Title: Professor
University: Laurentian
Email: pspoel@laurentian.ca
Description of your work
My earlier work in RHM focused on the rhetoric of midwifery communication in Ontario. My recent work has focused on various aspects of the rhetoric of public health, particularly in relation to neo-liberalized “lifestyle” health (including “healthy eating”) and health citizenship. I am especially interested in the rhetorical constitution of “citizen” subjectivities through various forms of public health (as well as environmental and science) communication. My work typically takes the form of rhetorical criticism and focuses on the (ideo)logical tensions and implications of public health discourse. Most recently, Colleen Derkatch and I have been investigating the rhetoric of Canadian local food policy—which is typically strongly endorsed and supported by public health agencies—as enacted through the genre of regional food charters and emerging policy-related genres. We are currently working on a paper about food literacy and food security in these emerging genres as shaped by and indexing fundamental, possibly intractable tensions in public health promotion between a neoliberal individual “choice” frame and a more social justice Social Determinants of Health frame – we are looking forward to workshopping a (very) preliminary draft of this paper at RHM 2019!
My second, newer area of research is exploring the epideictic rhetoric of citizen science, in both ecological and human health related projects in Canada. As with my public health research, I am especially interested in how “citizen scientists” are rhetorically constituted (or interpellated) by this discourse—what kinds of values and characteristics are they presumed and encouraged to hold? What kind are they not?