, a professor in the Department of Communication, is a rhetorical critic and theorist. She is the 2016 recipient of the National Communication Association’s .

Could you tell about the work that led to this award?

The bulk of my work is on the rhetoric of science. That means that I study the persuasive strategies used in arguments about science — by scientists seeking to convince their colleagues that a study is worthwhile, or by scientists addressing broader publics, or even by politicians wrangling over public policies that involve technoscientific matters.

This is a national award for a career of work around a particular subject, so my work on the rhetoric of science is the main reason I received it. But the awards committee also mentioned my work developing a rhetorical theory of – that is, how some texts are designed to carry different meanings for different audiences, whether for good or ill.

That’s interesting about scientists seeking to convince their colleagues — what arguments tend to succeed?

Some of my earliest work showed that scientists who persuade their colleagues to undertake interdisciplinary work do so by employing strategies of polysemy. That’s how I ended up studying that concept. For example, physicist inspired physicists and biologists to come together to form the field of molecular biology by hinting to each that they would find what they most desired across disciplinary borders.

There was a single passage in his influential little book, “” that was interpreted differently by physicists and biologists, and each ended up seeing it as evidence that their discipline would benefit the most from a collaboration between the two. That type of strategic ambiguity is a masterful rhetorical move used by a someone who is both a brilliant scientist and a brilliant arguer.

What are some examples of polysemy that people might encounter in life or work?

Another type of polysemy is one that doesn’t serve the interests of the arguer, but is created instead by others. It’s called resistive reading, and you can see it in the current presidential campaign, where statements are read out of context to suggest a meaning that’s opposite to what its author originally meant.

A case in point is Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” speech. Few people know that her much-quoted line about “half of Trump’s supporters” was just the first half of an argument she was making to persuade a die-hard group of her own supporters that they shouldn’t write off those who plan to vote for her opponent.

After assuring her audience that she identified with their frustration with some of the most irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamaphobic supporters of Trump, she went on to talk about the rest of his supporters, the smart people who “don’t buy everything he says” but who “feel that the government has let them down.” Her speech made a moving appeal to her most faithful contributors to “understand and empathize” with opponents they would rather just dismiss. And if you listen to the empathy in her voice, and the way the audience gets silent and serious in response, it seems like she’s really getting through to them.

But that point is completely lost when the first part of her argument is ripped out of the rest of the speech as evidence that she hates Trump supporters. That speech has two meanings — one for the immediate audience and another that resists that meaning and turns it into its opposite.

You are honored for two academic books — “” (2013, 91±¬ÁÏ Today interview ) and “” (2001) plus more than two dozen articles and book chapters. What basic themes run through the work?

In addition to polysemy, I do a lot of work with metaphors — the mixing of metaphors and the unintended entailments of otherwise productive metaphors. I’ve also done some work on manufactured scientific controversy, in which special interests falsely claim that a settled issue is still the subject of debate in specialist scientific communities. Also known as , this tactic is used most often to delay policy action, and it’s hard for scientists to respond to it without seeming dismissive.

Most of my work tries to help scientists come up with ways of improving their persuasive discourse, such as appropriately responding to manufactroversies, rethinking the metaphors they use, and designing effective appeals across disciplinary boundaries.

What work do you have underway now, and what’s coming up?

I’ve been doing a lot of work lately on the ethos of science — that is, how the character of scientists is presented in the public sphere, whether in presidential speeches or in movies, or in policy deliberations about risk. A division between scientists and citizens seems to be entrenched in our thinking as a culture. But scientists don’t give up their citizenship duties when they get their degrees, so I’d like us all to think more about the responsibilities of the scientist as citizen.

I should note that I’m encouraged along these lines by the number of young scientists and science studies scholars who are participating in a new that I’ve helped to initiate and that I currently direct. It’s exciting to see so many highly engaged people, from different fields across the sciences and the humanities, coming together to talk about how knowledge about the world is produced and communicated, how it’s inflected by the contexts of its development and use, and what we should do about it.

Ceccarelli and other 2016 honorees will receive their awards during the association’s 102^nd annual convention, Nov. 10-13, in Philadelphia.

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For more information, contact Ceccarelli at cecc@uw.edu or the National Communication Association at inbox@natcom.org.

Q: What’s the concept behind this book? Why did you write it?

A: I kept seeing appeals to the American frontier spirit in the public arguments of scientists. That rhetoric was often inspiring, giving scientists an exciting image of their work across the metaphorical “boundaries” of knowledge. But it was also troubling in the expectations it set out about the manifest destiny of scientists to push forward at all costs, and in the way it reinforced their separation from a public that funds their endeavors.

Q: You write that the metaphor of the frontier “shapes our understanding of science in America, it narrows our perception of who is qualified to undertake scientific research.” Would you elaborate?

A: The heroes envisioned by scientists who use the “frontier of science” metaphor are always adventurous men, such as Lewis and Clark. So young women who might do well in a scientific career, but who but can’t imagine themselves as lonely explorers, are discouraged from considering themselves as future scientists.

Q: You quote a historian saying the frontier metaphor is capable of “sudden twists and shifts of meaning.” Would you give an example?

A: When (biologist) writes eloquently about the need for research on endangered species in the Brazilian rainforest, he frames it as a “bioprospecting” venture in which heroic individuals “hunt for new treasures.” This makes a fairly dull taxonomic study seem thrilling to American scientists. But Brazilians have responded to this rhetoric by closing their territorial borders to foreign biodiversity researchers for fear that American scientists are going to mine Brazil’s “biological wealth” and seize intellectual property rights to new pharmaceutical chemicals derived from the species being cataloged there.

Q: You write that the George W. Bush administration redefined the scientific frontier as “a deadly and dystopian space,” subverting the appeal of “an American spirit that always presses forward toward new biological futures.” How so? And is that change a lasting one?

A: By imagining the forward progress of scientists as dragging us onto a minefield or into an apocalyptic future, Bush created a vision that runs counter to the positive connotation of the scientific adventurer who expands America’s borders by entering a rich wilderness territory. But he only used these counter-metaphors in his first stem cell speech in 2001; they dropped out of his discourse after that, and thus had no lasting effect.

Q: A stated, “The future of science … might depend on a lasting withdrawal from the frontier metaphor.” It added, “Perhaps a fresh metaphor could unleash a new era in science, one where the victor is not a conqueror but a collaborator instead.” Do you agree? How is such a new era achieved?

A: I’ve thought about promoting other metaphors, but they all end up having their own drawbacks. Rather than police our use of language or encourage the substitution of one metaphor for another, I think we’re better off just being critically aware of the language we use and the implications that our rhetorical choices subtly carry along with them.

For example, once we come to see how the frontier of science metaphor asks us to think about the bodies of human subjects as territory, and biological research as a competition between nations for ownership of that territory, we can begin to ask ourselves if that’s how we really want to conceptualize what we’re studying and how we’re studying it.

Q: Briefly put, what were your conclusions and/or recommendations? How is the rhetorical trope of the frontier to be avoided, or differently used?

A: I doubt that we could consciously eliminate the metaphor from our vocabulary, even if we tried. But we could use it with more care, evoking aspects of the frontier myth that are more conducive to the ethic that we want to promote for science.

For example, rather than praise the rugged men who spend lonely days exploring the frontiers of science, we can talk about the collaborative efforts of our modern wagon train pioneers of science.

Rather than imagine the next Lewis and Clark of the laboratory, we can talk about the next Sacagawea of the laboratory, where the translator’s skill with languages, ability to negotiate, and capacity for work/life balance are just as highly valued as the masculine adventurer’s tendencies toward risk-taking and long periods of separation from others.