RHM's Relations and Relationships

On the Focus and Scope page of the journal's website, we describe RHM as a "multidisciplinary" journal that publishes rhetorical studies, and then go on to reference publishing "interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research" that "can combine rhetorical analysis with any number of other humanistic or social scientific methodologies." We still think, in some ways, that both the journal and field of RHM can be described as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary at the same time; beyond drawing from a number of scholarly areas, for example, our collective research often synthesizes and integrates (in a holistic way) concepts, methods, and findings from these areas, creating new hybrid forms of scholarship that are not fixed within disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, we recognize that these prefixed designators can mean different things, and that our use of all three at once suggests a field still very much in flux and with blurred boundaries, even if we can also point to some common characteristics and a growing body of scholarly positioned primary as RHM (Scott & Meloncon, 2018; Meloncon & Frost, 2015). As we argued in our introduction to the RHM volume 1, numbers 3–4 double issue, establishing the identity of our field entails an ongoing attention to forms of engagement, alignment, and imagination, including the ways these interact. An example of this interaction is our encouragement, as editors, of research that contributes to existing scholarly conversations by rhetoricians of health and medicine and experiments with imaginative and responsive methodological frameworks. Attending to this interplay is especially important for an emergent field that seeks to establish and promote a common body of rigorous rhetorical contributions generated by an expanding community and valued by a range of health and medicine's stakeholders.

Discussions of RHM's lineage and relations have noted the varied and sometimes multiple affiliations of scholars "who conduct rhetorically attuned analyses" of health and medical discourse, pointing to our intersections with a number of other scholarly areas, fields, or disciplines (see, for example, Malkowski, Scott, & Keränen, 2016). Indeed, in our collaboratively developed proposal for this journal, we mention several key relations and intersections beyond the "parent" field of rhetorical studies, including technical and professional communication (TPC); health communication, particularly critical-interpretive threads (see Lynch & Zoller, 2015); the health humanities; disability studies; and the rhetoric of science, especially regarding studies of medical science and research. Indicative of this latter relation was the deliberation about adding "Medicine" to the organizational name of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (so, from ARST to ARSTM), finalized in November 2015. Additionally, RHM work has been acutely concerned with, and responsive to, its relationships with health and medical areas and publics—a topic that has been the subject of multiple RHM Symposium plenary sessions.

The 2019 RHM Symposium, which unfortunately was cancelled because of Hurricane Dorian, had the theme of "Pushing Boundaries," and for the program we had planned several discussion-based sessions led by interdisciplinary scholars on the intersectional relationships (and perceived or imagined boundaries) between RHM and four other areas: the rhetoric of science, TPC, disability studies, and health communication. Of course, questions and discussions about the boundaries of disciplines, methodologies, and inquiries are hardly new (particularly in the social sciences), but now that RHM has a (growing) body of declarative knowledge, we have a kairotic opportunity to think through the idea of boundaries together.

As historian of science and medicine, William Rankin wrote in a review essay, "Academic disciplines [and here we could also specify their boundaries] are a comfort and a cage: Their shared literature creates communities and defines common problems, but they can also inhibit the exploration of uncharted territory" (n.p.). After raising generative questions about RHM's boundaries, intersections, and relations vis-à-vis other areas, at the Symposium we planned to encourage interested participants to organize dialogues around them, targeting publication in RHM or elsewhere. Because we hope this is still possible, in this introduction we want to pose several sets of questions as catalysts for dialogues, commentaries, or other follow-up work.

Because we want to be cautious about...