Brenton Faber

Biography

Education: B.A. Political Science & English University of Waterloo 1992 M.A English Simon Fraser University, BC 1993 Ph.D English University of Utah 1998 Brenton Faber's work continues to examine discursive forms and actions associated with change. These are concerns of vision and adaptation, resistance and promotion, language and representation. He has studied activities in the financial services sector that compelled bankers to introduce mutual funds, stocks, and bonds to customers historically comfortable with savings and checking accounts; the introduction of new computer systems in contested organizational sites; and the promotion of nanoscience and technology as a new science within residual disciplinary frameworks. He has a clinical background as a practicing Paramedic and he volunteers for a rural ambulance squad and a Worcester-based free medical clinic. He is currently studying efforts to introduce quantitative activities (analytics, metrics) and process improvement forms within health care systems. In practical terms, contemporary health systems are forecasting immense demographic, medical, regulatory, and financial challenges. Professor Faber is particularly interested in health care analytics and the promises of new electronic data that are being assembled to represent and affect these challenges. This work is related to more theoretical questions about changing forms of intention, observing intention as a relatively new contested yet critical rhetoric in professional practice. The human dynamics that influence action, especially when professional and personal communication overlap, are perplexing and shifting aggregations of history, experience, power, and intention. Using a reconstituted positioning of human dynamics can we describe and simultaneously offer interventions for contemporary problems that appear resistant or antagonistic to prior rhetorical forms? In new (and old) problems with disease, climate, political discourse, and even new forms of the human (synthetic biology, nanotechnology), we see problems with and because of intention. A reforming of the rhetoric of intention invites resisting retroactive description/critique in favor of inventing methods for contemporary analysis for both epistemological and practical forms and actions.

Research Interest

Organizations and change; Health care systems and emergency medicine (prehospital); Epistemology; Analytics, metrics