Celeste M. Condit, PhD

Celeste Condit serves the department and the university as a Distinguished Research Professor. She is currently expanding her understandng of the possibilities for global politics.  She is seeking to integrate approaches to the relationship of biological and symbolic facets of human being in producing human experience and human social structures. She has recently studied public understanding of genetics and public communication about genetics, with emphasis in gene-environment interaction and "race." She uses the "Reacting to the Past" role-playing approach in teaching Communication in Government and Communication and Social Movements. She also teaches an undergraduate course in "Rhetoric and Society". At the graduate level recent courses include pathos, rhetoric of economics, and Burke.  

Transilience: The Transilience Project website includes a manuscript describing an orientation to matter, which argues that matter arranged in fundamentally different ways--physical, biological, and symbolic--evinces fundamentally different capacities and properties. This model materialist perspective is then applied to questions of human society.