Finalist, 2021 Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine Book Award
Honorable Mention, 2021 CCCC Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication
“Vaccine Rhetorics offers a nuanced and occasionally optimistic take on the potential for pro-vaccine persuasion ... provid[ing] an insightful account of where we might look to find opportunities for successful pro-vaccination persuasion efforts.” —Mark C. Navin, Journal of Medical Humanities
“Lawrence is an agile and versatile rhetorical critic. ... Her project is worthy, and her confidence in rhetoric itself, and rhetorical solutions to public problems, is inspiring. ... Vaccine Rhetorics is an important book to read.” —Judy Z. Segal, Rhetoric Society Quarterly
“By the end of Vaccine Rhetorics, readers are offered an enormously helpful roadmap for what it might look like to enact a rhetorical approach to vaccination that resists an ‘us versus them’ mentality. ... I applaud Vaccine Rhetorics for the way it steps into fraught subject matter terrain and makes rhetorical theory ‘do things in the world’ (Helmreich 160).” —Christa Teston, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society
“This is a strong piece of research with very good instincts—very relevant both in terms of understanding how medical science and public resistance are generated and providing a good way to study the vaccine controversy by attending to the material factors which can drive and shape the conflicts.” —Nathan Stormer
“Vaccine Rhetorics is a powerful example of the important contributions that rhetorical scholars can make to interdisciplinary understandings of health and rhetoric. I expect this book to be of great interest to diverse stakeholders, including rhetoricians, health care professionals, scientists, and parents seeking to make sense of this complex subject.” —Amy Koerber
Debates over vaccination run rampant in the US—from the pages of medical journals, to news coverage about the latest outbreak, to vehement messages passed back and forth online. From the professional level to the personal one, almost everyone has an opinion on vaccinations—and often conversations around this issue pit supporters of vaccinations against “anti-vaxxers.” In Vaccine Rhetorics, Heidi Yoston Lawrence turns a critical eye toward such conversations—proposing a new approach that moves us beyond divisive rhetoric and seeks to better understand the material conditions underlying the debate.
Starting with a key question—If vaccines work, why are they controversial?—and using an approach she calls “material exigence,” Lawrence seeks to understand the material conditions of disease and injury associated with vaccination. Examining four primary motivations—the exigency of disease at the heart of physician views, the desire for eradication from policymakers, concern over injury expressed by parents and patients in online confessionals, and questions about the unknown surrounding potential recipients of the flu vaccine, Lawrence demonstrates the complexity of vaccination skepticism and the need for more nuanced public discourse. In bringing together the voices of those who oppose, question, and support vaccines, Vaccine Rhetorics unearths the material circumstances that lead to differing viewpoints and brings important attention not just to what is said but how and why it is said—providing a useful framework for studying other controversial issues.
Heidi Yoston Lawrence is Assistant Professor at George Mason University.
Contents
List of Tables
Preface A Starting Point
Acknowledgments
Introduction Retaining Persuasion
About Vaccination Controversy
Contending with Materiality
Considering Vaccine Rhetorics: A Theory of Material Exigence
About This Book
A Final Note on Materiality
Chapter 1 Doing Disease
Material Exigence: Vaccines and the Modification of Infectious Disease
Doctors Doing Disease: Vaccination in Medical Practice
Diseases, Cures, and Prevention: Material Exigencies of Disease in Vaccination Discourse
Changing Disease: Toward Intervention and Eradication
Chapter 2 Community Immunity and the Promise of Eradication
Material Exigence: Medico-legal Rhetorics and Smallpox Eradication
Prevention and the Public Good: Toward Community Immunity
Exemptions, Eradication, and the Disneyland Measles Epidemic
Medico-legal Rhetorics and Exigencies of Eradication
Objection and the Greater Good
Chapter 3 Family, Authority, Injury
Material Exigence: Vaccination and the Threat of Injury
Before-and-After: Vaccine Injury Confessionals
Rhetorical Authority, Rhetorical Presence
Injury and Beyond: Risking the Unknown
Chapter 4 Persuasion and the Unknown
Material Exigence: Calibrating the Unknowns of Flu
Risking the Unknown: Adults and Flu Vaccine
Rhetoric Amid the Unknown
Addressing Material Exigencies
Conclusion Rhetorically Informed Persuasion and a Material Rhetorical Approach to Controversy in Science and Medicine
The Material Rhetorical Approach
Material Rhetorical Approach and RHM
Exigencies, Responses, and Spaces: Possibilities for Modifying Material Exigencies in Vaccination Controversy
Future Directions for RHM Research in Large Controversies Involving Science and Medicine
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
