Representations of an Ebola 'outbreak' through Story Technologies.

Background: Attempts to understand biosocial phenomena using scientific methods are often presented as value-neutral and objective; however, when used to reduce the complexity of open systems such as epidemics, these forms of inquiry necessarily entail normative considerations and are therefore fashioned by political worldviews (ideologies). From the standpoint of poststructural theory, the character of these representations is at most limited and partial. In addition, these modes of representation (as ) do work (as ) in the service of, or in resistance to, power.

Global health wars: a rhetorical review of global health critique.

The critique of global health is a longstanding tradition in the global health humanities (GHH). Typically, this critique takes an expected tack: critics take a slice of global health, identify its rhetoric, expose its power, and elucidate its unanticipated consequences. Here, I subject global health critique to its own approach-conducting a 'rhetorical review' of global health critique in order to ascertain whether it has rhetoric, power and unanticipated consequences of its own.

Public voices in pharmaceutical deliberations: negotiating "clinical benefit" in the FDA's Avastin Hearing.

This article offers a hybrid rhetorical-qualitative discourse analysis of the FDA's 2011 Avastin Hearing, which considered the revocation of the breast cancer indication for the popular cancer drug Avastin. We explore the multiplicity of stakeholders, the questions that motivated deliberations, and the kinds of evidence presented during the hearing. Pairing our findings with contemporary scholarship in rhetorical stasis theory, Mol's (2002) construct of multiple ontologies, and Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe's (2011) "hybrid forums," we demonstrate that the FDA's deliberative procedures elides various sources of evidence and the potential multiplicity of definitions for "clinical benefit.