Dr. Christa Teston and Addison Torrence’s article, “Durability, Portability, and Responsivity in Rhetorics of Health and Medicine (RHM)” was recently published in Issue 7.4 of the RHM journal. Assistant editor, Amy Reed, interviewed them to learn more about their approach to collaboration and their hopes for future work in RHM.
AR: Can you talk a little bit about how your partnership came together to collaborate on this project and co-author this article? It sounds like an incredibly collaborative effort!
AT: Dr. Christa Teston, the lead author, had been working on this project for years before I joined on—it’s truly her brainchild. We initially connected through CareLab when I was an undergraduate, and she generously invited me to collaborate with her. Christa not only brought me into the project but also took me under her wing, mentoring me throughout the process. Her guidance and expertise in the field of RHM were invaluable, making this experience incredibly enriching and collaborative from start to finish.
CT: Yes, I met Addison through my colleague, Dr. Margaret Price. She and I were able to secure grant funds to help support cross-rank research teams collect and analyze their data. Addison’s interest in human health, community thriving, and empirical research made him a perfect collaborator on this project. I was able to secure a limited amount of internal grant money to compensate Addison for the hours he spent helping me to organize and analyze each of the articles we included in our corpus. Without Addison’s ongoing persistence on this project, I probably would have given up a thousand times.
AR: You write that one goal of the project is to “offer a data-driven, critical baseline to which we can compare the next decade of RHM scholarship’s enactment of socially just research” (p. 373). Toward that end, what are your future plans for research with this data set, and how are you hoping (or imagining) that others might pick up the threads of what was begun here?
CT: That’s a great question. Right now, I’m so swamped with other projects that I haven’t had a chance to build on the corpus that Addison designed in Airtable. But the number of times I’ve sent folks a link to the Airtable corpus since we finalized our analyses are too many to count! This resource has been especially helpful to graduate students who are assembling comprehensive exam reading lists, for example. So I think for now it’s kind of simmering on my back-burner until I can find the resources (time, energy, collaborations) to pick it back up again. But we were also very sincere when we invited readers to take the data set, themselves, and mobilize it in ways they see fit. In other words, just because it’s on our back-burner doesn’t mean someone else couldn’t take it and run! We’re especially eager for someone to truly trace the ebbs and flows of socially just oriented research in RHM now that diversity, equity, and inclusion have become weaponized by right wing politicians in the U.S. Here at Ohio State, for example, SB 1 is about to pass, which would make doing the research that might qualify as “socially just” technically illegal.
This is all mournfully outrageous, of course. But I suspect these kinds of state laws and harmful public sentiments will have severe consequences on RHM researchers’ capacity to do this work since state funding and personal employment is on the line. If nothing else, the way DEI has been weaponized by the right has had a considerable chilling effect. I wonder how, if at all, RHM researchers will attempt to resist? As the incoming president of the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Society, I hope to help brainstorm some potential answers to that question.
AT: I share Christa’s concern regarding the current attacks on DEI and social justice work more broadly, and I’d like to see RHM researchers continuing to push back against these damaging policies and narratives. Sadly, these attacks don’t just affect researchers—they have far-reaching consequences for healthcare professionals, patients, and community health as a whole. When research that prioritizes equity, access, and social justice is suppressed, it doesn’t just limit academic inquiry; it actively shapes the healthcare landscape in ways that can be harmful.
For example, the chilling effect on socially just research in RHM means that we lose critical opportunities to analyze and address disparities in healthcare access, patient outcomes, and provider biases. Without the ability to document and analyze these issues, misinformation and political rhetoric can more easily drive healthcare policy—often at the direct expense of those who need care the most. Without this kind of research, healthcare systems are less equipped to recognize and respond to the needs of marginalized populations, including disabled people, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, immigrants, and those experiencing poverty.
As we look ahead, I hope to see researchers and healthcare advocates push back against these attacks in creative and strategic ways. We need to ensure that critical work in RHM continues. The stakes are too high to allow political pressure to dictate whose health and well-being are deemed worthy of study.
AR: In your recommendations, you argue that even if replicability is not the goal, that reviewability should be important (p. 397). Can you say more about “reviewability” and how it relates to portable, durable, and responsive research?
CT: In this assertion, we’re actually pointing more toward RAD research expectations than we are commenting on portable, durable, and responsive research.
A key text I almost always assign in my research methods graduate seminar is Richard Haswell’s (2005) “NCTE/CCCC’s Recent War on Scholarship,” published in Written Communication. In that essay, Haswell describes replicable, aggregable, and data-based research, or “RAD research.” Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from decolonial and Black research methods experts who rightly challenge Haswell’s prioritization of RAD research. I also continue to learn a great deal from my colleague, Dr. Beverly Moss, whose work in community literacy doesn’t always lend itself toward RAD research.
So instead of continuing to further what some scholars might call “epistemic violence” by insisting on RAD research, Addison and I issue a call to perhaps replace RAD research’s “R” with reviewability instead of replicability. And what we mean by this is basically: show your readers how you got from “raw” to “cooked” data (cf. Smagorinsky). Just pull back the curtain and help us see how you got from point A to point B. Give us something to review. It doesn’t need to be replicable. It just needs to be reviewable.
Facilitating reviewability is, to me, the first step in research sustainability. We can’t build from one another’s work if we can’t review what’s been done. To me, reviewability is a core practice that enables portability, durability, and responsivity.
AT: I don’t have much to add here—Christa said it perfectly! One thing I’ll emphasize is how much we appreciated when authors “pulled back the curtain” and showed their work as we reviewed this large corpus. When researchers clearly outlined their processes, it not only made our job easier but also made their insights more accessible and actionable for others in the field. This kind of openness strengthens research sustainability by allowing future scholars to engage with, build upon, and challenge prior findings.
AR: In the introductory section, you talk about the two critical needs for RHM–the need for “durable” and “portable” research that can impact the sites we study and the need to dismantle “disciplinary whiteness.” Do you see these goals as working in tandem? Are they ever in conflict or tension? For example, is there a danger that making our research more recognizable to other fields would impact our ability to critique oppressive power structures operating within those fields?
CT: This is such a fabulous question. Thank you for pushing our thinking on this a bit more by asking it.
I think the goal of dismantling disciplinary whiteness is almost always in tension with the status quo.
The first thing that comes to mind is how I often find myself having to make certain concessions or compromises when trying to work across disciplines and/or sites of study. These concessions and compromises can sometimes require minimizing some things in order to prioritize other things. And any time we minimize, we risk silencing.
So I’m not sure that it makes sense to value durability and portability just because we think it’s important; I think we practice durability and portability because it stands to benefit the persons who should benefit from that research. Without constantly (re)calibrating to who/what benefits from our research, durability and portability (and concessions/compromises) might (perhaps unintentionally) render our research vulnerable to co-option or a kind of epistemic violence.
Speaking just for myself here, but I try to look at more senior researchers and writers as models for what it might look like to practice durability and portability without reifying disciplinary whiteness. The late Bill Hart-Davidson was one such role model for me. But I also look toward folks whose work is taken up by multiple publics as models (e.g., Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here; Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work).
AT: Thank you for this important question. I agree with Christa that dismantling disciplinary whiteness is constantly in tension with the dominant framework, including how we think about durability and portability. To me, the challenge isn’t just reaching broader audiences—it’s ensuring our research remains in service to the people and movements that need it most. Activist writers like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, as Christa mentioned, show how work can travel across audiences while staying accountable to the communities it serves. Work that is deeply engaged with lived experience—especially the experiences of those most impacted by systemic inequities—can be both durable and portable in ways that actively resist disciplinary whiteness rather than reinforcing it.
Be the first to reply