current and former students are amazing! At the 2018 National Communication Association Conference in Salt Lake City, they earned a mind-boggling number of top paper recognitions. Melissa L. Carrion, my former PhD student and now an assistant professor at Georgia Southern University, won the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine’s Article…

Park City Writing Retreat 2018

Scenes from our 2018 Park City Writing Retreat!  Benjamin Mann, Melissa Parks, Kourtney Maison, Madison Krall, Emily Krebs and I spend these last few days analyzing primary sources, brainstorming, writing, re-writing, and accomplishing a ton of research goals. We also laughed, ate, and tried to figure out how to turn the malfunctioning fire alarm off…

Celebrating Dr. Celeste Condit and Reproductive Justice at the Public Address Conference

  What fun it was to meet up with some of my favorite people in Boulder, Colorado to talk about the amazing work of Dr. Celeste Condit and speak to issues of reproductive justice and health! Below are a few scenes from the event, beginning with the honoree, Dr. Condit, responding brilliantly and humbly (as…

The first issue of the new journal, Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, is hot off the press!

Click here to check out the issue’s compelling introduction by journal editors Lisa Meloncon and J. Blake Scott, as well as fantastic articles by Lisa DeTora, Celeste Condit, S. Scott Graham, Mary Lay Schuster, Colleen Derkatch, and more. Below, editor Lisa Meloncon and I coordinate at the 2017 Rhetoric of Health & Medicine Symposium.

I was interviewed for two podcasts that focus on reproductive health and infertility

The first is called Waiting for Babies, and you can listen here! Host Steven Mavros asks great, informed questions, and was such a pleasure to talk with. The second is called Beat Infertility, and you can listen here! Host Heather Huhman has one of the best radio voices I’ve ever heard, and her podcast was…

Presenting Blake Scott with the Health Communication Division’s Distinguished Book Award at NCA 2017!

I had the great honor of presenting Blake Scott with the 2017 Health Communication Division’s Distinguished Book Award. His book, Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing, instigated the sub-field of rhetoric of health and medicine and is long overdue for recognition. Congratulations Blake!  

Keynote Address at the 2017 Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Symposium

Last week I headed to the University of Cincinnati for the 2017 Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Symposium.  I had the pleasure of finally meeting the amazing Lisa Meloncon (pictured above); who has overseen the symposium since its start in 2013; catching up with my friend and extremely smart former advisee Melissa Carrion (also pictured above);…