Celeste M Condit
Biographic Data
| ID | 3603762 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Celeste M Condit |
| GIVEN NAMES | Celeste M |
| FAMILY NAME | Condit |
| SIGNATURE | CONDIT C M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Georgia |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Do Conservation Films Generate Support for Conservation? A Case Study Using Transportation Theory and Hidden Rivers
We conducted an experiment to determine whether a conservation film increased support for conservation and whether transportation and emotion were correlated with shifts in conservation support. Viewers of short and feature-length versions of the conservation film exhibited greater alignment with story-centric beliefs and conservation behavior interest than individuals who viewed a control film. Transportation was correlated with conservation bel…
Rhetorical strategies for retrieving abortion rights
This essay contrasts the reform rhetorics that were used to legalize abortion in the US with current anger-driven rhetorics surrounding abortion rights. Applying a materialist both/and feminist perspective it argues for the ethics and efficacy of the both/and rhetorical strategies used in the reform era. It suggests replacing the radical/reform dichotomy with a spectrum that prefers relatively broadening over more narrowing rhetorics. Current nar…
Theory, Practice, and the Battered (Woman) Teacher
Phronesis and the Scientific, Ideological, Fearful Appeal of Lockdown Policy
“Lockdown!” has articulated our collective and individual fear response to the novel coronavirus. Two regnant specialized discourses fostered by the academy—science and ideology critique—could not redirect this inadequate response nor generate their own adequately broad and focused social responses. This suggests the desirability of the academy adding phronesis as a goal for its pedagogical practices
Laypeople Are Strategic Essentialists, Not Genetic Essentialists
In the last third of the twentieth century, humanists and social scientists argued that attention to genetics would heighten already‐existing genetic determinism, which in turn would intensify negative social outcomes, especially sexism, racism, ableism, and harshness to criminals. They assumed that laypeople are at risk of becoming genetic essentialists. I will call this the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” This model has not accurat…
Click politics and the ecosphere, 2020
The human-scape regarding earth, ecology, the environment, wilderness, or nature has changed substantially since the publication of Kevin DeLuca's Image Politics in 1999.1 The election to the Unite
Public Health Experts, Expertise, and Ebola: A Relational Theory of Ethos
The key public health officials in the United States have been criticized for their work in the Ebola outbreak of 2014–15 by citizens, public officials, and health scholars from multiple disciplines. There are numerous grounds for these complaints, but underlying many of them was the perception of “failed leadership” that is here traced in substantial part to the embodiment of a positionality based in a presumed logos-based power instead of an et…
The character of scientists in the Nobel Prize speeches
This essay describes the ethos (i.e. the character projected to specific audiences) of the 25 Nobel Lectures in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine given in 2013–2015 and the 15 Presentation Speeches given at the Nobel Banquets between 2011 and 2015. A thematically focused qualitative analysis grounded in theories of epideictic discourse indicates the Nobel speakers demonstrated a range of strategies for and degrees of success in negot…
Participant views on consent in cancer genetics research: Preparing for the precision medicine era
Bruce Gronbeck’s Gift: A Hermeneutics of Hospitality
Research Article| September 01 2015 Bruce Gronbeck’s Gift: A Hermeneutics of Hospitality Celeste M. Condit Celeste M. Condit Celeste M. Condit is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, Athens. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (3): 567–574. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.3.0567 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Sha…
Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions to Social Change
This essay follows Dr. Kirt Wilson's charge to attend to the global context as a force that shapes scholarship on communication. Key components of the present moment suggest the value of a strategy of proliferation even beyond Wilson's urged dialectical relationship between “nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism.” Though “inefficient,” the strategy of participatory governance at multiple levels in the model of a federalist monitory democracy will tak…
Pathos in Criticism: Edwin Black's Communism-As-Cancer Metaphor
Edwin Black's essay on “The Second Persona,” introduced to rhetorical critics a rationale and model for a type of ideological criticism. Because it ignored the role of pathos in both the rhetoric Black purported to critique and in the construction of his own audience, Black's essay mis-described key features of Robert Welch's Blue Book, which was his explicit example of right-wing discourse. This critique of Black's essay invites readers to explo…
Recent rhetorical studies in public understanding of science: Multiple purposes and strengths
We review rhetorical studies of the public understanding of science that were published in journals since the last major review in this journal (1994–2011). Our review suggests that a vibrant and increasingly sophisticated body of research 1) has pursued Gross’s (1994) emphasis on contextual studies and studies emphasizing judgment of scientific rhetorics, 2) is producing a growing body of work designed to develop specific strategies for scientif…
When Do People Deploy Genetic Determinism? A Review Pointing to the Need for Multi‐factorial Theories of Public Utilization of Scientific Discourses
For over two decades, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have attended warily and thoughtfully to the growing influence of biological and especially genetics‐based explanations of human behavior. Concern about genetic determinism has formed a focal point of this attention, because it was presumed to provide a lynchpin for discriminatory effects arising from genetics technologies. Substantial empirical research has now demonstrated tha…
Believing in both genetic determinism and behavioral action: A materialist framework and implications
A disparity exists between studies reporting that genetics discourse produces deterministic or fatalistic responses and studies reporting that the majority of laypeople do not hold or adopt genetically deterministic views. This article reports data from an interview study ( n = 50), and an interpretation of those data grounded in materialist understandings of discourse, that explains at least part of the disparity. The article employs a detailed …
Visualizing nanotechnology: The impact of visual images on lay American audience associations with nanotechnology
Developments in nanotechnology are attracting the attention of scholars of science communication who can play a strategic role in understanding technology adoption by the public. This paper begins to address a critical gap in that research by studying the impact of visual images on lay American audience associations with nanotechnology. An inductive qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews about participants' general knowledge of nanote…
Functions of health fatalism: Fatalistic Talk as Face Saving, Uncertainty Management, Stress Relief and Sense Making
Much research on fatalism assumes that fatalistic statements represent a global outlook that conflicts with belief in the efficacy of health behaviours. Other scholars have suggested a more contextual approach, suggesting that fatalism fulfils personal and social functions. This study analyses 96 in-depth lay interviews in the US, most with low-income members of the general public, about four diseases: heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes and dep…
A preliminary study of how multiple exposures to messages about genetics impact on lay attitudes towards racial and genetic discrimination
Media depictions of genetics have led to concerns that this coverage will lead to increased belief in genetic determinism and increased discrimination, including racism. Previous studies of single exposures to messages about genetics or messages about genetics and race have shown some increases in discrimination and racism. Since attitude change is linked to repeated exposure to many messages, this study aimed to identify the effect of multiple e…
Feminist Biologies: Revising Feminist Strategies and Biological Science
Race and Genetics from a Modal Materialist Perspective
Prevailing idealist and materialist theories of rhetoric fail to account for the continual circulation and recirculation of “racism” as a scientific discourse. An alternative theory of modal materialism addresses this problem by suggesting that the properties of all being are constituted through three distinguishable forms of matter that include the “physical,” the “biological,” and the “symbolic.” A sufficiently lush and nimble conceptualization…
Genes and Race in the News: A Test of Competing Theories of News Coverage
Risk Comprehension and Judgments of Statistical Evidentiary Appeals: When a Picture is Not Worth a Thousand Words
Journal Article Risk Comprehension and Judgments of Statistical Evidentiary Appeals: When a Picture is Not Worth a Thousand Words Get access Roxanne Parrott, Roxanne Parrott 1Pennsylvania State University 5Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, 206 Sparks Building, University Park, PA 16802 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Kami Silk, Kami Silk 2Michigan State Universit…
The State of the Art in Feminist Scholarship in Communication
Bonnie J. Dow, Celeste M. Condit; The State of the Art in Feminist Scholarship in Communication, Journal of Communication, Volume 55, Issue 3, 1 September
Risk Comprehension and Judgments of Statistical Evidentiary Appeals: When a Picture is Not Worth a Thousand Words
Too little theory and research has considered the effects of communicating statistics in various forms on comprehension, perceptions of evidence quality, or evaluations of message persuasiveness. In a considered extension of Subjective Message Construct Theory (Morley, 1987), we advance a rationale relating evidence form to the formation of impressions of evidence. We compare visual versus verbal representations of statistical evidence associated…
Warranted concerns, warranted outlooks: A Focus Group Study of Public Understandings of Genetic Research
Functions of health fatalism: Fatalistic Talk as Face Saving, Uncertainty Management, Stress Relief and Sense Making
Much research on fatalism assumes that fatalistic statements represent a global outlook that conflicts with belief in the efficacy of health behaviours. Other scholars have suggested a more contextual approach, suggesting that fatalism fulfils personal and social functions. This study analyses 96 in-depth lay interviews in the US, most with low-income members of the general public, about four diseases: heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes and dep…
Diversity in lay perceptions of the sources of human traits: Genes, Environments, and Personal Behaviors
Warranted concerns, warranted outlooks: A Focus Group Study of Public Understandings of Genetic Research
An Exploratory Study of the Impact of News Headlines on Genetic Determinism
Critics have suggested that news headlines about genetics with inappropriately deterministic content will produce increased levels of determinism in the public, even when news article contents are not highly deterministic. This might result from a replacement effect (headlines stand in for the content of the article because few people read it fully) or from a framing effect (headlines frame the interpretation of the article content). A quantitati…
Feminist Biologies: Revising Feminist Strategies and Biological Science
Perceived Levels of Health Risk Associated with Linguistic Descriptors and Type of Disease
To guide communication with lay people about levels of genetic risk, this exploratory study employs a written survey to assess whether different levels of perceived risk were associated with varying the terminology used to describe the nature of risk associated with genes and several diseases. Results indicate that for lay participants (N = 243), there is a statistically significant difference in the level of risk associated with the terminology …
Hegemony, concordance, and capitalism: Reply to Cloud
Do Conservation Films Generate Support for Conservation? A Case Study Using Transportation Theory and Hidden Rivers
We conducted an experiment to determine whether a conservation film increased support for conservation and whether transportation and emotion were correlated with shifts in conservation support. Viewers of short and feature-length versions of the conservation film exhibited greater alignment with story-centric beliefs and conservation behavior interest than individuals who viewed a control film. Transportation was correlated with conservation bel…
Public Health Experts, Expertise, and Ebola: A Relational Theory of Ethos
The key public health officials in the United States have been criticized for their work in the Ebola outbreak of 2014–15 by citizens, public officials, and health scholars from multiple disciplines. There are numerous grounds for these complaints, but underlying many of them was the perception of “failed leadership” that is here traced in substantial part to the embodiment of a positionality based in a presumed logos-based power instead of an et…
Pathos in Criticism: Edwin Black's Communism-As-Cancer Metaphor
Edwin Black's essay on “The Second Persona,” introduced to rhetorical critics a rationale and model for a type of ideological criticism. Because it ignored the role of pathos in both the rhetoric Black purported to critique and in the construction of his own audience, Black's essay mis-described key features of Robert Welch's Blue Book, which was his explicit example of right-wing discourse. This critique of Black's essay invites readers to explo…
The Meaning and Effects of Discourse about Genetics: Methodological Variations in Studies of Discourse and Social Change
Studies seeking to explore the implications of the discourse of medicalgenetics using four different methodologies are overviewed. Research on genetics discourse using critical methods, audience studies, persuasion studies and institutional studies suggest results that are at odds with one another. Rather than selecting one approach based on a preference for the methodology itself or the results it provides, a clearer picture of how genetic disco…
Lay Understandings of Sex/Gender and Genetics: A Methodology That Preserves Polyvocal Coder Input
Recipes or blueprints for our genes? How contexts selectively activate the multiple meanings of metaphors
In the 1990s, critics of public discourse about genetics urged the replacement of the "blueprint" metaphor with the "recipe" metaphor. The subsequent appearance of the "recipe" metaphor in the mass media did not carry the expected reduction of genetic determinism, however. To account for the failure of the critical predictions, this essay extends Josef Stern's contextually based semantic theory of metaphor to a polyvocal theory of how metaphors d…
Framing Kenneth Burke: Sad tragedy or comic dance
(1994). Framing Kenneth Burke: Sad tragedy or comic dance? Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 80, No. 1, pp. 77-82
Framing Kenneth Burke: Sad tragedy or comic dance
(1994). Framing Kenneth Burke: Sad tragedy or comic dance? Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 80, No. 1, pp. 77-82
Political styles and political feelings: Introduction
Robert Hariman. Political Style: The Artistry of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, xii + 259. Roderick P. Hart. Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. viii + 230 pp
Hegemony, concordance, and capitalism: Reply to Cloud
Clouding the issues? The ideal and the material in human communication
How the public understands genetics: Non-deterministic and non-discriminatory interpretations of the “blueprint” metaphor
Critics have worried that recent mass media coverage of genetics encourages genetic determinism and discriminatory attitudes in the public. They have identified the “blueprint” metaphor as one major component of public discourse that encourages such undesirable public opinions. To assess public interpretations of popular discourse about genetics, this audience study exposed 137 college students to sample genetics news articles and asked for their…
Blueprints and Recipes: Gendered Metaphors for Genetic Medicine
An Exploratory Study of the Impact of News Headlines on Genetic Determinism
Critics have suggested that news headlines about genetics with inappropriately deterministic content will produce increased levels of determinism in the public, even when news article contents are not highly deterministic. This might result from a replacement effect (headlines stand in for the content of the article because few people read it fully) or from a framing effect (headlines frame the interpretation of the article content). A quantitati…
Recipes or blueprints for our genes? How contexts selectively activate the multiple meanings of metaphors
In the 1990s, critics of public discourse about genetics urged the replacement of the "blueprint" metaphor with the "recipe" metaphor. The subsequent appearance of the "recipe" metaphor in the mass media did not carry the expected reduction of genetic determinism, however. To account for the failure of the critical predictions, this essay extends Josef Stern's contextually based semantic theory of metaphor to a polyvocal theory of how metaphors d…
Lay Understandings of Sex/Gender and Genetics: A Methodology That Preserves Polyvocal Coder Input
Diversity in lay perceptions of the sources of human traits: Genes, Environments, and Personal Behaviors
Deriving Lay Models of Uncertainty About Genes' Role in Illness Causation to Guide Communication About Human Genetics
Advances in clinical genetics and biotechnology increase the ability to identify individual genetic makeup through genetic services and testing. As a result, genes have become the focus of an increasing number of health messages associated with medical interaction and public communication. This research explored public perceptions (N= 858) of the role of genes in health using problematic integration (PI) theory as a framework. A Genetic Relativis…
The Role of “Genetics” in Popular Understandings of Race in the United States
The increase in public representation of the science-based concept “genetics” in the mass media might be expected to have a major impact on public understanding of the concept of “race.” A model of lay understandings of the role of genetics in the contemporary United States is offered based on focus group research, random digit dial surveys, and community based surveys. That model indicates that lay people identify race primarily by physical feat…
Perceived Levels of Health Risk Associated with Linguistic Descriptors and Type of Disease
To guide communication with lay people about levels of genetic risk, this exploratory study employs a written survey to assess whether different levels of perceived risk were associated with varying the terminology used to describe the nature of risk associated with genes and several diseases. Results indicate that for lay participants (N = 243), there is a statistically significant difference in the level of risk associated with the terminology …
The Meaning and Effects of Discourse about Genetics: Methodological Variations in Studies of Discourse and Social Change
Studies seeking to explore the implications of the discourse of medicalgenetics using four different methodologies are overviewed. Research on genetics discourse using critical methods, audience studies, persuasion studies and institutional studies suggest results that are at odds with one another. Rather than selecting one approach based on a preference for the methodology itself or the results it provides, a clearer picture of how genetic disco…
Risk Comprehension and Judgments of Statistical Evidentiary Appeals: When a Picture is Not Worth a Thousand Words
Journal Article Risk Comprehension and Judgments of Statistical Evidentiary Appeals: When a Picture is Not Worth a Thousand Words Get access Roxanne Parrott, Roxanne Parrott 1Pennsylvania State University 5Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, 206 Sparks Building, University Park, PA 16802 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Kami Silk, Kami Silk 2Michigan State Universit…
The State of the Art in Feminist Scholarship in Communication
Bonnie J. Dow, Celeste M. Condit; The State of the Art in Feminist Scholarship in Communication, Journal of Communication, Volume 55, Issue 3, 1 September
Risk Comprehension and Judgments of Statistical Evidentiary Appeals: When a Picture is Not Worth a Thousand Words
Too little theory and research has considered the effects of communicating statistics in various forms on comprehension, perceptions of evidence quality, or evaluations of message persuasiveness. In a considered extension of Subjective Message Construct Theory (Morley, 1987), we advance a rationale relating evidence form to the formation of impressions of evidence. We compare visual versus verbal representations of statistical evidence associated…
Warranted concerns, warranted outlooks: A Focus Group Study of Public Understandings of Genetic Research
Genes and Race in the News: A Test of Competing Theories of News Coverage
A preliminary study of how multiple exposures to messages about genetics impact on lay attitudes towards racial and genetic discrimination
Media depictions of genetics have led to concerns that this coverage will lead to increased belief in genetic determinism and increased discrimination, including racism. Previous studies of single exposures to messages about genetics or messages about genetics and race have shown some increases in discrimination and racism. Since attitude change is linked to repeated exposure to many messages, this study aimed to identify the effect of multiple e…
Feminist Biologies: Revising Feminist Strategies and Biological Science
Race and Genetics from a Modal Materialist Perspective
Prevailing idealist and materialist theories of rhetoric fail to account for the continual circulation and recirculation of “racism” as a scientific discourse. An alternative theory of modal materialism addresses this problem by suggesting that the properties of all being are constituted through three distinguishable forms of matter that include the “physical,” the “biological,” and the “symbolic.” A sufficiently lush and nimble conceptualization…
Believing in both genetic determinism and behavioral action: A materialist framework and implications
A disparity exists between studies reporting that genetics discourse produces deterministic or fatalistic responses and studies reporting that the majority of laypeople do not hold or adopt genetically deterministic views. This article reports data from an interview study ( n = 50), and an interpretation of those data grounded in materialist understandings of discourse, that explains at least part of the disparity. The article employs a detailed …
Visualizing nanotechnology: The impact of visual images on lay American audience associations with nanotechnology
Developments in nanotechnology are attracting the attention of scholars of science communication who can play a strategic role in understanding technology adoption by the public. This paper begins to address a critical gap in that research by studying the impact of visual images on lay American audience associations with nanotechnology. An inductive qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews about participants' general knowledge of nanote…
Functions of health fatalism: Fatalistic Talk as Face Saving, Uncertainty Management, Stress Relief and Sense Making
Much research on fatalism assumes that fatalistic statements represent a global outlook that conflicts with belief in the efficacy of health behaviours. Other scholars have suggested a more contextual approach, suggesting that fatalism fulfils personal and social functions. This study analyses 96 in-depth lay interviews in the US, most with low-income members of the general public, about four diseases: heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes and dep…
Sociology (30 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Political science (17 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (12 works) · Biology (11 works)