Rhetoric, Science, & the In/humanities
“We need to speak instead of our genres of being human. Once you redefine being human in hybrid mythoi and bios terms, and therefore in terms that draw attention to the relativity and original multiplicity of our genres of being human, all of the sudden what you begin to recognize is the central role that our discursive formations, aesthetic fields, and systems of knowledge must play in the performative enactment of all such genres of being hybridly human.” ~Sylvia Wynter
Rhetoric is a part of the humanities, of course; but rhetoric is also inhuman—it operates within racialized material economies in its scholarly, public, and institutional pursuits. The sciences are human achievements, of course; but sciences are also deeply inhuman—they grapple with natural phenomena in ways that too often reify racial and patriarchal projects through which Western Man becomes majoritized and overrepresented (Wynter, 2003; Roberts, 2011; McKittrick, 2015; Yusoff, 2018). In the epigraph, Sylvia Wynter argues that being human is a process, a praxis, that must be re-enacted rhetorically, creatively, and hybridly through technoscientific systems. Relatedly, in recent STS literatures, humans are biocultural (Fanon 1952; Wynter, 2015; Frost, 2016), sympoetic cyborg kin with unique response-abilities (Maturana & Varela, 1992, Haraway, 2015; Strathern, 2005), and animals who eat (Massumi, 2015; Mol, 2021). Being human is not a noun, but an entangled form of earthly praxis. As rhetorical scholars committed to anti-racist global feminist projects on a living planet, we therefore must ask ourselves, what genre of the human is doing these technoscientific rhetorics?
The slash between in/humanities reminds RSTM scholars that an/other rhetoric of science is possible if it dwells with colonial wounds and works to build pluriversal futures for Black feminist technoscience (McKittrick, 2020; Noble, 2018; Weheliye, 2014), Chicanx feminist decolonial scientia (Sandoval, 2000; Anzaldúa, 2015; Mignolo, 2015), and Indigenous scientific praxis (Kimmerer, 2015; TallBear, 2015; Tamez, 2011), just to mention a few. For those primarily trained in Western onto-epistemologies, engaging the in/human means some rhetorics and sciences will become unrecognizable and strange exactly because their relations are multiple (Rivers, 2015). At the same time, the inhuman reminds scholars that the nonhuman, more-than-human, posthuman, cannot be ethically engaged without reckoning with contemporary legacies of coloniality and racialized capital, perhaps especially when in rhetorical practice with the political, public, and place-based (Olson, 2014).
Rhetorical new materialisms have questioned rhetoric’s genres of humanness through its diagnostic critique the modern/post-modern, its rejection of monohumanist praxis, and its redefinitions of humanness toward the material-relational (Coole and Frost, 2010; Graham, 2015; Graham 2020; Barnett & Boyle, 2016; Druschke, 2019; Teston, 2019; Walsh, et. al., 2017). Yet as STS scholars like Kathryn Yusoff (2018) have argued, the value of the inhumanities is not just a dialectic to reframe humanist exclusions in relation to their Others, but rather the inhumanities are an analytic to trace relations of racialized material economies through scientific practices (Roberts, 2011; Happe, 2013), and reckon with contemporary forms of coloniality (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo 2012). Simultaneously, as a version of counter-humanism, the inhuman understands being human as hybrid (Wynter, 2003; McKittrick 2015; Latour, 1991), as networked within global social ecologies (Gomez-Barris, 2017), as feminist matters of care (de la Bellacasa, 2017; Haraway, 2015; Jensen, 2016), as multiply applied and praxiographic (Mol, 2003; Graham and Herndl, 2013), and always already in relation to technoscientific infrastructures (Edwards, 2020; Johnson, 2020; Mehlenbacher, 2019; Kelly and Miller, 2016; Pfister, 2014). When paired together, rhetorics and sciences practice the technical and creative, the sciences and the humanities, the being human within networked planetary relationships. And while technosciences may not in and of themselves be liberatory, questions of emancipation and abolition seem unthinkable without reckoning with science’s monumental racial histories and practicing new technoscientific worldings with distinctive rhetorical arts (Miller, 1984; Graham, 2020).
Thus, the 2021 ARSTM@NCA Preconference invites individual papers and panels that address and/or embody the following questions:
- How do sciences, technologies, and medicines engage the process of genre-ing the human? How do technoscientific rhetorics (re)define genres of the human, and what racializations contribute to these processes?
- How have technoscientific rhetorics and racial-patriarchal projects emerged together historically and contemporarily?
- How are world-building practices and definitions of the in/human inextricably linked in the context of your research questions, sites, methodologies, and teaching of RSTM? How do your frameworks reckon with the overrepresentation of monohumanness?
- How do we make an/other (rhetoric of) science possible—one that betrays its relationship with racialized capital and instead builds worlds where living systems have priority over economic gains, growth, and development?
- How can rhetorical scholars work to empower publics with techne (i.e., citizen science movements, community-based scientists, health collectives; alternative medicines; etc), and how might this work transform genre processes within technoscience?
How to submit
Dates and Deadlines
Abstract submission deadline: Monday, August 30th, 2021 at 11:59pm ET
Decision notification: Monday, September 27th, 2021
Papers/presentations due for upload: Monday, November 8th, 2021 at 11:59 ET
Preconference date: 9:00am-4:30pm PST, Wednesday, November 17th, 2021
The Association for Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM) will host its annual preconference prior to the National Communication Association conference. We will offer a hybrid format of in person/online conferencing on November 17th, 2021, the day before the 107th Annual Convention of National Communication Association.