Lisa DeTora 

Associate Professor/Director of STEM Writing

Hofstra University

Description of Work

I proposed a WIP on phronesis and fear in public health campaigns that grew out of some work I started to do with an international group of ethicists. Pathos-based public health appeals are viewed by experts in the field of public health emergencies as potentially backfiring in situations, like COVID-19, where people need to think critically and effectively weigh and consider evidence. Pathos-based appeals trigger unthinking responses and a drive for what are ultimately algorithmic approaches to healthcare. In the long term, an overreliance on algorithmic health care delivery, unfortunately, is damaging to individual and public health. Even more dangerous is a belief that there’s a guarantee of “safety” available from infectious disease, which can lead people to reject public health measures for specious reasons. Rhetorical intervention could benefit humanity by unpacking unhelpful belief systems and providing means of persuasion that foster thinking rather than reactivity. An added exigence in this situation is that rights-based refusals to act in the common good can reinforce existing health inequities and even physically endanger the less privileged.

This work dovetails with a few other projects I am collaborating on, each of which suggests that considered thinking rather than ticking through requirements is a necessary practice in all health and medicine settings. These projects include a book chapter on ethics and global health security. The exigence in that project is that although various ethical frameworks exist for things like clinical trials, emergency room care, or resource allocation in emergency situations, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of good guidance for how to think through circumstances where different ethical frameworks collide or overlap. I am also collaborating on Good Publication Practice and an education framework for regulatory documentation, both of which focus on heuristic approaches to situations where different epistemological and practical approaches overlap or collide.

My fun project is about dinosaurs and embodiment, but it draws on a number of the same types of concepts as the work I just discussed. Dinosaurs are a convenient carrier for ideologies because we like to interact with them on an emotional level, even though we associate paleontology with science. I’m specifically interested in how scientific placement and displays of dinosaurs are suffused with embedded ideological information that goes beyond what might seem to be logical bounds of science, instead instructing people about how to think.

Contact: Lisa.m.detora@hofstra.edu