Robin E Jensen
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 135344 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Robin E Jensen |
| NOMBRES | Robin E |
| APELLIDO | Jensen |
| FIRMA | JENSEN R E |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Utah |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0216-3589 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 20 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2007 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Union Carbide’s “Hand in Things to Come”
Due to the booming U.S. chemical industry and the proliferation of new media, the mid-twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a distinct public vocabulary of chemistry. This vocabulary played a role in constituting U.S. consumer culture and establishing a narrative groundwork for upholding and shaping ideologies about progress, colonialism, and the value of U.S. corporate science – and the justification of corresponding large-scale environme…
Indirect audiences and conflicting narratives about oral contraception
When the first oral contraceptive pill was approved in the United States in 1960, scientific information for potential users was scant. Newspapers were one of the few sources of lay pill-related content. This study offers a critical-rhetorical analysis of the earliest New York Times coverage of the oral contraceptive pill ( N = 292), to assess how audiences were guided to understand and interpret this new technology. Findings reveal that, of the …
Defining abortion beyond the clinic
Abortion as a term functions within and across multiple spheres of interaction-medical, legal, public, and lay. Considerable attention has been given to medical and legal definitions regarding abortion. However, limited research exists regarding lay definitions of abortion and how they may be distinct from those in other discursive realms. This is the case even though research suggests lay conceptualizations of reproductive health topics play a c…
Targeted Invitations to Tailor
The United States faces troubling fertility trends that include high percentages of unintended pregnancies, as well as record-low fertility rates and individuals having fewer offspring than they desire. To address these problems, scholars and public health advocates have argued for the implementation of fertility information into existing sex-education curricula. In this study, we draw from 32 semi-structured interviews with secondary school sex …
Connecting infertility beliefs with viewership of teen pregnancy media
Popular media often contain storylines focused on pregnancy and infertility. These storylines have the potential to perpetuate stigmatization related to these issues. According to the differential susceptibility to media effects model (DSMM), lay infertility beliefs could serve as either predictors or outcomes of pregnancy-focused media viewership, with moral sanction theory and cultivation theory supporting competing hypotheses. Further, viewers…
The First Publication on Contraception in a US Medical Journal, 1928
Today, as access to women’s reproductive health care in the United States has proven less than ensured, it behooves scholars of public health to explore how US medical contraceptive care was successfully established and perpetuated initially in the early to mid-twentieth century. This article highlights the work of Hannah Mayer Stone, MD, in building and advocating such care. From the moment she accepted the position of medical director for the f…
Chemistry in the mail
Postage stamps are designed to convey messages that reverberate symbolically with broad swaths of the public, and their content has been employed as a window into how members of the public understand the ideas represented therein. In this rhetorical analysis, we analyze Philadelphia’s Science History Institute’s Witco Stamp Collection, which features 430 stamps from countries around the globe dating from 1910 to 1983, to identify how chemistry is…
Re-envisioning fertility science
This essay explores the discursive means by which ingrained trajectories of medical knowledge and practice have been re-envisioned and recalibrated in U.S. history. It takes for its case study the development of the field of fertility science and medicine, which is an outgrowth of Dr. J. Marion Sims’s notorious, nineteenth-century gynecological tradition of invasive and injurious surgeries targeting the female body. More specifically, this essay …
Theorizing Chemical Rhetoric
Chemistry has been a pivotal part of scientific discovery and human life for centuries. This essay argues that chemical terms, tropes, figures, appeals, and narratives serve as powerful rhetorical features of public discourse. From affinities and atoms to dark matter and radioactivity, chemical rhetoric fulfills a central organizing function in contemporary society and shapes how people deliberate and delineate their identities, relationships, an…
Strategic Place-Making and Public Scientific Outreach in the American Chemical Society’s National Historic Chemical Landmarks Program
This article investigates place-making—a process involving appeals to embodiment, materiality, and spatial arrangement—as a means for building communicative relationships between technical scientific communities and lay publics. Drawing from discourses related to the National Historic Chemical Landmark Program’s 89 landmarks, we illustrate how the National Historic Chemical Landmark Program builds different types of relationships with nonexperts …
Nonlinear Histories
The excellent books, articles, and chapters I list here conceptualize history through nonlinear lenses. Their authors engage not only a diversity of perspectives in the process of articulating different time periods and subject matters, they also complicate or counter the idea that history is inherently progressive or chronologically linear in nature. They replace the metaphor for history so commonly employed – that history is a straight line wit…
Reimagining Advocacy
In Reimagining Advocacy, Elizabeth C. Britt draws from her vast experience interviewing and observing students enrolled in the Domestic Violence Institute (DVI) at Northeastern University’s School
Mapping Nature ’s scientist
Nature, the journal that in 1953 published James Watson and Francis Crick’s double-helix model of DNA, also published numerous pieces about crystallographer Rosalind Franklin. Franklin’s coverage, however, was published largely after her death in 1958 and dealt with the fact that, without her knowledge, Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins gave Watson her crystallographic images of DNA and thereby supplied him with the key data upon which his mod…
Justifying an ideal first pregnancy age
Members of the lay public often draw from vernacular science knowledge—or metaphors, images, and terms related to technical science—to make normative assessments about behavior. Yet, little is known about vernacular science knowledge in terms of its forms and functions. In a national survey, US adults ( N = 688) were asked to identify an ideal age for first pregnancy, and to explain their decision. Participants drew from arguments related to horm…
Public Perception of Female Fertility
A Question of Sex
Kristan Poirot’s A Question of Sex: Feminism, Rhetoric, and Differences that Matter offers a much-needed intervention into existing accounts of U.S. feminist history. Poirot analyzes key points of
Conflicted Identification in the Sex Education Classroom
Despite enormous resources spent on sex education, the United States faces an epidemic of unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections among young people. Little research has examined the role sex educators play in alleviating or exacerbating this problem. In this study, we interviewed 50 sex educators employed by public schools throughout a Midwestern, U.S. state about their experiences in the sex education classroom. Twenty-two inter…
Improving Upon Nature
Chemical theories of human fertility and reproduction first became prevalent in both technical and mainstream media outlets beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, and they have remained prevalent to this day. In this essay, I analyze a selection of primary sources from this era that defined human fertility as a chemically induced process, rather than, for instance, a characteristic related to the conservation of nervous energy or to moral physiology. …
Curricular decision-making among public sex educators
The content of sex education in government-funded schools in the USA varies dramatically and reflects its contested nature and goals. Drawing from 50 interviews with sex educators working in the public, government-funded school system in a Midwestern US state, this study explores the processes through which sex educators decide what and how to teach. Working from the theoretical framework of argument sphere theory, and, specifically, socio-scient…
The Relationship Between “Teen Mom” Reality Programming and Teenagers' Beliefs About Teen Parenthood
A survey was conducted with U.S. high school students (M = 16.57 years of age) from the Midwest to examine whether exposure to “teen mom” reality programming (e.g., 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom) was related to teens' perceptions of teen parenthood. Contrary to our hypotheses, analyses revealed that exposure to teen mom reality programming was related to an increased tendency to believe that teen mothers have an enviable quality of life, a high incom…
Interview and Focus Group Research
Two qualitative methods, interviewing and focus groups, guide scholarship in a range of fields, yet evaluation of such work has long been riddled with complications. Scholars have called for the investigation of norms in qualitative research design to offer evaluators and qualitative scholars alike additional tools for judging and justifying specific methodological choices. In answer to this call, we analyzed the content of articles (N = 13,670) …
Balancing Mystery and Identification
The present analysis explores Dolores Huerta's use of a shifting transcendent persona to balance the sense of mystery surrounding her accomplishments with a performance of normalcy and audience identification. We find, first, that Huerta leveraged her borderland experiences and ideology as rhetorical resources that functioned to facilitate the amalgamation of personae exemplifying her advocacy, and, second, that her shifting transcendent persona'…
Narrative Sensemaking and Time Lapse
Secondary-school students in the United States score notoriously low on tests of their reproductive and sexual knowledge despite attempts by educators and legislators to provide them with informative sex-education courses. In this paper, we build from narrative theory to explore how low-income women perceived their formal sex-education experiences and how they connected those experiences to their sexual-health knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors. D…
A Content Analysis of Youth Sexualized Language and Imagery in Adult Film Packaging, 1995–2007
This study defines youth sexualized language (YSL)—language that sexually objectifies young people/youth (i.e. individuals who look like they could be minors)—and youth sexualized imagery (YSI)—photographs, drawings, or other visual depictions that sexually objectify young people/youth—and quantifies the frequency of both in mainstream adult film packaging. A content analysis of 2,600 randomly selected mainstream adult film covers released from 1…
Dirty Words
Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924, details the approaches and outcomes of sex-education initiatives in the Progressive Era. In analyzing the rhetorical strategies of sex-education advocates, Robin E. Jensen engages with rich sources such as lectures, books, movies, and posters that were often shaped by female health advocates and instructors. Her narrative demonstrates how women were both leaders and innovators in early…
Fertility-Related Perceptions and Behaviors Among Low-Income Women
In this article we explore elements of the theory of normative social behavior (TNSB) through interviews with low-income women ( N = 30) in a Midwestern U.S. state about their experiences with and perceptions of fertility-related norms. Using grounded theory and matrix analysis as analytical lenses, we found that individuals sometimes learn of injunctive norms and social sanctions separately, might be more likely to comply with a norm if they lea…
Entertainment Media and Sexual Health
The Relationship Between “Teen Mom” Reality Programming and Teenagers' Beliefs About Teen Parenthood
A survey was conducted with U.S. high school students (M = 16.57 years of age) from the Midwest to examine whether exposure to “teen mom” reality programming (e.g., 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom) was related to teens' perceptions of teen parenthood. Contrary to our hypotheses, analyses revealed that exposure to teen mom reality programming was related to an increased tendency to believe that teen mothers have an enviable quality of life, a high incom…
Using Science to Argue for Sexual Education in U.S. Public Schools
During the Progressive Era, Dr. Ella Flagg Young instituted the first sexual education program in U.S. public schools. She garnered support for her “Chicago Experiment” by integrating scientific appeals about sexual education into popular discourses on modern research methods, education, and physical health. Although Young lived in an era when respect for science was at an all-time high, she created arguments for public sexual education that bala…
Conflicted Identification in the Sex Education Classroom
Despite enormous resources spent on sex education, the United States faces an epidemic of unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections among young people. Little research has examined the role sex educators play in alleviating or exacerbating this problem. In this study, we interviewed 50 sex educators employed by public schools throughout a Midwestern, U.S. state about their experiences in the sex education classroom. Twenty-two inter…
Improving Upon Nature
Chemical theories of human fertility and reproduction first became prevalent in both technical and mainstream media outlets beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, and they have remained prevalent to this day. In this essay, I analyze a selection of primary sources from this era that defined human fertility as a chemically induced process, rather than, for instance, a characteristic related to the conservation of nervous energy or to moral physiology. …
Narrative Sensemaking and Time Lapse
Secondary-school students in the United States score notoriously low on tests of their reproductive and sexual knowledge despite attempts by educators and legislators to provide them with informative sex-education courses. In this paper, we build from narrative theory to explore how low-income women perceived their formal sex-education experiences and how they connected those experiences to their sexual-health knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors. D…
Theorizing the Transcendent Persona
In this article, we define and theorize the “transcendent persona,” a discursive strategy in which a rhetor draws from a boundary-breaking accomplishment and utilizes the symbolic capital of that feat to persuasively delineate unconventional ways of communicating and behaving in society. Aviator Amelia Earhart's autobiography The Fun of It (1932) functions as an instructive representative anecdote of this concept and demonstrates that the transce…
Using Science to Argue for Sexual Education in U.S. Public Schools
During the Progressive Era, Dr. Ella Flagg Young instituted the first sexual education program in U.S. public schools. She garnered support for her “Chicago Experiment” by integrating scientific appeals about sexual education into popular discourses on modern research methods, education, and physical health. Although Young lived in an era when respect for science was at an all-time high, she created arguments for public sexual education that bala…
Entertainment Media and Sexual Health
Sexual Polysemy
Communication researchers from a range of methodological backgrounds are studying the relationship between communication and sexual health. The present study contributes to this line of research, offering a rhetorical history of the earliest conversations about public sexual education in the United States. By analyzing highly circulated texts from figures representing three of the major ideological positions on public sexual education in the late…
Women's Rhetoric in History
A Content Analysis of Youth Sexualized Language and Imagery in Adult Film Packaging, 1995–2007
This study defines youth sexualized language (YSL)—language that sexually objectifies young people/youth (i.e. individuals who look like they could be minors)—and youth sexualized imagery (YSI)—photographs, drawings, or other visual depictions that sexually objectify young people/youth—and quantifies the frequency of both in mainstream adult film packaging. A content analysis of 2,600 randomly selected mainstream adult film covers released from 1…
Dirty Words
Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924, details the approaches and outcomes of sex-education initiatives in the Progressive Era. In analyzing the rhetorical strategies of sex-education advocates, Robin E. Jensen engages with rich sources such as lectures, books, movies, and posters that were often shaped by female health advocates and instructors. Her narrative demonstrates how women were both leaders and innovators in early…
Theorizing the Transcendent Persona
In this article, we define and theorize the “transcendent persona,” a discursive strategy in which a rhetor draws from a boundary-breaking accomplishment and utilizes the symbolic capital of that feat to persuasively delineate unconventional ways of communicating and behaving in society. Aviator Amelia Earhart's autobiography The Fun of It (1932) functions as an instructive representative anecdote of this concept and demonstrates that the transce…
Fertility-Related Perceptions and Behaviors Among Low-Income Women
In this article we explore elements of the theory of normative social behavior (TNSB) through interviews with low-income women ( N = 30) in a Midwestern U.S. state about their experiences with and perceptions of fertility-related norms. Using grounded theory and matrix analysis as analytical lenses, we found that individuals sometimes learn of injunctive norms and social sanctions separately, might be more likely to comply with a norm if they lea…
Narrative Sensemaking and Time Lapse
Secondary-school students in the United States score notoriously low on tests of their reproductive and sexual knowledge despite attempts by educators and legislators to provide them with informative sex-education courses. In this paper, we build from narrative theory to explore how low-income women perceived their formal sex-education experiences and how they connected those experiences to their sexual-health knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors. D…
Interview and Focus Group Research
Two qualitative methods, interviewing and focus groups, guide scholarship in a range of fields, yet evaluation of such work has long been riddled with complications. Scholars have called for the investigation of norms in qualitative research design to offer evaluators and qualitative scholars alike additional tools for judging and justifying specific methodological choices. In answer to this call, we analyzed the content of articles (N = 13,670) …
Balancing Mystery and Identification
The present analysis explores Dolores Huerta's use of a shifting transcendent persona to balance the sense of mystery surrounding her accomplishments with a performance of normalcy and audience identification. We find, first, that Huerta leveraged her borderland experiences and ideology as rhetorical resources that functioned to facilitate the amalgamation of personae exemplifying her advocacy, and, second, that her shifting transcendent persona'…
Curricular decision-making among public sex educators
The content of sex education in government-funded schools in the USA varies dramatically and reflects its contested nature and goals. Drawing from 50 interviews with sex educators working in the public, government-funded school system in a Midwestern US state, this study explores the processes through which sex educators decide what and how to teach. Working from the theoretical framework of argument sphere theory, and, specifically, socio-scient…
The Relationship Between “Teen Mom” Reality Programming and Teenagers' Beliefs About Teen Parenthood
A survey was conducted with U.S. high school students (M = 16.57 years of age) from the Midwest to examine whether exposure to “teen mom” reality programming (e.g., 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom) was related to teens' perceptions of teen parenthood. Contrary to our hypotheses, analyses revealed that exposure to teen mom reality programming was related to an increased tendency to believe that teen mothers have an enviable quality of life, a high incom…
Improving Upon Nature
Chemical theories of human fertility and reproduction first became prevalent in both technical and mainstream media outlets beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, and they have remained prevalent to this day. In this essay, I analyze a selection of primary sources from this era that defined human fertility as a chemically induced process, rather than, for instance, a characteristic related to the conservation of nervous energy or to moral physiology. …
A Question of Sex
Kristan Poirot’s A Question of Sex: Feminism, Rhetoric, and Differences that Matter offers a much-needed intervention into existing accounts of U.S. feminist history. Poirot analyzes key points of
Conflicted Identification in the Sex Education Classroom
Despite enormous resources spent on sex education, the United States faces an epidemic of unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections among young people. Little research has examined the role sex educators play in alleviating or exacerbating this problem. In this study, we interviewed 50 sex educators employed by public schools throughout a Midwestern, U.S. state about their experiences in the sex education classroom. Twenty-two inter…
Justifying an ideal first pregnancy age
Members of the lay public often draw from vernacular science knowledge—or metaphors, images, and terms related to technical science—to make normative assessments about behavior. Yet, little is known about vernacular science knowledge in terms of its forms and functions. In a national survey, US adults ( N = 688) were asked to identify an ideal age for first pregnancy, and to explain their decision. Participants drew from arguments related to horm…
Public Perception of Female Fertility
Reimagining Advocacy
In Reimagining Advocacy, Elizabeth C. Britt draws from her vast experience interviewing and observing students enrolled in the Domestic Violence Institute (DVI) at Northeastern University’s School
Mapping Nature ’s scientist
Nature, the journal that in 1953 published James Watson and Francis Crick’s double-helix model of DNA, also published numerous pieces about crystallographer Rosalind Franklin. Franklin’s coverage, however, was published largely after her death in 1958 and dealt with the fact that, without her knowledge, Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins gave Watson her crystallographic images of DNA and thereby supplied him with the key data upon which his mod…
Nonlinear Histories
The excellent books, articles, and chapters I list here conceptualize history through nonlinear lenses. Their authors engage not only a diversity of perspectives in the process of articulating different time periods and subject matters, they also complicate or counter the idea that history is inherently progressive or chronologically linear in nature. They replace the metaphor for history so commonly employed – that history is a straight line wit…
Theorizing Chemical Rhetoric
Chemistry has been a pivotal part of scientific discovery and human life for centuries. This essay argues that chemical terms, tropes, figures, appeals, and narratives serve as powerful rhetorical features of public discourse. From affinities and atoms to dark matter and radioactivity, chemical rhetoric fulfills a central organizing function in contemporary society and shapes how people deliberate and delineate their identities, relationships, an…
Strategic Place-Making and Public Scientific Outreach in the American Chemical Society’s National Historic Chemical Landmarks Program
This article investigates place-making—a process involving appeals to embodiment, materiality, and spatial arrangement—as a means for building communicative relationships between technical scientific communities and lay publics. Drawing from discourses related to the National Historic Chemical Landmark Program’s 89 landmarks, we illustrate how the National Historic Chemical Landmark Program builds different types of relationships with nonexperts …
Chemistry in the mail
Postage stamps are designed to convey messages that reverberate symbolically with broad swaths of the public, and their content has been employed as a window into how members of the public understand the ideas represented therein. In this rhetorical analysis, we analyze Philadelphia’s Science History Institute’s Witco Stamp Collection, which features 430 stamps from countries around the globe dating from 1910 to 1983, to identify how chemistry is…
Re-envisioning fertility science
This essay explores the discursive means by which ingrained trajectories of medical knowledge and practice have been re-envisioned and recalibrated in U.S. history. It takes for its case study the development of the field of fertility science and medicine, which is an outgrowth of Dr. J. Marion Sims’s notorious, nineteenth-century gynecological tradition of invasive and injurious surgeries targeting the female body. More specifically, this essay …
Sociology (26 obras) · Political science (18 obras) · Psychology (18 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Social Psychology (12 obras) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (10 obras) · Rhetorical question (10 obras) · Art (9 obras) · Medicine (9 obras) · Philosophy (9 obras)