This fall, Walsh took a position at UNR to focus on research and teaching graduate students. A self described "desert rat at heart," Walsh is loving her new location, even though her research may lead her back to her former home.
Tell me about your book.
I got interested in it because I'm a rhetoric of science specialist. I look at how scientists speak to the public, so the book looks at fake science news stories written by Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Dan De Quille and others in the late 19th century. There were these two cultures, scientists and literature people, that didn't really talk to each other. Scientists started to make enough technology to make lives better, so people started to turn to them instead of preachers and philosophers. So, these writers are saying, 'I managed to fool you, I'm smarter because I got you to admit your beliefs were wrong.' Society was saying, 'Let's listen to what science has to say about everything.' And these writers were saying, 'Look you guys can't tell the difference between a fake (science article) and a real one. You should probably be listening to us, not them.'
The last chapter of the book is about the reverse case--a fake literary article written by a scientist in the 1990s. The article was published in Social Text and purported to explain gender and how we come to gender through quantum mechanics. At the time, in the 1990s, there was an argument between scientists and social scientists. Social Text was a cultural studies journal taking the hard line that nature was just a social construct because we only understand it through our own social and political interactions. Alan Sokal, a particle physicist at NYU, wrote this fake literary article and sent it to the non-peer-reviewed Social Text. They didn't send itout to review by physicists or anythin; it was just an editorial collective. There are really elementary math mistakes in it and things like that. There was something like a 17-page article with 20 pages of footnotes. They thought that was something fishy, so they e-mailed Sokal and asked for edits, but he said, "No." So, they published it as it was. [Sokal] wrote a piece for Lingua Franca that was published at the same time revealing the hoax. Sokal was saying, "Haha, these editors were so desperate to have their beliefs reinforced, they swallowed my article hook, line, and sinker." He was really saying, "People on the Left betrayed us [Marxists], they got into chicanery instead of struggling for social change." The analogy that gets used all the time in analyzing the hoax is the Emperor's New Clothes. The editors basically accepted the article even though they didn't understand the science in it because they were so desperate to have a practicing scientist in their political camp.
Hoaxes are a guerilla tactic. The power structure was such that [Sokal] felt he couldn't get his message out by normal channels. But, he was forcing or coercing people to confront their assumptions by playing on the fact that they would give authority to these statements without question. All of the hoaxers had different reasons for doing what they did, but they were all in a disadvantaged position where they felt they needed to use a guerilla tactic to get heard. Poe was one of the first to try to make a living solely as a writer in the United States, so he had his livelihood at risk because the government and the public were giving all this money to scientists and not to artists. Dan De Quille was one of the West's first technical writers; he reported mining news. He wrote his hoaxes to get back at the United States government for bringing Nevada into the Union for her silver but not supporting her miners via a silver standard.
What are you working on now?
One of my projects has to do with the reintroduction of the Mexican Gray Wolf to New Mexico and Arizona. Scientists can't explain to ranchers why [the wolves] need to be there. And the wolves are getting killed, 45% of them illegally. I'm creating a model to show people the failure of communication here. I'm trying to show the ranchers how the administration is ranking their values and reasons, so better communication can take place. I'm hoping to hire a graduate student to go back to New Mexico and collect more data about how the ranchers are presenting their own values to their public.
How do you like Reno?
UNR is a really good program for rhetorical studies. Where I came from, there were not really any other rhetoricians, but Shane Borrowman here does similar things to what I do with global rhetorics, with Islamic rhetoric, and Mary Webb and Jane Detweiler share common interests, too. Mark Waldo does Writing Across the Curriculum, which is all I taught at New Mexico Tech; I used his book. This semester, I'm brand new here; I'm just trying to get used to how UNR does things. I really enjoy my classes. My students are really engaged and bright, they like to discuss the philosophical underpinnings of what I'm asking them to do. It's really great working in an environment where students are always asking why we're doing something.
What do you hope to bring to the staff here?
I bring expertise in scientific and professional communication, which is going to be a major career field for UNR's English graduates in the next five years. I also bring an interdisciplinary background in rhetoric, linguistics, and literature that enables me to offer courses that will appeal to students from all of the majors here in the department.