Title: Professor
University: Wayne State University
Email: ellen.barton@wayne.edu
Description of your work
I am a Professor of Linguistics and English at Wayne State University. My research interests are in medical communication and medical rhetoric, particularly the discourse analysis of ethically charged communicative events in clinical interactions. In work with Richard Marback I am interested in exploring the ethics of defining vulnerable populations in health and medicine. There is an immense literature on vulnerable populations in research from chronic disease to natural disasters, from bioethics to health disparities.
In the IRB literature, two issues regarding vulnerable populations are well-known. First, there is no consensus on a workable definition of vulnerable populations (Ruof, 2004), and second, there is a worrisome expansion in the categories of vulnerable populations (Schneider, 2015). To contribute to this literature, I add two more issues. Third, there are no observational studies of how IRBs actually deliberate vulnerable populations in their review of research, and fourth, there are no rhetorical studies of autonomy or, especially, justice, which is at the heart of the wicked problem of vulnerable populations.
I hope to work collaboratively with participants in the 2019 Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Symposium to think about developing rhetorical definitions of vulnerable populations, analyzing of the discourse(s) of vulnerable populations historically and empirically, and proposing theoretical and methodological frameworks through which researchers and scholars in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine might contribute to the research literature and the practices of working ethically with members of vulnerable populations.