RHM Editor Blake Scott’s Interview with Lisa Keränen

Blake Scott and Lisa Keranen

Date posted: August 2019

Transcription of RHM Editor Blake Scott’s Interview with influential rhetorician of health and medicine and bioethics scholar Lisa Keränen to get her perspective on the first special issue of the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine journal on public health, co-edited by editor Lisa Melonçon and by guest editor Jennifer Malkowski.

Topic: public health

 

RHM Author Interview: Liz Angeli, Ph.D. and Christina Norwood, M.S., authors of Persuasion Brief: The Internal Rhetorical Work of a Public Health Crisis Response

Cathryn Molloy and Erin Trauth

Date posted: March 2020

This persuasion brief suggests that the rhetorical concepts of techne and rhetorical work facilitate the creation of public health crisis communication. To illustrate this claim, we present findings from a case study with the Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, a transdisciplinary group that collaborated with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the 2014 Ebola crisis. The team created multimodal documentation to support healthcare providers as they prepared to treat patients and crafted communication to alleviate the fear among health workers and the public caused by the threat of Ebola. Ultimately, we frame public health crisis communication as a rhetorical endeavor guided by a focus on failure, situated expertise, and techne. This focus pushes specialists to tend to the processes involved in creating a response, and it highlights how gut feelings factor into the process of designing and implementing a public health crisis intervention.

Angeli, E., Norwood, C. (2019) “The Internal Rhetorical Work of a Public Health Crisis Response.” Rhetoric of Health & Medicine 2(2): 208-231.

Topic: CDC, PPE, techne, public health