In Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty (University of Chicago Press), I explore four backstage scientific methods for evincing disease: visualization, assessment, synthesis, and computation. Each case study describes medical and scientific practice as a kind of quixotic empiricism that involves human, nonhuman, and computational partnerships. I challenge the fetishization of certainty and make a case for an ethic of care that honors human fragility and bodily flux.

 

Projects In Progress

(1) Post-ACA Publics (with co-PIs Kristin Bivens & Kelly Whitney)

An IRB-approved project that uses survey methods to understand the needs, concerns, and anxieties of multiple publics as they anticipate changes to their healthcare.

 

(2) Dignity and the Posthuman Patient (book project)

An IRB-approved, site-based study of contemporary biomedical practices among occupational therapists who collaborate with assistive technologies. I hope to construct a practice account of human dignity in the age of the posthuman patient.

 

(3) Interrogating Hit-and-Run Rhetorical Criticism

Drawing on bibliometric data, this study examines the current state of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholarship. Specifically, I hope to better understand what makes some RHM scholarship more or less sustainable.

 

(4) New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality (book series, Ohio State University Press)

Barbara Biesecker, Wendy Hesford, and I invite proposals for monographs or edited collections for our co-edited book series that explores the suasiveness of material-discursive phenomena and the social-symbolic labor circulating therein. Here is the call.

 

Recent Publications (see CV for full list of publications)

• Teston, C. (forthcoming). "Pathologizing Precarity." In W. Hesford, A. Licona and C. Teston’s Precarious Rhetorics. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.

• Teston, C. (2017). "Enthymematic Elasticity in the Biomedical Backstage." In L. Walsh and C. Boyle’s Persuasive Topologies: Equipment for a Post-Critical Rhetoric of Technoscience, Media, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan.

• Teston, C. (2016). "Rhetoric, Precarity, and mHealth Technologies." Rhetoric Society Quarterly.
• Teston, C. (2016). "Rendering and Reifying Brain Sex Science." In S. Barnett & C. Boyle (Eds.) Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things. University of Alabama Press.

 

Only after becoming engaged with and a part of the very community and activities I study am I able to understand ways in which rhetoric (material-discursive phenomena) does work. In the classroom, therefore, I design learning experiences for students based on the philosophy that we learn best by doing. That is, I aim to facilitate a supportive classroom environment that encourages experiential, problem-based, collaborative learning. Email to request syllabi. Recent courses include,

 

Rhetorics of Science & Medicine*

Research Methods*

Writing Controversies*

Digital Protest & Online Activism

Rhetoric & Community Service

Crisis Communications

Business & Professional Writing

 

*graduate seminar