Global Rhetorics of Science - Hardcover

by Lynda C. Olman (Editor)

Takes a multicultural, interdisciplinary approach to the rhetoric of science to expand our toolkit for the collective management of global risks like climate change and pandemics.

With this volume, the field of rhetoric of science joins its sister disciplines in history and philosophy in challenging the dominance of Euro-American science as a global epistemology. The discipline of rhetoric understands world-making and community-building as interdependent activities: that is, if we practice science differently, we do politics differently, and vice versa. This wider aperture seems crucial at a time when we are confronted with the limitations of Euro-American science and politics in managing global risks such as pandemics and climate change-particularly in our most vulnerable communities. The contributors to this volume draw on their familiarity with a wide range of global scientific traditions-from Australian Aboriginal ecology to West African medicine to Polynesian navigation science-to suggest possibilities for reconfiguring the relationship between science and politics to better manage global risks. These possibilities should not only inspire scholars in rhetoric and technical communication but should also introduce readers from science and technology studies to some useful new approaches to the problem of decolonizing scenes of scientific practice around the world.

Author Biography

Lynda C. Olman is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of Sins against Science: The Scientific Media Hoaxes of Poe, Twain, and Others, also published by SUNY Press.