Cristina Hanganu-Bresch

Blending rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, and lived experience, Living Menopause: Rhetorics, Tensions, and Futures explores the forces that have long framed menopause as a problem to solve, a decline to fear, and a market to exploit. Against this backdrop, the authors craft expansive, agency-affirming futures for living with/and/through menopause. Across six chapters, the authors trace how menopause circulates through medical research, workplace expectations, caregiving pressures, health applications, and popular media. They show how decades of medicalization, beauty culture, and binary thinking through various “menobooms” have constrained what menopause can mean—and what women are allowed to feel, choose, or imagine during this transition. Living Menopause invites scholars and practitioners to join a conversation already underway—one that challenges stigma, expands agency, and opens new futures for how we understand and experience menopause. Ultimately, this book encourages readers to continue to critique and think outside current menopause discourse en route to imagining, constructing, and demanding new stories around the menopause experience.

Writing and the sciences are intricately linked. Without writing, science would not exist -- and could not be funded, communicated, replicated, enhanced, or applied. Further, writing helps scientists (and students) understand the science, explain the results of research in a greater context, and develop new ideas. Working from this philosophy, this book primarily addresses undergraduate STEM majors and minors who want or need to improve their scientific writing skills. Grounded in the basics of rhetorical research and scientific writing practices and guided by the authors' experiences in the classroom, this book makes the case that writing is an essential component of science regardless of the stage of the scientific process, and that it is in fact a component of thinking about science itself. Featuring student-centered stories that place each topic in context and suggestions for practice, Hanganu-Bresch and Flaherty arm STEM students with the skills to enhance critical thinking and cultivate good writing habits.

Madness and Identity is a study of the linguistic negotiations at the heart of mental illness identification and patient diagnosis. Through an examination of individual psychiatric case records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cristina Hanganu-Bresch and Carol Berkenkotter show how the work of psychiatry was navigated by patients, families, doctors, the general public, and the legal system. The results of examining those involved and their interactions show that the psychiatrist's task became one of constant persuasion, producing arguments surrounding diagnosis and asylum confinement that attempted to reconcile shifting definitions of disease and to respond to sociocultural pressures. By studying patient cases, the emerging literature of confinement, and patient accounts viewed alongside institutional records, the authors trace the evolving rhetoric of psychiatric disease, its impact on the treatment of patients, its implications for our contemporary understanding of mental illness, and the identity of the psychiatric patient. Madness and Identity helps elucidate the larger rhetorical forces that contributed to the eventual decline of the asylum and highlights the struggle for the professionalization of psychiatry.