Amy Koerber

• PhD Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication
• Associate Dean for Administration & Finance at Texas Tech University

In From Hysteria to Hormones, Amy Koerber examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert understandings of women's health. Shortly after Ernest Henry Starling coined the term "hormone" in 1905, hormones began to provide a chemical explanation for bodily...

Breast or Bottle? is the first scholarly examination of the shift in breastfeeding recommendations occurring over the last half century. Through a close analysis of scientific and medical controversies and a critical examination of the ways in which medical beliefs are communicated to the public, Amy Koerber exposes layers of shifting arguments and...

This article reports on a subset of data from nine focus groups. Participants included new and expectant mothers and their partners, friends, and relatives. The larger goal of the focus groups was to understand local infant-feeding practices of mothers in our region. The subset of data reported in this article pertains to breastfeeding failure. The...

This study reports the results of 12 recent interviews with nonnative-English-speaking (NNES) authors who have conducted research and written articles on health and medical subjects. Analyzing the interview transcripts through the theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s forms of capital, this study expands on previous research by offering a more prec...

This article examines the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, exposing the articulation of two incongruous discourses: arguments for increasingly strict regulations on women’s reproductive rights and antiregulatory attacks on Obamacare. Drawing on articulation theory and on a Foucauldian understanding of biocitizenship, we argue that women’s rep...

In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might seek to easily define and guard against it. This...

In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might seek to easily define and guard against it. This...

In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might seek to easily define and guard against it. This...

In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might seek to easily define and guard against it. This...

In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might seek to easily define and guard against it. This...

In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might seek to easily define and guard against it. This...

In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might seek to easily define and guard against it. This...

In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might seek to easily define and guard against it. This...

This study applies Harvey and Green’s (1993) model of quality to scholarly knowledge production. Although studies of quality in higher education have been commonplace for decades, there is a gap in understanding quality in terms of research production from stakeholders’ perspectives. This study begins to fill that gap through a qualitative intervie...

This study applies Harvey and Green’s (1993) model of quality to scholarly knowledge production. Although studies of quality in higher education have been commonplace for decades, there is a gap in understanding quality in terms of research production from the stakeholder’s perspective. This study begins to fill that gap through a qualitative inter...

This study applies Harvey and Green’s (1993) model of quality to scholarly knowledge production. Although studies of quality in higher education have been commonplace for decades, there is a gap in understanding quality in terms of research production from the stakeholder’s perspective. This study begins to fill that gap through a qualitative inter...

This study applies Harvey and Green’s (1993) model of quality to scholarly knowledge production. Although studies of quality in higher education have been commonplace for decades, there is a gap in understanding quality in terms of research production from stakeholders’ perspectives. This study begins to fill that gap through a qualitative intervie...

This constructionist framing analysis identified media frames in news coverage of four tenured professors, two men and two women, accused of sexual harassment at research-intensive universities: Jorge Dominguez (Harvard), Coleman Hutchison (University of Texas), Avital Ronell (New York University), and Teresa Buchanan (Louisiana State University)....

This article explores science communication in the context of COVID-19 through case study of a January 31, 2020, bioRxiv pre-print publication that led to conspiracy theories by suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the laboratory through genetic engineering. Analysis will consider the initial pre-print, the scientific critique that led it to be...

Predatory journals and publishers are a growing concern in the scholarly publishing arena. As one type of attempt to address this increasingly important issue, numerous individuals, associations, and companies have begun curating journal watchlists or journal safelists. This study uses a qualitative content analysis to explore the inclusion/exclusi...

As the need for more attention to leadership in the STEM professions has become apparent, it has also become clear that much remains unknown about this subject. To explore how communication scholars might contribute to these scholarly conversations, the interview results presented in this article reveal some of the ways in which effective communica...

This article reports the results of a qualitative media framing analysis of news coverage about #MeToo in four national contexts: the United States, Japan, Australia, and India. Comparing media coverage of a woman who became associated with #MeToo in each country reveals four media frames: brave silence breaker, stoic victim of an unjust system, re...

In this persuasion brief I suggest how rhetorical-historical insights into the scientific and medical discourses of female hormones are relevant to current organizational and institutional diversity initiatives, especially those that aim to increase the number of women in leadership positions. Many of the examples I cite in the essay make specific...

In this article, we contribute to the current literature on the difficulties that social scientists encounter with IRBs, but with a focus on the distinct challenges that health communication scholars face in dealing with IRBs at their own institutions and elsewhere. Although health communication researchers, like other communication researchers, ca...

Recent updates in qualitative data-analysis software have provided the qualitative researcher in professional communication with powerful tools to assist in the research process. In this tutorial, we provide a brief overview of what software choices are available and discuss features of NVivo, one prominent choice. We then use our experiences with...

Many students see instructor commentary as not constructive but prescriptive directions that must be followed so that their grade, not necessarily their writing, can be improved. Research offering heuristics for improving such commentary is available for guidance, but the methods employed to comment on writing still have not changed significantly,...

Qualitative sampling methods have been largely ignored in technical communication texts, making this concept difficult to teach in graduate courses on research methods. Using concepts from qualitative health research, this article provides a primer on qualitative methods as an initial effort to fill this gap in the technical communication literatur...

This article invokes Habermas's ideal speech situation to analyze the controversy surrounding a recent study of pain relief for women in labor. Using Habermas's concepts, the authors argue that distortion of scientific and medical information originated in the New England Journal of Medicine article that first reported the study's results. Thus, th...

Early scholarly inquiries into online health information focused primarily on questions of accuracy and credibility. In recent research, however, we are seeing an expansion in this initial focus, to include issues such as the usability, design, and ethics of online health information. This special issue contains five articles that contribute to sch...

This article examines the recent construction of human milk's immune-protective qualities as scientific fact, demonstrating that long-standing controversies about human milk's immune-protective effects have not been resolved by a particular scientific discovery. Rather, experts' consensus on how to respond to this uncertainty has been transformed,...

Drawing on interviews from a qualitative study, this article extends theorizing about rhetorical agency and resistance by analyzing how breastfeeding advocates and their clients resist medical regulatory rhetoric. The resistant acts that interviewees describe begin with a negotiation of discursive alternatives and subject positions framed by the gr...

Building on Herndl’s concept of critical practice, this article presents a case study of attempts to change the discourse practices surrounding breast-feeding in today’s medical environment. To complicate readers’ understanding of rhetorical agency, resistance, and discursive change, the author considers the rhetorical efforts of two high-profile p...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Minnesota, 2002. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-216).

This article argues that online communities can be seen as fostering meaningful political action, but that to understand such action requires rethinking the notion of political resistance in postmodern terms. Its claims are based on rhetorical analysis of the political activity occurring in an online community being fostered by a cluster of website...

This article extends current thinking about the rhetoric of technology by making a preliminary inquiry into what a feminist rhetoric of technology might look like. On the basis of feminist critiques of technology in various disciplines, the author suggests three ways in which feminist approaches to building a rhetoric of technology might differ fro...

In recent years, feminist scholars have called on professional communication researchers to incorporate insights from feminist theory and gender studies into their research. Although this call has been heeded to some extent, feminist thinking has not had nearly as much impact on professional communication research as it has had on research in other...