About the Event
In this installment of the Health and Humanities Research Seminar series, Christa Teston, Ph.D., presents “‘Death With Dignity’ Rhetorics.”
Teston shares findings from rhetorical analyses of “death-with-dignity” discourse. She makes the case that contemporary arguments in favor of Medical Aid in Dying legislation in the U.S. have been hijacked by sentimentalized ableism. As an alternative to sentimentalized ableism, she shares micro-moments from several case studies that demonstrate dignified care-in-practice. The talk concludes with an invitation to discuss the scalability of dignified care in the U.S., considering compassion’s short shelf-life and the limits of market-based medicine.
Teston is the Andrea Lunsford Designated Professor in Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies at The Ohio State University. She also serves as the vice chair of rhetoric, composition and literacy studies and director of business and technical writing in the Department of English. Her research mobilizes multiple methods to study how people navigate uncertainty in technoscientific and biomedical contexts. Teston’s first book, Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2017 and won two national best book awards. Her second book, Doing Dignity: Ethical Praxis and the Politics of Care, was published in 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press.
The Health and Humanities Research Seminar is sponsored by: The Humanities Institute, The College of Liberal Arts through the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities #1, Greg Hemphill, M.D. and Brenda B. Hemphill, Tom Vetter, M.D. and Imelda Vetter, and friends and supporters of the Humanities Institute.