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This is a rhetorical case study in the evolving presentation of
science to the public. Joanna S. Ploeger examines the communicative
practices of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in suburban
Chicago to show how the rhetoric of science functions as an
indicator of the intellectual and political interests of scientific
institutions. She delineates the rhetorical strategies by which
Fermilab's founders, especially Robert R. Wilson, sought the
consent, cooperation, and goodwill of its neighbors. Wilson's
rhetoric was an attempt to distinguish Fermilab from other
laboratories in the national network by emphasizing that Fermilab
was not a nuclear-weapons laboratory and that its sole purpose was
to advance theoretical physics for the sake of knowledge. To
dissociate itself from weapons research, Fermilab incorporated the
aesthetic of sublimity, emblematic of the laboratory's focus on
high-energy physics, into the design of its buildings, grounds,
public art, and outreach materials. Ploeger tests the success of
Wilson's rhetoric through extensive interviews with researchers,
administrators, and visitors at Fermilab. Wilson's visual rhetoric
strategies were unable to counteract the persistent belief that
Fermilab was involved in nuclear-weapons research. In later years
the end of the cold war diminished the urgency of physics research.
This change in the national climate induced Fermilab's subsequent
directors to stress the many potential uses of experimental
physics, thereby opening Fermilab to a variety of projects at the
cost of the aesthetic Wilson had tried to project. In tracking the
evolution of the lab's representation of itself to its public,
Ploeger's work combines rhetorical criticism, visual rhetorics, and
qualitative analysis of interview data in studying a salient
example that comes into focus only when all three methods are
deployed collectively.
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