Teston, C. (2024). Doing Dignity: Ethical Praxis and the Politics of Care. Johns Hopkins University Press.
After critically examining human dignity’s violent premodern origins, Doing Dignity: Ethical Praxis and the Politics of Care reports results from three case studies of contemporary healthcare situations at different scales: U.S. health care professionals’ Covid-19 caretaking experiences, legislative debates about medical aid in dying, and clinical interactions between wheelchair users and health care professionals. Each chapter moves beyond top-down, philosophical thought experiments to reconceive of dignity as a repertoire of rhetorical practices. I demonstrate how such practices are constrained by a situation’s local politics of care and conditioned by a sentimentalized, selectively-supplied sense of commonality.
Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty
Teston, C. (2017). Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
In Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty, 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.
Awards:
- 2019 Best Book Award, Association of Rhetoric, Science, Technology, and Medicine
- 2019 Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication, National Council of Teachers of English
Hesford, W.S., Licona, A.C., Teston, C. (2018). Precarious Rhetorics. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.
Precarious Rhetorics is the first work to bring precarity studies to the field of rhetoric and communication—and to couple it with new materialist frameworks—in order to unearth and analyze the material conditions and structuring logics of inequality.