[Past Project] Rhetoric of Science

This new undergraduate seminar about the Rhetoric of Science seeks to use rhetoric both ancient and modern to empower young scientists to think creatively about their own research. The course proposal has been submitted by Professor Lisa Dolling and has recently been approved. The course will be highly recommended to all RCSS scholars with the goal of becoming part of the new Science and Society major at Columbia.

Even before the pandemic, science had become an increasingly contentious topic in political debates, with opinions often varying from total distrust in science, or uncritical belief in science as immutable fact. This raises the issue of public trust in science, and what science means to the public. Additionally, issues in current science research, like gene editing, promise to create a myriad of ethical issues. Finally, in fields like the social sciences, our methods themselves are under scrutiny, as issues like the replication crisis in psychology, with simultaneous advances in AI-driven statistics, present many methodological crossroads to newcomers to the field. Questions like these leave young scientists wondering: what tools can we use to not only better communicate science, but understand our own work? 


We believe that the RCSS is the perfect resource to explore this question. While courses like philosophy or history of science offer invaluable insight into science as an intellectual discipline, often, these courses attract an audience of humanities scholars seeking to understand science. Rhetoric of Science is an underutilized field that, because of its emphasis on practice, may be especially valuable to scientific researchers themselves. This new undergraduate seminar about the Rhetoric of Science seeks to use rhetoric both ancient and modern to empower young scientists to think creatively about their own research. The course proposal has been submitted by Professor Lisa Dolling and has recently been approved. The course will be highly recommended to all RCSS scholars with the goal of becoming part of the new Science and Society major at Columbia.