You know the stars have aligned well when scholars living in Utah, New Jersey, and Montana can all find a convenient time to meet via Zoom, and at the tail-end of the fall semester no less. What we have been calling our “pill project” is making great progress thanks to the hard work of these…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Our Rhetoric of Science seminar had the wonderful opportunity last week to talk with Dr. Aimee Roundtree about her fantastic book, Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination: How Virtual Evidence Shapes Science in the Making and in the News. Dr. Roundtree’s book offers a wonderful analysis illustrating how scientific knowledge creation is grounded in…
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…
Our team’s newest publication is hot off the presses at Management Communication Quarterly. Please read the full article at: Cullinan, M. E., Maison, K., Parks, M. M., Krall, M. A., Krebs, E., Mann, B., & Jensen, R. E. (2022). “Seedlings in the Corporate Forest: Communicating Benevolent Sexism in Dow’s First Internal Affirmative-Action Campaign.” Management Communication…
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…
Last month, I had the opportunity to travel to San Diego for an NSF-funded workshop on inclusive language in the STEM disciplines. It was a wonderful trip mixing rhetoricians (you can see several of them hard at work if you look closely at the image below–John Lynch at the board, Raquel Robvais looking on from…
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…
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.
Starting in January, Melissa will begin her new position on faculty in the Department of Communication at Drexel University, where she will teach classes and do research focused on non-profit communication. This allows her to draw from her extensive background in environmental, health, and intercultural communication, as well as her experience working with the Peace…
The 2021 National Communication Association Conference was held in November in Seattle and members of the Chemical Rhetoric Group were there and busy. Dr. Megan Cullinan did a wonderful job presenting an analysis our group has been working on with artifacts we garnered from the Science History Institute’s Othmer Library of Chemical History Archives.
In a new publication headed by Madison Krall, the Chemical Rhetoric Group analyzes the contents of the Science History Institute’s extensive Witco Stamp Collection, which features postage stamps from around the globe that represent chemistry and related sciences from 1910-1938 (see below for some great digitized examples of collection artifacts). You can find an online-first…
Earlier this week, we gathered as many of our group as we could and had a meeting for the first time since March of 2020 (one of us was on Zoom from the east coast, one of us was driving to the meeting on Zoom and arrived in the middle for the physical meeting, and…
My new article, “Theorizing Chemical Rhetoric: Toward an Articulation of Chemistry as a Public Vocabulary,” has been published in the Journal of Communication! I learned so much in the process of writing this piece and am hoping that it proves useful for others who are interested in how chemistry and its concepts circulate and are…
Megan and Melissa learned recently that their paper, “Art-as-Pedagogy for Environmental Activism: The Rhetoric of Washed Ashore’s Ocean Plastics Exhibition,” won the Top Paper Award at the 2021 Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE). Woot, woot! Here is the announcement on Twitter. Their research is funded by a 2019 National Geographic Early Career Grant. I…
At the end of April, we had a Chemical Rhetoric Group soiree, via Zoom. As you might imagine, the whole thing was very exclusive and very, very fancy in that it included science-themed party favors and a viewing of a new NOVA “Beyond the Elements” episode wherein we learned about some of the differences between…
The journal Science Communication recently published our article “Strategic Place-Making and Public Scientific Outreach in the American Chemical Society’s National Historic Chemical Landmarks Program.” More than any other piece we’ve written as a group, I think this one had us working together as an interconnected unit the most. It involved traveling to (and finding!) multiple,…
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…
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…
Right before everything shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chemical Rhetoric Group spent a wild day on-campus working through research projects. We planned, wrote, brainstormed, ordered lunch, and then wrote some more. You know, all of your typical Spring Break shenanigans.