Spring 2015 Research Questions from Trevor Owen's blog

Ideal Goal
My overarching goal is do something that makes a difference.

Academic Goal To be able to better understand, and to effectively communicate, the degree to which excessive dependence on digital technology reduces human cerebral practice with proprioception, exteroception and interoception.  (I love those terms.)

As part of that larger academic goal, I am interested in investigating and exposing the degree to which the over-use of technology, in and around childbirth, has the potential to cause both short and long-term emotional and/or physiological problems in mothers and children.

Realistic Academic Goal: 

I am interested in doing a rhetorical analysis to show how the conversation in medical science (in peer-reviewed journals such as Medical Hypothesis and the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics) about the safety of digital imaging in pre-natal testing (specifically ultrasound) is very different from the conversation in the rhetoric of the popular media and in medical sites (such as WebMD, advertising for imaging services and hospitals).   (This disconnect between contemporary medical research and the rhetoric of current medical practice is also apparent relative to C-sections and the use of drugs in labor augmentation and pain relief.)

Embedded in this disconnect is the question of :

Who has the most authority to speak about medicine?

Hypothesis: It is not the researchers who are producing the current science who have the most authority; it is the for-profit institutions that are delivering the services.  This is no doubt related to who has access to popular avenues of information distribution, and the best ability to package the information in a consumer digestible  form.  (It is also, I imagine, related to liability issues for practitioners, who no longer have the option of being wrong, so they opt for the most current technologies to do the work, because for some reason technology is never wrong.)

My conceptual framework is as a 2^nd wave, presenthuman feminist* teacher-writer who is interested in cooperating with (and translating), rather than contesting, the partial perspectives of both narrative and empirical stories. 

*I do not agree with Donna Haraway that the goddess is dead (Cyborg Manifesto 301), and I do not agree with Haraway that the Posthuman Cyborg is a feminist liberator (Cyborg Manifesto 302), but I also do not believe that the goddess (as a metaphor for empowered and embodied womanhood) is more important or more powerful than her metaphorical ontological consort.  (I think that using an incrementum to weigh gender-worth is ridiculous; it's like using an incrementum to weigh the worths of hot and cold.)

My previous scholarly investigations, first-hand observations, and lived experience situate me to understand that unmediated  (and un-medicated) childbirth is far safer than the current media rhetoric suggests, and that techno-birth is far more dangerous than current media rhetoric suggests.  My previous scholarship (some of it conducted last semester in 597 as part of my final project) confirms this hypothesis.

I also want to investigate the degree to which a "rhetoric of risk" around childbirth not only encourages reliance on costly (in more ways than one) technology in this culture, but is being spread more and more throughout the 3^rd world. 

Two research questions are:

• What is the best way to reveal the disconnect between the rhetoric of for-profit institutions and the information currently being published in peer-reviewed journal studies in medicine? My specific focus is on the use of technology in childbirth, specifically the use of digital imaging such as pre-natal ultrasound as standard practice.
• What is the best way to communicate this information to childbearing couples? [Because no matter how effective I am in packaging this work for the field of Composition and Rhetoric, not enough people are willing to read--or are able to understand--the impenetrable discourse in the scholarly stuff we write.] 

My methods will be to:

• Find, Read and Document the birth and breast-feeding conversation in for-profit sites (WebMD, imaging services, hospital protocols).
• Find, Read and Document the medical research conversation about birth and breast feeding (peer-reviewed journal-based).
• Find, Read and Work from sources that investigate similar questions (like the work of Mary Lay, Marika Siegel, Amy Koerber and Robbie Davis-Floyd on the rhetoric of birth, pregnancy and breast feeding).
• Drink wine, make soap and play ping pong regularly to avoid letting this project take over my life.

The validity concerns I have are that:

I am highly emotional about this topic, and that compromises my ability to be systematic about studying it.  My tendency is to just want to scream-- and that isn’t persuasive.

Much of the data that I have unearthed--particularly about the relationship of autism to the over-use of technology in childbirth--is new, and it is based on correlation rather than causality.  

I have trouble implementing any systems consistently (even recipes) and that compromises my ability to be systematic about approaching any topic.

What do I want to gain from the course that will help me in the pursuit of this research?  Most specifically, I'd like to learn more about the expectations of the genre.  I am a writer, with the majority of my education occurring in the 20th century.  I am not opposed to learning the conventions of producing text (performing text) in digital space, but it is new to me.  I have access to 21st century support systems to figure some of this out, but I am hoping to learn what the expectations are for arranging evidence in digital space (since it is not exactly linear in its presentation) and what constitutes evidence.  Also, what are the most productive or persuasive venues?  What are the citation or copyright rules for linking to stuff?  How do you create a web-site?  Yes, I am also interested in the theoretical-conceptional frames, but I challenge conceptual frames that tout a utopian vision (I think we should leave that to missionaries and not to scholars).