{"id":214,"date":"2015-08-20T18:15:01","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T18:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2015\/?page_id=214"},"modified":"2015-08-20T18:15:01","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T18:15:01","slug":"christa-teston","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2015\/participant-profiles\/christa-teston\/","title":{"rendered":"Christa Teston"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\"teston.2\"<\/a>Title:<\/strong> PhD, Assistant Professor, English<\/p>\n

University:<\/strong> The Ohio State University<\/p>\n

Email:<\/strong> christateston@gmail.com<\/p>\n

Twitter:<\/strong> @christateston<\/p>\n

Website:<\/strong> www.christateston.com<\/p>\n

Description of Work:<\/h2>\n

Mostly, I\u2019m interested in how people make decisions. And because sites of medical practice are so complex (mediated by a wide range of expertise, technologies, languages, visuals, and other embodied sensory input), I tend to turn my investigative lens thusly. Some recent observational sites include the Food and Drug Administration, hospitals\u2019 tumor board meetings, pharmaceutical clinical trial procedures, physicians\u2019 use of electronic medical record software systems, and pathologists\u2019 laboratory practice of visually rendering bodies\u2019 data.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m in the early stages of a book-length project tentatively titled Decriminalizing Uncertainty: Studies of Communication and Human Health. Each chapter in this book examines a particular case wherein uncertainty about future action persists. Subjects for each of these cases are informed by several recent events. First, I\u2019m haunted by the Italian government\u2019s imprisonment of scientists who did not accurately predict and\/or report an earthquake threat. This case is complicated not only by how scientists know, with some certainty, about an event that\u2019s yet to occur, but also how they communicate it to non-scientists, and then to whom they\u2019re beholden when failures occur anywhere along that long line of scientific practice. While this case isn\u2019t explicitly \u201cmedical\u201d in nature, it is about human health. The L\u2019Aquilla, Italy events became heuristic for me as I encountered other more medically relevant uncertainties.<\/p>\n

Consider, for instance, Angelina Jolie\u2019s decision to undergo preventative surgery after testing positively for the BRCA gene mutation. This case not only initiated popular discourse about women\u2019s health, but it drew attention to the complex relationship between knowledge or certainty about future events and unequal distribution of (healthcare) resources.<\/p>\n

This book is also in response to a project I completed with S. Scott Graham wherein we tried to better understand how decisions about pharmaceutical approvals were made by key stakeholders within or affiliated with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). One of our key findings is that there is little to no way for medical and scientific experts to measure or quantify clinical benefits provided by certain drugs that aren\u2019t obviously related in one way or another to overall survival. In other words, say, for instance, a drug improved a patient\u2019s quality of life but did not actually help them live longer. Drug companies, patients, patients\u2019 families, and any other stakeholder advocating for the effectiveness of the drug is hamstrung. They cannot provide the evidence that matters to the decision-makers (overall survival), and so their testimonies are largely dismissed. Scott and I believe there has to be a better way, and we draw on Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe\u2019s theory of \u201chybrid forums\u201d as a starting point for how we might reimagine deliberative events like the ones sponsored by the FDA.<\/p>\n

While I\u2019ve not yet fully worked through the theoretical and practical implications of what it would mean to \u201cdecriminalize\u201d uncertainty, I\u2019m confident that these moments, some of which I\u2019ve described above, are significant. They\u2019re the kinds of fractured, unwieldy, complex rhetorical events that are hard to study. And this is precisely why I\u2019m drawn to them as a rhetorician.<\/p>\n

Symposium Submission:<\/h2>\n

Exploring Feminist Materialisms in Contexts of Health and Medicine<\/strong><\/p>\n

More than a decade ago, Karen Barad (2003) argued that \u201clanguage has been granted too much power\u201d and that \u201cthe only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter\u201d (p. 801). Well prior to Barad\u2019s bold assertion, Berg & Mol (1998) argued, \u201cmedicine is a heterogeneous coalition of ways of handling bodies, studying pictures, making numbers, conducting conversations\u201d (p. 3). In my own research, I have tried to deploy these claims about the important of medicine\u2019s materiality as a theoretical lens. I have extended my gaze beyond Barad, Berg, and Mol to include scholarship that some might characterize as new materialism, object oriented ontologies, and\/or feminist materialisms. For the purpose of this proposal, I\u2019ll collapse these scholarly lines of inquiry into \u201cfeminist materialisms.\u201d During this symposium, I am interested in sharing and discussing ways in which these scholarly threads can be paired productively with objects of study in health and medicine. Although such a conversation might require that we eschew the descriptive prefix, \u201cdiscourses of\u201d in our symposium\u2019s title, I hope the organizers might see merit in exploring these theories for what they offer our research.<\/p>\n

Exigency for inquiring about what feminist materialisms offers scholars in medical rhetorics\/discourses lies in my own book project, tentatively titled Evidential Attunements: Methods for Managing Medical Uncertainty. Here, I am invoking Thomas Rickert\u2019s (2013) notion of attunement. He argues that attunement,<\/p>\n

Indicates one\u2019s disposition in the world, how one finds oneself embedded in a situation. This point needs emphasis: being so entangled, so caught up in the richness of the situation, an attunement is nothing subjective. It is neither inside nor outside, as Heidegger says, but \u2018the way of our being there with one another\u2019 (FCM 66). It results from the co-responsive and inclusive interaction that brings out both immersion (being with) and specificity (the way of our being there). (p. 9)<\/p>\n

Rickert invokes the Greek word \u201cperiechon\u201d to make a case for the ways in which \u201cthe surrounding environment becomes understood as more than a neutral, objective stage on which human drama and activity play out\u201d (p. 9), and \u201cthe local environment is not just a passive stage for human activity but an integral, active element in its own right\u201d (p. 10). I extend what Rickert refers to as environment to include material spaces where medical professionals and scientists engage in the everyday work of creating order from chaos. I argue that their meticulous, methodical approaches to constructing, assessing, and synthesizing evidence are material methods for or a way of being with uncertainty.<\/p>\n

For example, how pathologists dwell amidst uncertainties presented by biological processes invisible to the naked eye is a matter of attunement. In other words, how the pathologist can render meaningful (vis-\u00e0-vis diagnosis or prognosis) from a morass of cellular and molecular chaos is due in part to evidential attunement. My aim, therefore, is to reveal how material techniques for managing medical uncertainty are composed of human, nonhuman, and computational labor whose entanglements and intra-actions (Barad), when disciplined by method, can afford a sense of certainty. Evidential attunements create possibilities for sense-making amidst what appears to be non-sense.<\/p>\n

Detecting cancer, seeing pre- and post-operative differences, and determining a pharmacological intervention\u2019s effectiveness are all a matter of evidential attunement vis-\u00e0-vis method. Even as I endorse the work of colleagues in our field who emphasize that moving from uncertainty to certainty depends on discourse, texts, and rhetorical decision-making by human agents, I add a new dimension to our analyses: the suasive potential of material objects that have either been overlooked or regarded only as epiphenomenal to acts of diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. Indeed, the scientist makes meaningful the move from matter to evidence. But matter-turned-evidence is not mere material marionette enlivened by human manipulators\u2019 scientific strings. To investigate ways in which matter matters in contexts of health and medicine, I\u2019m interested in exploring the following theories and constructs\u2014some of which may still be characterized as emerging.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Barad\u2019s \u201cintra-action,\u201d \u201cagential realism,\u201d and \u201conto-epistem-ology\u201d
\n\u2022 Bennett\u2019s material vitality, or \u201ceffectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things\u201d (ix)
\n\u2022 Rickert\u2019s \u201cambient rhetoric\u201d
\n\u2022 Frost\u2019s notion that matter and bodies \u201chave a peculiar and distinctive kind of agency\u201d
\n\u2022 Haraway\u2019s \u201csituated knowledges,\u201d \u201cpartial perspectives,\u201d and \u201cthinking technologies\u201d
\n\u2022 Bradiotti (via Deleuze & Guattari)\u2019s \u201crhizome\u201d
\n\u2022 Coole\u2019s theories about agency<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Title: PhD, Assistant Professor, English University: The Ohio State University Email: christateston@gmail.com Twitter: @christateston Website: www.christateston.com Description of Work: Mostly, I\u2019m interested in how people make decisions. And because sites of medical practice are so complex (mediated by a wide … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":11,"menu_order":40,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"onecolumn-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-214","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/214\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}