The Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine leadership and Board of Directors wishes to affirm its commitment to diverse scholarship and a diverse membership. By affirming our commitment to diversity and scholarship, we repudiate arguments that would reduce diversity to a quota or would resort to tokenism as a sufficient substitute for disciplinary transformation. Instead, we wish to prioritize and legitimate the grievance as voiced by those most harmed by recent events beginning with necessary changes to the National Communication Association’s process for selecting Distinguished Scholars.
We unequivocally reject Professor Medhurst’s editorial statement and the efforts of select Distinguished Scholars to steer the conversation away from the significant contributions of diverse scholars and scholarship of National Communication Association. Such actions and statements as made by Professor Medhurst and select Distinguished Scholars demonstrate a failure to recognize the systematic harm that is being done, and a failure to recognize those on whom harm has been inflicted. We also reject the false dichotomy of diversity and merit as oppositional terms. A good deal of scholarship in communication studies itself demonstrates how diverse scholars are disadvantaged in a long-term, systematic manner, and that the presumed neutrality of selection processes on the basis of “merit” is not “neutral,” and, further, fails to account for those systematic biases scholars in communication studies continue to identify. To suggest that attending to and counteracting bias will impoverish scholarly rigor or quality signals to minoritized scholars that their work is presumed to be less rigorous or of lower quality.
We also affirm our organizational commitment to increasing diversity because it is just. We recognize that this statement must be part of an ongoing process of making the field of communication as well as our own organization truly inclusive. We recognize that the #CommunicationSoWhite and #RhetoricSoWhite conversations do more than tangentially implicate ARSTM in reproducing structures of whiteness. Working towards inclusivity requires not only valuing diversity, but also taking concrete steps towards identifying how current institutional structures create and maintain bias, as well as protect an unjust status quo. To that end, we will continue modifying ARSTM’s processes for selecting leadership, composition of awards committees, ensuring diverse representation in conference programming, and recruitment of members in order to correct our own contributions to the field’s harmful exclusivity. We encourage members and non-members alike to attend our 2019 National Communication Association Business Meeting where we will dedicate space and time to reviewing our organizational practices mentioned above to critically assess how we have reproduced whiteness within the organization.
We also welcome further discussion of these issues and our own responsibilities for amending them at the ARSTM@RSA2020 pre-conference addressing Boundaries. Whether explicit or implied, disciplinary boundaries often limit who has a voice in important conversations, especially when the practice of science, development of technology, and delivery of medicine reify structural exclusions based upon (at least) race, ethnicity, class, gender, sex, and ability.
Signed,
Leadership of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine