ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses consent as a rhetorical interaction and then describes the research project and aims to study this process as it is understood and experienced by Latino immigrants. It founds extensions to the principlist notion of autonomy provided by feminist ethics useful in examining author's research data since they allow fuller consideration of the audience's social context. The chapter considers informed consent a process of persuasion, thus a rhetorical interaction. It explores how Latino immigrants with little to no English-language skills negotiate an informed consent conference for enrollment into a clinical trial, and conductes a research project made up of few separate studies: the Negotiating Informed Consent (NIC) Project. The project explored Latinos' understanding of the informed consent conference considered on a broad level, including oral, textual, and visual components. The chapter discusses how understanding autonomy through a feminist framework provides a way to consider the social context.
