Stephen Straker Memorial Lecture | Mar 7

Since the launch of STS at UBC—and with the wisdom of Stephen Straker—rhetorical studies of science, technology, and medicine have been central to the interests of the program. My own work has focused on rhetorical elements in the theories and practices of health and medicine. My topics have included, inter alia, persuasions at work in discourse on migraine, breast cancer, death and dying, illness anxiety, “female sexual dysfunction,” aging/ageism, and health justice. My interest in the rhetoric of diagnosis itself led to my current work on low moods and their meanings. My lecture will begin with a brief history of STS at UBC (I have the archive!) and notes on the contributions of rhetorical studies to the work of the program. I will then give an account of the cultural and material significance of the persuasiveness of Peter D. Kramer’s (1993) Listening to Prozac—and of Kramer’s public and sustained allegiance, 30 years on, to the theses of that book. The lecture will address some of the ways that circulating discourse about mental health—here, discourse on “disordered” moods—is taken up in individual selves and in populations.

Judy Z. Segal (she/her) is Professor Emeritus, Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia. She was, in 2002, Chair of the Provost’s Committee to Propose an STS Program at UBC; she was a founding faculty member in that program. She was, as well, a founder of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine as a field. Her essays appear in rhetoric journals, interdisciplinary health and STS journals, and medical journals—and in essay collections across disciplines; she is author of Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (2005). Professor Segal has been a member of the President’s International Advisory Committee of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, a Distinguished Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, and a recipient of a Killam Teaching Award. She is a member of the Advisory Panel on Medicine and Society for the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

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