CFP: Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Symposium 2025

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Dear All,

I am pleased to announce that the biennial Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Symposium will be held October 17-18, 2025 at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in Minneapolis, MN. Please see the symposium website for the call for proposals and submission link, which also appear later in this message. Submissions are due April 15.

We welcome any questions or accessibility feedback at rhmsymposium.

Here is the full CFP, with a link to the submission form at the end:

Call for Proposals

2025 Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Symposium

Theme: Intervention(s)

Symposium Dates: October 17 & 18, 2025

Minneapolis, MN

Proposal Deadline: April 15, 2025

Overview

The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) Symposium is a diverse gathering of folks, from graduate students to senior faculty from a variety of disciplines and fields. The RHM Symposium seeks to bring together humanities and social scientific research traditions in a rhetorically focused way to allow scholars to build new interdisciplinary theories, methodologies, and insights that can impact our understanding of health, medicine, illness, healing, and wellness.

Theme

The driving purpose of much RHM scholarship is to effect change, to engage in what Blake Scott (2003) describes as “ethical intervention, however tentative and local” (p. 229). Melonçon and Molloy (2022) further point out that scholarly interventions in RHM can “catalyze real and specific change and . . . break down disciplinary silos in the process” (p. 3). These and other scholars ask us to envision and engage the principle of intervention in RHM responsibly and ethically, whether our own interventions are pedagogical, methodological, social, or institutional. At the same time, many RHM scholars study interventions within health and medicine—efforts to improve health and health equity at the level of individuals, populations, and systems. The notion of intervention itself is not uniformly positive, or even neutral, however: interventions in both rhetoric and medicine can cause harm and leave legacies of trauma. Our call for proposals embraces all of these senses of intervention in RHM to underscore the value and opportunities of the field’s inherently interdisciplinary nature, ultimately providing diverse spaces and approaches for scholarly engagement.

We invite proposals that consider and/or critique the concept of intervention, widely construed, in rhetoric of health and medicine. Some key questions could include, but are not limited to:

  • What are the spaces of our interventions as well as the frameworks, methods, and implications in which we engage them?

  • What is the sustainability of our interventions? What are their short and long-term effects?

  • What ethical practices and principles inform responsible interventions?

  • How might we confront unjust interventions?

  • How do various actors, such as health professionals, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, social media influencers, health publics, and emerging technologies intervene in health and discourse about health?

  • How can rhetorical attention illuminate historical interventions in health and medicine?

  • How do (or can) we work across disciplines? How do interventions gather disparate disciplines around shared concerns?

  • How can we intervene in the field in order to shift conversations, amplify overlooked voices, or move our community in new directions?

  • What challenges come with interventions?

This symposium thus centers RHM’s capacity to engage with and intervene in the entanglement of academic scholarship and our daily lives in ways that are both critical and just.

Inclusivity and Accessibility

We understand access as an “ongoing, iterative process” (Melonçon, 2018) that involves careful planning and nimble adaptation to the unexpected (Haas & Eble, 2018). With your help, we are committed to making the symposium an inclusive and accessible space from proposal submission to day-of events. rhmsymposium.

Proposal Details

A hallmark of the RHM Symposium has been its orientation toward dialogue among attendees. We are excited to maintain this tradition through a mix of short presentations, workshops, and work-in-progress sessions. This year’s workshops will be held virtually at a date prior to the in-person Symposium in response to participant feedback for more virtual options and for the ability to attend multiple workshops.

To submit a proposal, please complete the RHM Symposium 2025 Submission Form. The form will ask for the following information:

  • Contact information: name, affiliation, email, position

  • Title of your project/proposal

  • Keywords that describe your professional identity, research area, and/or proposal

  • Proposal of up to 500 words, not including citations.

    • Note: Proposals for panels can be up to 1,000 words and should include an overview of the panel and brief descriptions of presentations within the panel.

  • Proposal Type Indication: see more details below.

As part of the proposal submission process, you will be invited to designate what kind of session you’d like your project to be considered for, including:

  • Work-in-progress for working groups

  • Lightning talk (5-7 minutes)

  • Panel (75 minutes)

  • Workshop (90 minutes)

NOTE: We invite you to submit one or multiple proposals for different session types. You will need to submit separate forms for each session type you’d like to be considered for. The same project can be submitted for multiple session types or you can submit multiple projects, but we ask that you only submit once for any given session type (i.e., please don’t submit multiple work-in-progress proposals or multiple workshop proposals). Each submission will be reviewed independently.

Session Type Descriptions

  • Work-in-progress: Participants accepted for the work-in-progress session will be placed into small working groups with three to five other participants. Members of these groups will exchange drafts and provide feedback on each other’s works-in-progress (drafts of articles, dissertation chapters, grant proposals, book chapters, etc.). Proposals for works-in-progress should describe the project and indicate the genre of the work-in-progress (e.g., article draft, grant proposal, dissertation chapter). Virtual or In Person

  • Lightning talk: Participants accepted for lightning talks will be organized into panels with short (5-7 minute) presentations followed by a facilitated discussion. Proposals for lightning talks should describe the project being presented and articulate what kinds of questions or discussion prompts the talk would offer. In Person Only

  • Panel: Accepted panels will feature 3-5 presentations of 10-15 minutes each on the speakers’ current research. Panel proposals should provide a panel overview and brief descriptions of each presentation. In Person Only

  • Workshop: Accepted workshops will guide symposium attendees through hands-on activities or guided discussions with specific themes and goals. These workshops will be held virtually on a date TBD, 1-3 weeks before the in-person Symposium. Proposals for workshop facilitation should articulate the purpose of the workshop, how the workshop will be interactive for attendees, and what practical takeaways attendees will leave with. Virtual Only

NOTE: Only work-in-progress submissions will be considered for our Top Paper award and the Barbara Heifferon Graduate Student Fellowship for top graduate student submissions. All work-in-progress submissions are automatically considered.

Important Dates

  • April 15, 2025: Proposals due

  • End of May, 2025: Decisions released

  • October 1, 2025: Drafts of works-in-progress due

  • October 17-18, 2025: RHM Symposium

Submit your proposal by completing the 2025 RHM Symposium Submission form. You can complete the form multiple times if you are submitting to participate in multiple ways (e.g., for works-in-progress and lightning talk).

Have a question? Contact us!

Please contact rhmsymposium if you have any questions or if you have feedback, accessibility requests, or recommendations

More details about the 2025 RHM Symposium can be found online at http://medicalrhetoric.com/symposium2025

References

Haas, A. M., & Eble, M. F. (Eds.). (2018). Key theoretical frameworks: Teaching technical communication in the twenty-first century. University Press of Colorado.

Melonçon, L. (2018). Orienting access in our business and professional communication classrooms. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 81(1), 34-51.

Molloy, C., & Melonçon, L. (Eds.) (2022). Strategic interventions in mental health rhetoric. Routledge.

Scott, J. B. (2003). Risky rhetoric: AIDS and the cultural practices of HIV testing. Southern Illinois University Press.