Browsing by Subject "Medical Rhetoric"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Eat Well to Work Well: Oppression, Risk, Power, and the Rhetorics of Employee Wellness
    (2022-05) Stambler, Danielle Mollie
    This dissertation draws on interdisciplinary scholarship, anchored in the rhetoric of health and medicine and technical communication, and employs mixed methods, archival texts, and participant stories to investigate the impact of eating-related discourse and practices in an employee wellness program (EWP) on people’s lived experience with food, health, and their bodies. Wellness as a concept is deeply complex, often fraught, slippery, pervasive, and commodified. Workplace wellness, as exemplified through EWPs, only adds to this complexity through institutional power dynamics and by tying wellness to health insurance coverage and healthcare costs. EWPs provide a good context for examining power and practices around “healthy bodies” and “healthy eating,” and what those practices mean for bodies that are excluded, marginalized, or otherwise framed as unable to participate in the pursuit of wellness. Overall, this study aims to interrogate the intersection of eating habits, institutionalized wellness, and medical ableism broadly, using one EWP as a site of study. The EWP under study here facilitates investigating how employee wellness is built on ableist foundations, how institutional wellness programs wield power in perpetuating dominant biomedical norms around eating habits, body size, and able-bodiedness, and how EWP discourse and practice impacts employees’ lived experience. This project contributes both theoretical and methodological insights to the rhetoric of health and medicine and technical communication. It centers social justice, user experience, and critical theory aimed at revealing power dynamics and systemic oppression in order to demonstrate how material-discursive practices that enact wellness operate outside medical settings.
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    The Rhetorical Making Of An Illness: Medical Refusal, Trope, And Improvisation In A Somali Women'S Health Center
    (2020-05) Campeau, Kari
    This ethnography examines the ways that individuals and communities come to understand autism, specifically, and health and illness, more broadly, and how these understandings influence medical decision-making. This study, developed in partnership with a Somali women's health center, asks how Somali parents understand autism, use services, and navigate divides between biomedical and other forms of care. To do so, I explore and rhetorically analyze three sites of health-related participation: 1.) public health communication outreach during the 2017 measles outbreak in Minnesota. 2.) the provision of a person-centered pilot grant to Somali families with children with autism, and 3.) alternative healthcare relationships and practices grounded in an understanding of autism as caused by imbalances in the microbiome. I offer three concepts--the situated refusal, bureaucratic literacy, and diagnosis as rhetorical trope--that can theorize health decision-making and can inform policy initiatives toward more accessible medical and social service procedures.