Research Interests
Rhetoric and writing studies; rhetorical criticism; rhetoric of science, medicine, and health; health humanities; science and technology studies.
Books:
Derkatch, Colleen. Why Wellness Sells: Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022.
Derkatch, Colleen. Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine. University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Articles and Chapters:
Derkatch, Colleen, and Julie Homchick Crowe. “Wellness Discourses.” The Routledge Handbook of RHM, edited by Lisa Melonçon, Cathryn Molloy, and J. Blake Scott, Routledge, under contract.
Derkatch, Colleen, and Julie Homchick Crowe. “Supplements as Symbols: Public Arguments Against Natural Health Product Regulation in Canada.” SSM – Qualitative Research in Health, vol. 4, n.p., 2023.
Derkatch, Colleen, Kristin Kondrlik, Hua Wang, and Beck Wise. “A Dialogue on Public Health Celebrities during COVID-19.” Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, vol. 6, no. 4.
Spoel, Philippa, and Colleen Derkatch. “How the Focus on Food Literacy in Ontario’s Food Charter Toolkits Detracts from Meaningful Food (In)Security Action.” Critical Dietetics, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 1-11, 2022.
Derkatch, Colleen, and Philippa Spoel. “Health Humanities as an Interdisciplinary Intervention: Rhetoric, Genre, and Health Citizenship.” The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is: Theories and Concepts for an Emerging Field, edited by Lisa Melonçon et al., Ohio State University Press, 2020, pp. 13-32. [Please feel free to contact me for a preprint version.]
Spoel, Philippa, and Colleen Derkatch. “Resilience and Self-Reliance in Canadian Food Charter Discourse.” POROI, vol. 15, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 1–28.
Derkatch, Colleen. “The Self-Generating Language of Wellness and Natural Health.” Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, vol. 1, no. 1–2, 2018, pp. 132–60. [Link to journal version.]
Derkatch, Colleen, and Philippa Spoel. “Public Health Promotion of ‘Local Food’: Constituting the Self-Governing Citizen-Consumer.” Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, vol. 21, no. 2, Mar. 2017, pp. 154–70.
Spoel, Philippa, and Colleen Derkatch. “Constituting Community through Food Charters: A Rhetorical-Genre Analysis.” Canadian Food Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, Apr. 2016, pp. 46–70.
Derkatch, Colleen. “‘Wellness’ as Incipient Illness: Dietary Supplement Discourse in a Biomedical Culture.” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, vol. 2, no. 2, 2012.
Derkatch, Colleen. “Demarcating Medicine’s Boundaries: Constituting and Categorizing in the Journals of the American Medical Association.” Technical Communication Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3, 2012, pp. 210-29.
Derkatch, Colleen. “Does Biomedicine Control for Rhetoric? Configuring Practitioner-Patient Interaction.” Rhetorical Questions in Health and Medicine. Eds. Joan Leach and Deborah Dysart-Gale. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010, pp. 146-70.
Derkatch, Colleen. “Method as Argument: Boundary Work in Evidence-Based Medicine.” Social Epistemology, vol. 23, no. 4, 2008, pp. 371-88.
Derkatch, Colleen, and Judy Z. Segal. “Realms of Rhetoric in Health and Medicine.” University of Toronto Medical Journal, vol. 82, no. 2, 2005, pp. 138-142.