Prof. Stuart Murray

Rhetoric involves the study of language and culture. I have worked on various fields or "sites"--the philosophy of technology, politics and identity, communication and culture, the medical humanities--but these are tied together through the rhetorical study of language and culture, an investigation of the in-between spaces, of relationality. With my training in rhetorical theory and criticism, I draw on Critical Theory and poststructuralism, especially the work of Foucault and his interlocutors. I understand relationality as an ethical practice.

My work begins with Foucault's late definition of ethics as "the self's relation with itself," and I parse this relation as a rhetorical and cultural act--that is, I understand our self-relation as taking place in terms that are ever-changing and contestable. Who am I? How do I understand myself? What are the terms through which I will understand myself? Who controls these terms? Is my identity tied to these terms, or am I free (and to what extent?) to forge new relations to myself and to others? What would it mean to accept the terms that are given to me?

Here, we cannot avoid addressing the social and political implications of (self-)knowledge, for it is through these terms that we appear in a world of others. The ethical self is not, then, fully coincident with itself: it is not an autonomous subject who knows in any Cartesian sense. My work argues that such a subject has become obsolete. The rational, liberal humanist subject has been devastated not only by poststructuralist critiques, but moreover, is increasingly unseated by recent advances in science and technology (e.g., in post-genomic medicine, which displaces agency onto/into our genes). How--in what ways--might we develop an ethics that will be commensurate with emergent tecnhoscientific subjectivities? How might we understand ethics while respecting difference/s and heteronomy?

I publish widely in nursing, health sciences, and the medical humanities. From a critical theoretical perspective, my work seeks to challenge the dominant discourses on ethics and healthcare practice, with attention to the rhetorical and biopolitical dimensions of ethical subjectivity. I have recently published a collected volume edited with Dave Holmes, titled, Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare: Challenging the Principle of Autonomy in Bioethics (Ashgate Publishing, 2009). Current work includes SSHRC-funded research on the ethics of mental health care in secure treatment units, as well as a book-length project on the rhetorical dimensions of biopolitics and thanatopolitics, tentatively titled, The Living From the Dead.