Jackie James (she/her/hers)

PhD Student

University of Minnesota

Description of Work: 

I am currently a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Scientific & Technical Communication program at the University of Minnesota (UMN). My interests, broadly construed, are feminist rhetorical practice, rhetorical new materialisms, disability studies, chronic disease, and rhetorical studies of archives (digital or analog). At the RHM Symposium, I am workshopping an article draft about polio care.

In researching my MA thesis on the history of polio treatment methods, I noticed a gap in UMN archival records that connected with larger trends in medical history; there was a focus on medical and scientific achievement but markedly fewer archival artifacts that preserved the patient experience. The archive mostly catalogued institutional documentation of financial records, government reports on the modern fixtures of polio treatment clinics, and advertising pamphlets for treatment regimes. These are important historical documents, but they are also indicative of archival collection practices that reflected the standard values of powerful recordkeeping organizations. Archives are rhetorical; they tell certain stories while eliding others. In UMN’s polio archives, I found that the story of polio was distinctly medicalized, leaving stories of patient lived experience untold.

In my project, I address archival erasure by searching outside of traditional archives to assemble an ontological history of the polio patient experience; my research includes interviews with polio and post-polio syndrome patients. Rhetorical histories that subvert dominant narratives tend to forward a singular historical narrative of their own. Ontological histories resist that tendency and enables scholars to present multiple histories that “hang” together.

This article is one facet of a larger dissertation research project that investigates polio in America through lenses of rhetoric, bioethics, disability studies, and new materialisms. Through this research, I hope to offer insight into the long term, chronic, and still unfolding consequences of an acute epidemic

Contact: james806@umn.edu