Controversial “gain-of-function” research (GoFR) aims to improve understanding of human health by studying behavior of genetically altered viruses in laboratory experiments. GoFR proponents tout its potential to support public health disease surveillance, drug development and vaccine innovation, while skeptics warn that unplanned laboratory release of genetically altered pathogens could harm millions in pandemics caused by science. Public interest in GoFR grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, as theories circulated that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of GoFR conducted at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Analysis of a 2015 public debate on GoFR research, reconstructed according to pragma-dialectical argumentation theory, sheds light on the increasingly salient scientific controversy and contributes to the growing literature on argumentation and health.

Robust stakeholder engagement in health research requires broad communicative integration, not only of patients but also other stakeholders such as health system leaders, clinicians, and researchers. As patients' personal narratives tend to focus on their own health care experiences, it can be challenging to incorporate these perspectives at the health system level, where discussions often address technical issues such as strategies for aggregating and interpreting population-level data. The PaTH Health System Leaders Demonstration Project provides a case study to explore the potential usefulness of deliberative techniques for facilitating heterogeneous stakeholder engagement in what some sociologists of science call 'hybid forums.' Close textual analysis of the event transcript yields insight on how social learning motivates group opinion shifts in deliberative processes. Reconstruction of the event's narrative arc marks a path of 'dynamic updating' that manifests in group opinion change. Analysis of episodes where participants perform 'deliberative openness' lends qualitative nuance to previously reported process measure outcomes reflecting high participant satisfaction. Such inquiry helps address a gap in literature on stakeholder engagement in comparative effectiveness health research, sheds light on the understudied genre of 'empowered deliberation', and illustrates design principles and practices useful for upstream integration of stakeholder engagement in the research process.

Background: Including stakeholders in the process and outcomes of comparative effectiveness research (CER) can help ensure that research questions are relevant and findings are communicated to individuals who need them for decision-making. Yet limited strategies are available to assist researchers with stakeholder engagement.While health system leaders’ perspectives are increasingly recognized as valuable for CER planning, their inclusion in the stakeholder pool raises challenges due to differences in culture, training, incentives, priorities and language norms.Objective: To convene and evaluate a deliberative forum for engaging health system leaders and other stakeholders in order to shape health system research priorities for the PaTH Clinical Data Research Network, a member of the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet).Methods: Breakout sessions and large group deliberation solicited diverse perspectives and explored benefits and challenges of different research questions. Topic reframing, narrative integration and dynamic updating techniques facilitated communication across diverse backgrounds. Participants included 29 health system and health plan leaders, clinicians, clinical researchers and patients from the network’s 6 participating health systems. Main measures were audience response system (ARS) polling on general topic preferences and survey data on measures of engagement and deliberation success.Results: A slate of 10 specific research topics was vetted; after deliberation, the group converged to favor the characterization of high utilizers of healthcare. Audience response polling revealed opinion shifts. Participants reported high levels of satisfaction with the experience and rated it highly for markers of deliberative quality (e.g., opportunity for active participation and adequate discussion, respect for others’ opinions and awareness of different perspectives). Fifty-four percent noted their views on the issues changed. Most participants learned from the experience (93%) and agreed that the process helped them to empathize with the challenges of others (85%).Conclusions: A deliberation forum can incorporate diverse stakeholders into CER, enabling participants to inform and learn from each other’s perspectives while shaping a person-centered research trajectory.

Research Article| December 01 2018 Newman’s Isocratic Protrepticus Gordon R. Mitchell Gordon R. Mitchell Gordon R. Mitchell is Associate Professor of Communication and Associate Professor of Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (4): 673–682. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0673 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gordon R. Mitchell; Newman’s Isocratic Protrepticus. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2018; 21 (4): 673–682. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0673 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In academic policy debate, annual resolutions focus research, facilitate argument development, and enable extensive preparation by participants. Little wonder, then, that calls to change resolutions mid-season tend to spark controversy and reflection. For example, citing strategic Cold War considerations, several branches of the U.S. military pressed the Speech Association of America to change the National Debate Tournament (NDT) NDT topic on recognition of communist China in 1954. Many called for the 2001–2002 NDT resolution dealing with U.S. policy toward Native Americans to be changed in the wake of the September 11, 2001 airline attacks. In Japan, debate officials withdrew the previously announced high school policy debate topic on nuclear power in arguing that it would be “educationally inappropriate” to debate such issues in the midst of the Fukushima nuclear crisis in 2011. Where do calls for mid-season topic change originate? What motivates them? What explains whether they result in mid-season adjustments? Original archival research exploring such questions promises to contribute relevant content to the historical record, as well as shed light on perennial questions regarding policy debate's status and role as a community of practice in the wider world.

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The practice of constructing imaginary scenarios for the sake of argument is sometimes referred to as ‘thought experimentation.’ In this paper, I employ analytical tools from the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation in order to clarify two theoretical puzzles that have been formulated with respect to thought experimentation. I do so by analysing the place and function of argumentative moves that contain suppositions in their propositional content. Three such moves are distinguished: proposing suppositions, accepting suppositions and using suppositions.

Perception Analyzer dial-meter technology has been increasingly deployed to track and display aggregate plots of focus group members’ real-time responses to argumentation in televised political debates convened in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. This article examines data cited to establish the Perception Analyzer’s reliability and validity; traces the tool’s historical roots to a Cold War machine nicknamed “Little Annie”; explores recent public controversies surrounding the tool’s use; and reflects on how real-time dial metering shapes the political terrain through a hidden curriculum that teaches contestable notions of public debate spectatorship and citizenship.

The 2013 National Communication Association convention included a deliberative double-session on big data, featuring Professor Lawrence Martin, co-founder of one of the leading business intelligence firms serving institutions of higher education, Academic Analytics. Analyzing the program transcript and deliberative polling results of audience feedback, this article explores how the development and use of new scholarly metrics implicate professional knowledge production in communication, and conversely, how conceptual tools from the rhetorical tradition elucidate the surge of digital scholarship that promises to reshape the intellectual landscape. The essay's middle sections isolate in discourse by and about Academic Analytics three “congruities of expertise”—techne, rhetorical exigence, and audience deference—and three topoi of assessment expertise, identified in the analysis as deference, humanizing metric, and negative synecdoche. The article then reviews an ongoing effort to curate a Wikipedia catalog of “measurement fallacies,” designed to supply inventive resources for scholars engaged in practical dialogues in which big data and new metrics are deployed to assess scholarly expertise.

Phronesis, or practical wisdom developed through experience, is an Aristotelian concept that can shed light on the capacities of patients to make health-related decisions and engage in healthy behaviors. In this article, the authors develop a conceptual framework for understanding the role of phronesis in lifestyle change as well as its relationship to patient activation, which is considered to be a critical component of the Chronic Care Model and patient education in general. The authors develop the concept of phronesis by analyzing qualitatively the comments made by 35 participants working to manage chronic health issues in a weight-loss study. The authors iteratively coded transcribed passages of exit interviews for phronesis and patient activation. These passages provide experientially grounded content for evaluating the use of phronesis and its development among individuals engaging in lifestyle change. Phronesis is expressed in 31% of participant responses to questions regarding the relationship between the online lifestyle intervention, participant health, and participant readiness to engage in productive clinical encounters with health care practitioners. Of those responses, 73% express some level of patient activation. The authors conclude that phronesis may be an important new tool for understanding successful self-management support, with potential usefulness in the creation of tailored lifestyle interventions, the development of patient activation, and the ability of participants to enact health-related behaviors.

While many "benchtop-to-bedside" research pathways have been developed in "Type I" translational medicine, vehicles to facilitate "Type II" and "Type III" translation that convert scientific data into clinical and community interventions designed to improve the health of human populations remain elusive. Further, while a high percentage of physicians endorse the principle of citizen leadership, many have difficulty practicing it. This discrepancy has been attributed, in part, to lack of training and preparation for public advocacy, time limitation, and institutional resistance. As translational medicine and physician-citizenship implicate social, political, economic and cultural factors, both enterprises require "integrative" research strategies that blend insights from multiple fields of study, as well as rhetorical acumen in adapting messages to reach multiple audiences. This article considers how argumentation theory's epistemological flexibility, audience attentiveness, and heuristic qualities, combined with concepts from classical rhetoric, such as rhetorical invention, the synecdoche, and ethos, yield tools to facilitate translational medicine and enable physician-citizenship.

Phronesis, or practical wisdom developed through experience, is an Aristotelian concept that can shed light on the capacities of patients to make health-related decisions and engage in healthy behaviors. In this article, the authors develop a conceptual framework for understanding the role of phronesis in lifestyle change as well as its relationship to patient activation, which is considered to be a critical component of the Chronic Care Model and patient education in general. The authors develop the concept of phronesis by analyzing qualitatively the comments made by 35 participants working to manage chronic health issues in a weight-loss study. The authors iteratively coded transcribed passages of exit interviews for phronesis and patient activation. These passages provide experientially grounded content for evaluating the use of phronesis and its development among individuals engaging in lifestyle change. Phronesis is expressed in 31% of participant responses to questions regarding the relationship between the online lifestyle intervention, participant health, and participant readiness to engage in productive clinical encounters with health care practitioners. Of those responses, 73% express some level of patient activation. The authors conclude that phronesis may be an important new tool for understanding successful self-management support, with potential usefulness in the creation of tailored lifestyle interventions, the development of patient activation, and the ability of participants to enact health-related behaviors.

A U.S. Department of State funded program, the Ben Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Summer Institute, has taught hundreds of high-school aged students from Eurasia and the United States practices of democratic deliberation using networked media. A survey of the program’s curricular innovations since 2006, involving integration of YouTube, Facebook, and documentary film, yields insight on how the advent and circulation of “(de-)liberation” technologies present pathways for young students to practice efficacious and convivial forms of cosmopolitan citizenship in our digital age.