Jennifer Miller, a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric, seeks in her dissertation, Constructing the Black Box: Rhetoric, Technology, Policy, to explain technical systems with large actual or potential public implications, and, at the same time, to contribute to an understanding of the process through which policy is made in regard to them. Looking particularly at nuclear materials research and management, advanced medicine, and internet and web technology, Miller’s goal is to develop a set of concepts and questions about the ways in which technical artifacts, organizational, governmental, legal and political procedures, and discourse (formal and informal) function to raise particular public concerns, inspire public policy, and negotiate engagement with the specific sociopolitical context.