Michelle Gibbons (she/her/hers)

Assistant Professor of Communication

University of New Hampshire

Description of Work: 

I am currently working on a book project concerning rhetorical negotiations around the diagnosis of the persistent vegetative state (PVS). Outlined by Bryan Jennett and Fred Plum in 1972, this diagnostic category was upended in the wake of brain-imaging studies in the 1990s and early 2000s that showed meaningful cognitive activity in the brains of individuals who had been diagnosed as in a persistent vegetative state. My project traces this upending in both expert and mainstream contexts, where key experimental brain-imaging findings gained considerable attentional traction. In doing so, this project brings together multiple lines of inquiry that have formed part of my ongoing research agenda. For one, it examines expert and popular discourses regarding cognition and cognitive processes. It also addresses how technology mediates communication as well as how we talk about technology and its mediations (in another in-progress project, I am theorizing the rhetorical work of deep fake videos). And finally, it considers the rhetorical ecologies of specialized knowledges, particularly as they circulate in and among popular contexts.

Contact: Michelle.Gibbons@unh.edu