STSS in Coursework

Though the completion of the STSS certificate, I have been able to broaden my horizons beyond the study of rhetoric into the vast world of scholarship on the sociocultural impacts of science and technology.

STSS 519 STSS in Action  

In this introductory course, I learned the myriad ways in which STSS scholars engage with questions about the social impacts of science and technology. Beginning with seminal works in STSS from scholars like Kuhn and Latour, this class engaged with critical questions about the social nature of science, ultimately arguing that science is in fact a social institution. From there, we engaged with questions about technology, infrastructure, communication, controversy, and social structures. It was at the conclusion of this course that I feel my dissertation project really began to emerge. My final project in this course involved reviewing existing literature on the topic of expertise and putting that literature into conversation with other works emanating from both rhetoric and STSS to show that the question of expertise is central to both disciplines.

COM 538 Theories of Communication Technologies 

This class, taught by Dr. Adrienne Russell, was my first exposure to literature from STSS. In this class, we explored themes of technological affordances, algorithmic selection, self-presentation online, and the broad impacts of technologies on communication practices. By engaging with theory on the impacts of technology on communication, this class allowed me to see that technologies are not deterministic nor are they neutral, and that as a scholar who hopes to contribute to STSS and communication theory it is essential to avoid describing it as such.

COM 540 Rhetoric of Science  

In this broad perspectives seminar taught by Dr. Leah Ceccarelli, we developed rhetorical tools for use in the analysis of scientific artifacts. This course also engaged with the question of how rhetoricians can contribute to the study of STSS more broadly, ultimately arguing that the position of rhetoricians as scholars attentive to the role of language and symbols is essential to the understanding of how science works as a social institution. This class also allowed me to further develop my own understanding of how rhetoric, a uniquely humanitarian discipline, can work to analyze scientific and technical artifacts, which are largely considered to be objective and entirely outside the purview of the humanities. By combining approaches from the humanities, the sciences, and STSS, I was able to see more clearly that interdisciplinarity is essential in the study of science, technology, and their social impacts.

COM 586 Rhetorics of Health and Medicine

Dr. Amanda Friz taught this discipline-specific seminar in the rhetorics of health and medicine, and, much like Dr. Ceccarelli’s rhetoric of science course, focused on the ways in which rhetoric can work alongside other approaches to scholarship in the study of health and medicine. More specifically, this class explored questions of how bodies can function as rhetorical artifacts, how medical experts can gain rhetorical power over subject matter, and how our social understandings of sickness and health are rhetorically constructed. In this class, I experimented with using scholarship on new materialisms – briefly, scholarship that investigates the rhetorical power of objects and physical entities – to explore how medical devices and technologies allow their users to construct novel conceptions of themselves and their bodies.  

GWSS 590 Narratives of Race and Gender in Science and Medicine

To explore the interdisciplinary depth of STSS, I took a class on the narratives of race and gender in science and medicine with Dr. Bettina Judd. In this course, we read texts ranging from technical writings on medical practices and the history of medicine to novels and poetry in an effort to answer questions about how Black women and Black trans people have been uniquely exploited by Western medicine. More than any other class in the STSS certificate program, this course challenged my beliefs in the power of science and medicine as largely beneficial institutions. This course showed me that not only do science and medicine not work for everyone, but in fact they are vastly and materially harmful to many, many people. Importantly, this class engaged with narratives stemming from patients and victims of medical exploitation to vividly illustrate the harms that come from medical institutions that are structured to serve only white, cis-gendered men. Because we read poetry and fictional writing in this class, I feel that I was able to step out of my own biases and really engage with the perspectives of people who have been harmed by the institutions of medicine in a unique, visceral, and affective way.