Hello all,
Sending along a quick addendum to the call for submissions: “Additionally, participants in this year’s Preconference will be invited to submit their work to a special themed issue of POROI.”
We look forward to your proposals!
The Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM) calls for submissions for the annual NCA preconference, to be held on November 19th, 2025. In 2025, the ARSTM preconference theme will be Plastics/Plasticity.
In more than one sense, plastics are in the air. Often moldable, foldable, or otherwise deformable, plastic materials also lend the language of plasticity to our understanding of, and practices related to, bodies, nervous systems, cultures, and organizations. Plastic surgery and other technical body modifications, for instance, exercise an outsized effect on the public imagination while positioning human biology as seemingly infinitely moldable. Metaphors of neuroplasticity, and cultural and organizational plasticity also abound in contemporary scholarship and public discourse. The theme Plastics/Plasticity invites then, inquiries into the deformability and changeability of diverse objects such as neuroscience, scientific cultures, and organizations. Furthermore, plasticity itself has a rhetoric. Plasticity and plastic as metaphors in the biological and physical sciences, as well as their public uptake, continue to shape understandings of the world and are thus worthy of interrogation alongside projects that deploy these tropes in service of rhetorical inquiry.
The proliferation of plastic materials also contributes to ongoing ecological and health crises across the planet. They pollute our oceans, air, and bodies with uncertain health and ecological outcomes. As products of socio-technical processes, the cause of myriad problems, and thus subjects of public and technical deliberation, plastic materials are a potentially fruitful site of rhetorical inquiry for scholars interested in science, technology, and medicine.
Finally, we also invite submissions that investigate the plasticity of the methods and field of the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine. Submissions that stretch our cross-disciplinary field by investigating new arenas, approach our traditional objects in new and important ways, or demonstrate the flexibility of our methodological approaches, are all welcome. In this vein, we are especially interested in submissions that investigate the relationships between our field’s methods and objects and power, including their intersection with categories of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class and any other identity category.
Possible topics include:
· Rhetorics of the material sciences
· Theorizations of rhetoric inspired by material sciences
· Plastic surgery and/or body modification, including technological modifications
· Neuroplasticity
· Cultural and organizational stretching in the context of scientific, medical, and technological controversies
· Rhetorics of plasticity and their ideological vicissitudes
· Plastics and ecological or health crises
· Plastics, controversy, and governance, including anti-plastics movements
· Expansions of the field’s objects and areas of inquiry including investigations of decolonial and indigenous rhetorics of science
· Expansions of the field’s methods to include investigations of power along the lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability
We also welcome submissions broadly related to the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine.
Submissions may be in the form of individual abstracts, panel proposals, or special sessions and should detail the main topic and approach in 500 words or fewer. Panel proposals should include three or four presenters and an additional 100-word rationale for the panel that carefully details how each paper contributes to an overall theme. Panels should include speakers from multiple institutions.
Submissions should be sent as an attachment without any identifying information to Dustin.Greenwalt<mailto:Dustin.Greenwalt> by Thursday, May 15th, 2025. Please use “ARSTM Preconference Submission” as your email subject and provide your preferred contact information and the contact information for any co-authors in the email body. Any questions about this CFP may be addressed to Dustin Greenwalt (Dustin.Greenwalt<mailto:Dustin.Greenwalt>).