Lunch is provided

Title: Toward a Rhetoric of Care for the At Risk

Abstract: In this talk, I report on a study of the critical and biosocial discourses surrounding BRCA risk, showing how constructivist understandings of risk in those discourses reinforce the rhetorics of choice that have dominated our thinking about genetic medicine for decades. In contrast to this rhetoric of choice, I advocate for a rhetoric of care, identifying in those same biosocial discourses a set of rhetorical topics that shift our attention from how or if women at genetic risk choose freely to how or if they receive good medical care.

Bio: Kelly Pender is an associate professor in the English department, where she teaches courses in critical theory, medical rhetoric, and the history of rhetoric. She is the author of two books, Techne, From Neoclassicism to Postmodernism (Parlor Press 2011) and Being at Genetic Risk: Toward a Rhetoric of Care (Penn State Press 2018).

Location:	Room 005 (ground floor) of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Building 200 Stanger St.
Price:	Free
Sponsor:	Center for Humanities
Contact:	Ashley Morales ash1038@vt.edu 540-231-1981
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