The Rutland Institute for Ethics Welcomes Its Newest Rutland Fellow

Dr. Steven Katz

Steven B. Katz has been named a Fellow of the Rutland Institute of Ethics (Spring 2014). He is the first and only Fellow from the Department of English. He joined Clemson University to assume the R. Roy and Marnie Pearce Professor of Communication, and Professor of English, in 2006, after a twenty-year career in the English Department at North Carolina State University, where he worked his way through the ranks to become a Full Professor in 2004.

Dr. Katz received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Communication and Rhetoric (1988), an interdisciplinary program where he studied technical communication, literature, writing, and the relationship of poetry and science—all through the lens of rhetoric (a field that has its Western roots in Plato and Aristotle, and that throughout its long history has involved questions about language, ethics and truth). Dr. Katz has always had an interest in science and technology, and the ethical implications and uses of them and throughout his childhood wanted to be an astronaut; however, a ‘little explosion’ in his home laboratory, and poor grades in math, ended those dreams. But Dr. Katz found his way back to science and engineering through the study of the history of science as well as the humanities. The focus of Dr. Katz’s wide-ranging interests is the nature and uses of language in a variety of contexts, situations, and disciplines (as well as language and ethics in religion, in particular, ancient Hebrew rhetorical traditions, an area in which he also has worked and published). The theme that runs through all this research is the importance of ethics in human communication, and most recently, human machine relations.

His 1992 College English article on ‘The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust” won the 1993 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Award for Excellence for best article of the year, has been documented as one of the most widely cited articles in technical communication, and is credited in print with the start of the serious study of ethics in the field of business and technical communication; the essay has been republished in several collections, most recently in Central Works in Technical Communication (Oxford, 2004). Dr. Katz has subsequently published many articles and chapters on ethics in technical and scientific communication, the particular study of which he brings to the Rutland Institute for Ethics.

Published articles that Dr. Katz has authored or co-authored treat subjects such as the ethics of scientific authorship; the problem of capturing, defining, measuring, and teaching scientific writing ethics in bioscience labs at Clemson (the result of a NSF-CCLI funded study at Clemson with Professor Lesly Temesvari [Biological Sciences], in which Dr. Katz was a Co-PI); ethical frames of technical relations in the digital workplace; the hidden ideology of email; biotechnical and global miscommunication with general audiences; rhetorical and risk communication models in genetic counseling; language and persuasion in biotechnology communication with the public (“How to Not Say What You’re NotGoing to Not Say and Not Say It”); the rhetoric of risk communication in the low-level radioactive waste siting controversy in North Carolina; the role of metaphor in the debate on physician-assisted suicide; charity and image in scientific societies; understanding, teaching, and learning writing as a moral act; and the reality of words and their aftermath. (Several of these articles are co-authored with graduate students.)

Dr. Katz is the author of several books, including Nana (a chapbook of poetry); The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric; and (with Ann Penrose) of the 3^rd edition of Writing in the Sciences: and Exploring Conventions of Scientific Discourse. Several other books are in progress. He continues to write and publish poetry as well—much of which attempts to capture contemporary philosophical, felt, and moral experience of living in a posthuman world—an awareness of the ethical ambiguity, ambivalence, tension, and potential loss of consciousness/conscience in the ethics of scientific, technological, and digital communication.

Dr. Katz has been an Invited Speaker, delivering lectures and/or conducting workshops at many national and international venues, including local middle schools and high schools; Clemson University, where with Lesly Temesvari he has conducted all-day workshops on teaching scientific communication; Duke University; North Carolina State University; UNC-Pembroke; Metropolitan State University; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Michigan Technological Institute; Texas Technological University; the Society for the Social Study of Science: the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the Symposium on Space Research and Exploration; IEEE International Professional Communication Conference; the Canadian Crop Protection Institute; Högskolan Trollhättan-Uddevalla (Sweden); University of Värnersborg (Sweden); Chalmers University of Technology (Göteborg, Sweden); the University of Göteborg (Sweden); and the International Conference for Global Conversations on Language and Literacy, sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Writing Project, the U.S. Department of Defense Dependents Schools, and the National Association for the Teaching of English-UK, at the University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Most recently, Dr. Katz was invited to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Hamburg-Plön to deliver a lecture, “Communicating Science with the Public: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Ethical Tensions,” as well as conduct a workshop with international doctoral and post-doc students from the Institute and surrounding universities. In Fall 2013, Dr. Katz was on leave as a visiting distinguished professor at North Carolina State University, where he worked formally and informally with a number of doctoral students-NSF IGERT Fellows and some faculty members in the Genetic Engineering and Society Institute, on issues of language and ethics in communicating biogenetics with the public; some of that collaborative work is to be published on Harvard University’s “STSNext20″, which is peer reviewed by the Fellows of the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Dr. Katz is not only an academic, but also has participated in extension services involving considerations of language and ethics in the Clemson community and beyond. He has given live radio interviews, including Canadian Public Radio during that country’s debate on labeling genetically modified foods. And he has acted as a consultant for Elster Solutions (Raleigh, NC), Crop Life International (Brussels, Belgium), Crop Life Canada, the pharmaceutical communication industry (McCulley-Cuppan LLC), the Center for the Study of Science, Technology, and Management (North Carolina State University), and the Center for Urban and Environmental Studies (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).

In all his work, Dr. Katz argues for in the centrality of language and ethics, even in science as a social enterprise—not only in the formulation of hypotheses, and the development of methods, experimentation, facts, but also in the sharing and collaboration that are inherent in modern science; the dissemination of scientific knowledge for verification, validation, consensus, necessary for scientific progress; and especially in communication between scientists/engineers and the public, and an enormous political, economic, social, and ethical concern, as it is fundamental in a democracy, especially where health  care, biotechnology, and genetic engineering are concerned. His work with Clemson faculty and students was the subject of a Clemson University Feature Article, which can be accessed at:

(http://features.clemson.edu/creative-services/homepage/2011/expressing-science-through-words/).