Last summer I took an amazing trip to the Penn State University Archives, as well as to the Drexel University Legacy Center, to find records of Dr. Helen Octavia Dickens, the first Black woman certified in Gynecology in the United States. Thanks to the fantastic archivists I worked with, boxes of materials were waiting for…
I’m thrilled that Christa Teston’s new book, Doing Dignity: Ethical Praxis and the Politics of Care, is now out with the Johns Hopkins University Press book series in Health Communication! Not only does this gorgeous book have an absolutely striking cover, but the insight Teston offers about the idea of dignity in the present moment,…
The Department of Communication at the University of Utah was very lucky to host the Health & Environmental Justice in Latina/o/x Communities Colloquium this past Friday. The effort was led by the stupendous Drs. Leandra Hinojosa Hernandez and Andy King. What a treat it was to gather in the Edna Anderson-Taylor Communication Institute, directed by…
The Rhetoric Society of America Conference took place in Denver this past May. It was truly a pleasure to see friends old and new and hear about fantastic ongoing projects. Below, amazing “old friends” I’ve known since graduate school (Jenell Johnson, Christa Olson, and Amy Wan). It’s so strange how none of us have aged…
This past week was a huge one for the amazing Olivia Webster. She successfully defended her M.A. comprehensive exams, a process that was made possible by her outstanding committee members (pictured below) including Drs. Crystal Lumpkins and Lezlie Frye! She also graduated AND accepted a new position with the Lauren McCluskey Foundation. I know it…
Our research team met last Friday to begin mapping out a paper associated with our interview study. The group is composed of undergraduate Jasmine Aguilar Lopez, Ph.D. student Gabrielle Garza, and graduating undergraduate (and future medical student!) Miya Jordan, as well as Dr. Madison Krall (meeting remotely from Seton Hall University) and me. I’ve had…
My wonderful friend, Dr. Raquel M. Robvais, was just announced as an ACLS Fellow for this coming academic year. Please check out the announcement here: Raquel M. Robvais – ACLS This is an extremely prestigious fellowship, and I can think of no one more deserving of this award than Raquel. Her work ethic, insight, and…
This spring break, I took a variety of planes, trains, and automobiles to get to Smith College in Northampton, MA, and to do research in the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History held in Smith’s Special Collection Reading Room. My visit was a lovely adventure that had me filling out call slips like this one…
Last week I was quoted in this really compelling Science article on maternal mortality rates by Meredith Wadman. Check it out here: Have U.S. deaths from pregnancy complications tripled? | Science | AAAS
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I’m thrilled to introduce Gabby Garza as a new PhD student in the Department of Communication here at the University of Utah and as a new advisee! Gabby’s research focuses on issues of reproductive health, health communication, and environmental communication. To say the least, Gabby’s expertise will be in high demand as we embark on…
My faculty mentee this year is the amazing Dr. Andy King, which is pretty hilarious because he is always the one teaching me important things. Case in point, I had never heard of Salt Lake City’s Old Cuss Coffee Co., and you’d think I would have because I am often calling myself an ‘ol cuss.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This week I’m looking forward to Dr. Hernandez’s colloquium talk on “Critical Health Communication, Reproductive Justice, and Intersectionality: Trends, Media, and Considerations Moving Forward.” What a treat to have Dr. Hernandez visiting and getting us talking and thinking about issues of reproductive justice.
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…
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, 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…
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…
The great thing about Zoom meetings is that you sometimes get a glimpse into the lives and furry companions of those on the other side of the screen. At our last CRG meeting, these adorable fluff balls contributed to the meeting by walking over and perching on the keyboards of Chemical Rhetoric Group members, making…
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…
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.
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…
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…
Last week, Jana Cunningham interviewed me for the new University of Utah Humanities Radio Podcast. She asked about my research on Dr. Sophia Kleegman, specifically, a person who I have had a lot of fun learning about through my current NEH project on the history of infertility science. You can catch our conversation HERE. Thanks…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
We had a grand showing at this year’s NCA! Melissa Parks received the Benson-Campbell Dissertation Research Award from the Public Address Division, and our research team presented three competitively selected papers–two of which were highlighted on top paper panels (ARSTM and the American Studies Division).
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…
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…
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…
Last spring I was awarded a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on a project entitled, Julia Ward Howe, Helene Deutsche, and Sophia Kleegman: 20th-Century Women Shaping the Science and Medicine of Fertility. To read more about this project and the award, click here.
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…
https://www.natcom.org/nca-inside-out/5-questions-withrobin-jensen
Right before heading into the spring semester, we braved the cold to spend one day at the downtown Salt Lake City library and one day at the Marmalade branch of the city library. It was great changing up our surroundings a bit and, of course, working on our research projects.
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…
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…
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…
On September 27, 2018 at the CU Boulder campus I’ll be taking part in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Preconference Symposium, which will proceed the 2018 Public Address Conference. The Preconference will honor Celeste M. Condit for her amazing work in this area (see here for an amazing oral history interview with Dr. Condit)…
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.
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…
The ART of Infertility art exhibit visited Salt Lake City last month and featured the original art by Abigail Glass featured on the cover of my book. It was so amazing to see the work in person. I even got a Twitter shout-out from the Pennsylvania State University Press:). The exhibit’s showing was sponsored by…
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! Â
At the beginning of this week, the Chemical Rhetoric Group met in Park City to work on two different group projects. We went through a huge amount of primary data and enjoyed our time in the orange-and-yellow-colored mountains. More photos to come! Madison and Ben sort, organize, and code. We flowed our progress. And we…
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);…