Title: Maurer Associate Professor of Performance & Communication Arts
University: St. Lawrence University
Email: arowland@stlawu.edu
Website: https://www.stlawu.edu/people/allison-rowland
Description of your work
I am a rhetorical theorist, and my specific interest centers on how lives come to matter, or, more specifically, how we rhetorically generate and modulate the status of living existents, human or not. I have coined the term “zoerhetorics” to describe the persuasive communicative practices that do this work. I have found scholarship on the rhetoric of health and medicine absolutely crucial in this endeavor. In this context, I study reproductive politics and biocitizenship, especially across gender, race, and sexuality. I have published case studies on drone warfare, fetal memorialization, and compulsive health practices as a performance of whiteness. My current efforts try to make sense of the breathlessly exuberant pop science language around the human microbiome.