This study examines the role of risk visualizations in public health communication through an analysis of the MyWater-Flint Map and Flint Service Line Map , developed during the Flint water crisis. Applying a newly proposed social justice-oriented framework for risk visual design, the study evaluates these maps' effectiveness in communicating risk through dimensions of accessibility, accountability, ethics, productive usability, hybrid collectivity, open systems, and circulation. Findings highlight the importance of community participation in the production and dissemination of risk visualizations. This work sheds light on visual risk communication theory, professional practice, and technical communication instruction.

For those like me who were eagerly awaiting the publication of the second edition of Document Design: From Process to Product in Professional Communication , you will not be disappointed! The new edition exceeds my expectations for updated content and examples—while staying true to the original focus on design theory and principles in practice. It balances foundational aspects of visual rhetoric and usability, while providing new insights on digital technologies and production.

As noted in my previous editorial, this semester I've been adjusting to my new role as CDQ 's Editor-in-Chief. It has been rewarding working with Associate Editor Casey McArdle on our first issue together. In keeping with CDQ 's roots, Casey has been spearheading a comprehensive review of our in-house and public-facing documentation and streamlining our production processes. He also helped to shoulder the load associated with copyediting and producing the articles for this exciting issue. Later in this editorial, you'll hear more from Casey about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), pedagogical trust, bridges between academia and industry, and accessibility as a core design competency. Meanwhile, I've been settling into my new role as Associate Professor and Chair of Professional and Public Writing at the University of Rhode Island, reconnecting with old friends, and making trips to the shore where I've observed firsthand how the coastline has changed. On clear days, it is now possible to identify windmills on the horizon offshore.

At a moment when questions of equity and access are reshaping higher education and professional practice, technical and professional communication (TPC) is undergoing a "social justice turn" that centers ethics, equity, and care within its research and design practices. Designing for Social Justice: Community-Engaged Approaches in Technical and Professional Communication (edited by Jialei Jiang and Jason C. K. Tham, 2025) situates itself squarely within this movement, framing justice not as an optional theme but as a guiding principle for communication design. Jiang and Tham note that this collection "explore[s] the intersection of multimodal design and community engagement for social justice" (p. 3), and they introduce design advocacy to capture this orientation.

This experience report is addressed to communicators and data visualization researchers embarking on visualization projects that involve complex layers of data. It explains the creation of a data visualization project focused on the relationship between environmental factors and the COVID-19 pandemic, as researched in the literature, using content analysis and graphical representation of data. The report surrounds the concept of complexity (Cairo, 2012) along six communication elements described by Cavaller (2021). These elements are regrouped into three categories aiming at describing the decision-making processes: data (message/encoder), representation (form/context), and technology (channel/decoder). The report concludes with takeaways drawn from the author's experience of this data visualization project.

As Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) adopts User Experience (UX) methods, gaps persist in integrating UX-specific knowledge and practices into curricula. This article advocates for Conversation Design (CxD) as a crucial yet overlooked intersection of TPC and UX. CxD focuses on creating human-centered interactions for chatbots, voice assistants and other conversational interfaces, aligning well with TPC's rhetorical foundations in audience, purpose, and context. Integrating CxD into TPC curricula equips students for emerging industry demands and drives academic innovation. The article defines CxD, examines its relevance to TPC, offers instructional strategies, and presents a course-based case study as a curricular model.

In Feminist Technical Communication , Erin Clark both articulates and demonstrates an apparent feminist lens on the idea of slow crisis. She does this through a case study of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (DHD), the 2008 oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico in which the lack of clear answers on health impacts demonstrates a critical need for transparency. By tracing DHD through a feminist lens and under the realm of crisis management, Clark raises important questions about what we mean when we talk about efficiency, how we define crisis, and how critical these questions are to the reconsideration of technical communication as neutral or objective. Her primary argument focuses on her theoretical contribution of apparent feminism that works to acknowledge and bring to light the need for explicitly feminist practices. Through Feminist Technical Communication , Clark provides scholars, practitioners, and community members with a new approach to crisis and risk communication.

Kristin Pickering presents a valuable case study that focuses on how professional communicators and researchers make sense of the narratives and values between stakeholders who may be at odds with each other. This is especially important in land usage and environmental protection cases like the Grey Cliffs, where the practices of private citizens and government regulated organizations conflict. Through Pickering's well-structured case study, she shares a fascinating web of documentation practices, discourse expectations, and community narratives and how they affect the communication practices between organizations and communities.

This article considers how learning environment design can help TPC instructors using social media tools in their courses to better support students' practicing of digital literacy. Based on findings from an IRB-approved qualitative study of a social media pedagogy that makes use of the platform Slack, this article contributes insight into how learning environment design in social media learning communities can assist instructors hoping to support their students as they practice digital and social media literacy activities.

This case study demonstrates that user feedback on social media is valuable for informing iterative product design for marginalized populations. Using content analysis, I analyzed 136 posts and comments from the reddit platform of a product (SteadyMouse) designed for people with Parkinson's disease. The analysis revealed four patterns in user feedback that may be useful for product redesign: technological details, embodied experience of the product, usage scenarios, and prioritization. While User Centered Design is often cost-intensive, this study suggests designers can intentionally solicit useful information from users in social media forums by offering a dedicated space on websites where product designers related to these four key topic areas.

In this experience report, we describe our work incorporating user-entered design (UCD) into an interdisciplinary risk communication project. We focus on documenting the connections between process and outcomes, with the goal of demonstrating how UCD activities contributed to broader project development in measurable and tangible ways. We also provide recommendations for how the UCD process in interdisciplinary communication projects might be improved to overcome barriers to integration with other concurrent development processes.

Queer Techné: Bodies, Rhetoric and Desire in the History of Computing is a little book doing big things. Author Patricia Fancher presents a well-theorized recovery of both queer lives and the lives of women in the history of computing, something of great import to scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC). Fancher engages with queer theory, rhetoric, technical communication, historiography, archival studies, mathematics, computers, and engineering, resulting in a robust interdisciplinary work. At the center of the book is Alan Turing, a pioneering mathematician and gay man, but just as important are the people around him—his queer community and the women of the University of Manchester Computer Lab. Fancher uses queer and embodied techné to explore these communities and the writing that occurred within them. Through this, she presents a case that pushes back against popular narratives of Alan Turing as a solitary genius while also bringing forward the embodied human presence in computing and TPC.

This summer my professional life was marked by a number of exciting changes. In addition to assuming the role of editor in chief of CDQ and producing my first issue, I stepped down from a longterm role with the editorial team at Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. In a bittersweet note, I received (and gave) a multitude of well wishes to the amazing colleagues and collaborators I had at Colorado State University, including Sue Doe, Lisa Langstraat, Tobi Jacobi, Todd Ruecker, Sarah Cooper, Chad Hoffman, Tiffany Lipsey, Dinaida Egan, and Meg Suter, while I started a new role as Chair of the Department of Professional and Public Writing at the University of Rhode Island. It was a summer full of packing, unpacking, painting—and new processes, policies, and people. Throughout this moment, I spent a great deal of time reflecting on this change. For instance, I reflected on what CDQ means to the fields of communication and user experience design (CD/UX), technical and professional communication (TPC), and writing and rhetoric studies (WRS). Similarly, I reflected on my editorial philosophy and how I will shape and alter it now that I've been entrusted with serving as steward of CDQ. In this opening editorial, I remark on three themes that emerged while contemplating these changes: gratitude, care, and resilience.

Fitter, Happier: the Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric (2024) by Lois Peters Agnew argues that American cancer rhetoric from 1900-1990 was built around eugenic ideology. Agnew says, "The tension between the need to acknowledge the real danger of cancer and the American insistence upon confidence and control lies at the heart of cancer rhetoric" (p. 5). This tension is delineated through a disability studies approach to analyzing historical documents regarding cancer and cancer patients. Agnew asserts that though cancer and disability are not synonymous, "the lens of disability studies can be helpful in understanding how cancer rhetoric establishes a pattern of normative responses to the phenomenon of disease" (p. 6). Her analysis of these responses relies on the work of disability studies scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thompson (1997), Jay Dolmage (2017), Sharon Snyder and Jack Mitchell (2015), Susan Sontag (1977), and Susan Wendell (2013), whose work helps to illustrate the overlap of disability, cancer, and eugenic rhetoric.

Grassroots organizations often struggle to balance short-term fixes with long-term goals. Technical communicators supporting these under-resourced groups face a similar challenge: they must navigate between short-term tactical communication and the development of resilient, socially durable writing infrastructures. This article proposes user enfranchisement as a way for grassroots organizations to make quick, tactical interventions while simultaneously building the infrastructure to make strategic, long-term changes within their sphere of influence. Enfranchising tactics may be understood as rhetorical maneuvers that provide immediate, albeit provisional, access to participation within an institution or system, giving individuals agency and building a foundation for systemic change. Drawing on the case study of a street design manual created for urban areas, the article demonstrates how user enfranchisement: performs boundary/identity work, is intended to be conspicuous, expands the agential capacity of the user by building the social capital of the communicator, and serves as a bridge to longer-term infrastructural strategies with the capacity to create change in the world.

Mike Diana was the first artist in the United States convicted for artistic obscenity. His crime, for which he was convicted in 1994, was creating and distributing a zine titled Boiled Angel. Diana's work and subsequent conviction opens potential avenues of exploration into radical rhetorics, ethics, and perceptions of aberrance. This paper considers how endeavors labelled as aberrant or radical ask us to expand ethical boundaries, even leading us to question what we might consider "technical," "professional," or "valuable." This reconsideration of appropriateness and acceptability through extremism, which leads us through the often-fuzzy distinction between "morals" and "ethics," has the potential to open or amplify opportunities for underrepresented or marginalized authors, groups, and genres by forcing us to question why we draw the lines we draw with what we deem as socially, professionally, or morally acceptable.

In working to put into practice the user-centered philosophies that are presented within the pages of UX Writing: Designing User-Centered Content , this book is worth reading, dog-earing, marking up, and possibly rereading depending on interest in learning more about any facet of UX writing/experience. Why? The short answer is that the authors, Tham, Howard, and Verhulsdonck, thoughtfully and strategically kick the book off with a basic yet necessary definition and perspective of user experience (UX) writing that works to set the stage for what UX writing really is and what influence it has on technical communication.

In User Experience Research and Usability of Health Information Technology , Jessica Lynn Campbell offers a guide on the design and implementation of usability studies to improve the user experience with health information technology (HIT). HIT is a broad and growing category, which includes applications such as telemedicine, electronic health records, and electronic communications between healthcare providers and patients. Given the increasing use of HIT, this is a welcome resource for both researchers and practitioners interested in improving user experiences and, ultimately, positive health outcomes. Campbell brings strong professional experience in the healthcare field, having worked in digital marketing, technical communication, and content creation roles. She is also an accomplished teacher and researcher within the technical communication and user experience disciplines. She draws on this diverse background to create a text intended for use by both academic scholars and healthcare practitioners.

In this article, we answer questions about user experiences and responses to an augmented reality (AR) app that represents "real" animals that users can photograph with themselves or in their world. We analyze user interview data and photography to see if and how participants think about care for these animals after playing the app. We found that participants only discussed care in regard to information presented to them outside of the photography mechanic and often created distancing narratives when using the photography mechanic. In response to these findings, we present design takeaways for future AR designers and potential applicability of our method to the field. Additionally, we present the methods that we developed in this study for more general AR photography research.

Voice and Tone Strategy: Connecting with People through Content by John Caldwell is an addition to The Content Wrangler series from XML Press, published in 2020. The primary goal of Caldwell's work is to give readers a straightforward and applicable content development process—the Vertical Voice and Tone Framework (p.10)—and subsequent implementation. In the book, Caldwell centers an argument for authentic connections with users through a value-centered approach to design, drawing from his experience in the industry as a strategic developer in brand voices for well-known companies such as TurboTax and QuickBooks. Caldwell's four key concepts, framed as "building blocks," support the Vertical Voice and Tone Framework, which is a goal-driven, four-part framework that aims to create an improved or new voice and tone strategy for individuals or brands looking to revisit what it means to connect with an audience in their professional practice.

In their 2019 special issue for Technical Communication Quarterly , St. Amant and Graham enjoined science and technical communication researchers to consider more durable and portable methods. Such methods would be considered valid across disciplines and able to move knowledge to various stakeholders to demonstrate the contributions of scientific and technical communication research. We review a framework called knowledge translation to highlight its dependence on technical communication skills and then articulate it with science and technical communication epistemology to meet St. Amant and Graham's criteria for science and technical communication research to become more durable and portable.

Incorporating Quick Response (QR) codes in informal environmental education signage is widespread, but existing studies primarily focus on marketing rather than engagement in environmental issues. We present two case studies that provide new insights into the potential usefulness of QR codes as a mediating tool in informal environmental education and outreach. Overall, few participants attempted to read QR codes, but 73% of survey-takers had positive perceptions, decreasing with age. Education level did not impact perceptions. We surmise that interest in linked information influenced QR code use the most and suggest best practices for their incorporation into informal learning materials.

Interrogating Gendered Pathologies , edited by Erin A. Frost and Michelle F. Eble, presents an illuminating and diverse critical study of the complex gender discrimination that historically and presently affects doctor-patient relations and medical institutions. The text's goal is to acknowledge these issues, instigate discussion, and aid in finding potential pathways to policy change.

Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook's edited collection on User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice offers case studies in technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy that premise around user experience (UX) design as an integrated and proactive academic practice. TPC has a rich history of UX-specific scholarship that focuses on creating holistic user experiences and conceptions such as experience architecture (Potts, 2014), design as advocacy (Rose, 2016), and participatory design (Muller, 2009). These are consistently weaved throughout the book. Crane and Cook define UX as a "theory and practice that emphasizes the need for functional products that integrate the users' needs and experiences" (p. 10). This collection features exploratory studies that discuss key methods and approaches for facilitating UX-inspired curricular design by framing student-users as co-creators in the process.

Content analysis is a common research method in technical and professional communication (TPC) journals. But TPC content analyses often lack intercoder reliability (ICR) statistics, possibly due to the lack of resources required to train human coders. This proof-of-concept study explores the viability of replacing a second coder with a generative AI tool to calculate an ICR. Using three previously published studies, I calculated a Krippendorff's alpha for various data types and various codebooks using non-modified versions of five popular generative AI tools. While the tools could code TPC data, most tools did not produce alphas strong enough to replace human coders. While it is premature in most cases to replace human coders with generative AI tools to calculate an ICR, generative AI may prove to be useful to researchers as a means of codebook and unit of analysis refinement prior to human coding.

Tables, one of the most familiar forms of data visualization, are often put to use as a popular workaround for laying out pages in word processing programs. This article illustrates examples of friction, compatibility , and congruence between accepted guidance for designing effective tables in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) and widely adopted accessibility standards outlined by the largest international software vendors and non-profit organizations. While acknowledging critiques in critical disability studies and in TPC of standards-based approaches to accessibility, we argue that adherence to standards offers a starting point for redressing the inaccessibility created by some TPC pedagogical practices. Navigating these departures and overlaps is important because designing effective data visualizations, laying out pages, and creating accessible documents are core competencies in technical communication that instantiate deeply held professional and disciplinary commitments to creating usable and ethical documents.

Adopting text mining and semantic network analysis, this study compares employers' expectations for UX and UI design-related jobs. Analyzing a total of 3,269 job ads on LinkedIn, it discovered notable convergences in titles, seniority levels, industry types, and expectations for some competencies and deliverables, indicative of a significant interconnection between UX and UI design. Nonetheless, distinctions emerged in desired skills like research, development, coding, and background knowledge. Furthermore, specific tools and power skills received varying degrees of emphasis across the two domains. This nuanced understanding sheds light on the landscape of UX and UI design through the recruiters' lens.

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, designers produced a number of novel data visualizations about the effects of the virus. Though many of these visualizations conveyed the current risks or actionable steps for mitigating risk, a subset of visualizations focused narrowly on depictions of total mortality. This article analyzes a set of 45 data graphics that fall into this latter group in order to unpack their rhetorical goals and to identify common design patterns. The article demonstrates that while these "death counter graphics" were rapidly produced and spread, they may have had limited value for conveying the immense scale of death during the start of the pandemic.

Data Justice and the Right to the City consists of a set of case studies each exploring the intersections between urban governance and datafication. This volume, edited by Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox, and Callum McGregor, situates itself within the critical discourse on how data-driven technologies reshape urban spaces, impacting notions of citizenship, justice, and democracy. Each chapter draws inspiration from Henri Lefebvre's concept of the Right to the City (RTTC) theory by integrating data justice as a complementary framework to address the political ramifications of datafication in urban contexts. RTTC emphasizes participatory parity in urban space by developing spaces and data systems that enable all residents, regardless of their economic status, cultural background, or political power, to have an equal say in how their cities are designed and managed.

Have you ever wondered how design matters other than in content, structure, and insightful arrangement? Amy Gore's latest text, Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History, can provide some answers to this question. A single sentence from the concluding chapter in her book--- "When we read a book for its narrative content only, we miss half the story" (p.125)---speaks volumes about where lies the book's alternative rhetorical possibility. This alternative rhetoricity rests on paratextuality manifesting a text's layout, cover design, and spatial texture that make up the cornerstone of design-based communicative practices.

Citation injustices have a long history in scholarly writing and have led to underrepresentation and silenced voices of certain author groups (e.g., women and people of color). Concerns about whose voices are cited, heard, and privileged have encouraged interventions for Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) scholars to promote inclusivity and equity in scholarly writing and the design of communication. This article examines another aspect on citation injustices tied to publishing policies and style-guide conventions and conformity: practices for crediting shared first authors and equally contributing authors for their scholarship. We question current citation practices and examine style-guide rules and conventions of 115 TPC and communication-related journals to identify where citation injustices may occur in scenarios with shared first authors and equally contributing authors. We argue that TPC scholars should pushback against style-guide conformity in their publications and citations to embrace more equitable and socially just practices. We conclude by presenting five opportunities for TPC and communication scholars to change current citation practices in our field.

In Amplifying Voices in UX, a diverse group of scholars and practitioners come together to explore different aspects of user experience (UX) with a focus on inclusivity and social justice. This book moves beyond conventional UX frameworks, presenting innovative pedagogical strategies and methodologies that highlight empathy, accessibility, and the importance of considering marginalized voices in design. The authors delve into areas often overlooked in mainstream UX discourse, offering new perspectives on how to create more inclusive and impactful user experiences.

As the impacts of extreme heat escalate, digital maps have been designed to triangulate the location, timing, and level of risk. To understand how these tools align with a range of heat communication needs, rhetorical topology is used to analyze three mapping tools that make projections at global, national, and local levels. While these tools seek to make heat risk visible, the reliance on numerical definitions and comparative statistics gets prioritized over lived experiences of heat, which could limit their impact. I argue that broadening the focus to include causal relationships and narratives may communicate extreme heat risk more equitably.

Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) has been facing concerns of viability, in both its relationship with industry and its ability to build a relevant and valid body of research. TPC's disconnection with industry may be reflected in its relationship to UX as well, despite both fields' shared values. To better understand how TPC and User Experience (UX) are relating to each other, we conducted a citation analysis of a sample of SIGDOC papers and a sample of Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) practitioner articles focused on research methods. The SIGDOC papers tended to cite TPC sources, while the NN/g articles cited no TPC, but did cite disciplines such as HCI and Psychology. The findings point to opportunities for TPC to improve its connection and influence beyond academia.

This article explores visual euphemism in the realm of technical and professional communication (TPC) visuals. I argue that euphemism is a mostly unexplored topic in TPC scholarship and deserving of further inquiry. Due to its equal capacity to inform or deceive, visual euphemism has particular value for scholars concerned with the efficacy and ethicality of TPC visuals. To support this argument, I identify the unique features of visual euphemism, as well as outline a basic critical framework for its identification and analysis. I conclude by briefly examining prominent TPC visuals and advocating for further research of visual euphemism.

Engineering Words: Communicating Clearly in the Workplace by Sharon Burton and Bonni Graham Gonzalez emphasizes that effective communication is essential for engineers to succeed in their careers. The book argues that technical brilliance alone is insufficient, and engineers must also convey their ideas clearly and persuasively to various audiences in business environments. It provides practical guidelines and techniques for various forms of communication that engineers commonly use. These include writing clear business documents, creating compelling presentations, and understanding the business context in which engineering communication occurs. Additionally, the authors integrate concepts of human cognition to explain how people process information and how this understanding can be applied to improve communication. They argue that mastering communication can significantly enhance an engineer's career prospects and influence.

This article presents a case study of instructor and student perceptions of collaborative learning in multiple sections of an upper-level, online business writing course. Our goals are to understand current attitudes toward collaboration among business writing instructors and students and to examine points of dissonance regarding attitudes, frameworks, and definitions of collaborative writing. Further, we aim to understand how collaboration is valued, how it is framed and valued in terms of either process or product, and various associations between collaboration and community. Our results revealed collaboration to be a shared interest by business writing instructors and students alike but at the same time it is received differently in online versus in-person interactions. In this article, we identify these dissonances and discuss what they mean for collaborative learning.

The first time I recall encountering artificial intelligence was in the early 2000s while working in a recording studio. After singing a take of a song, I watched as an engineer opened a plug-in called Auto-tune and then listened as he worked on tuning my vocals. I recall him explaining to me that the vocal had to be pretty close to the note I was trying to sing, otherwise the tuned version would sound fake. He demonstrated by tuning my vocal too sharp and then too flat. The sound of the stressed vocal created a distorted tremolo effect, with maybe even a bit of delay. It no longer sounded like me. It sounded like a robot who was impersonating me. I bristled. "No, not like that," I said uncomfortably laughing. "That doesn't sound like me."

This paper introduces a method, Exhibit Based Research (EBR), in which we deploy standalone gallery exhibits as a central component of our research program. We adopt this method to distill complex visual research problems and problematize technological affordances. In the two case studies outlined in this paper, we deploy this method to articulate the role played by algorithms in processes of inspiration, design, and curation. EBR includes a practice-based component, the co-design of an exhibit, a participant engagement component, and interactive, multimodal data collection. The EBR approach creates a dynamic engagement between the public, academia, and creatives, increasing the relevancy of findings across audiences and advancing public understandings. This methodological paper aims to encourage other researchers in the community to consider EBR as an inclusive, immediate, and effective means of revealing opaque concepts and mechanisms via exhibition design.

In this experience report, we share our strategies for scaffolding and supporting instruction in empathy in a first-year Engineering Design studio course. Empathy is a key component of UX and design, but as Tham argued, it is a difficult skill that requires practice and critical application. Community engagement scholars have long argued that community-engaged projects help foster that empathy. Our teaching case will show how emphasizing content knowledge about user groups and creating an empathetic classroom environment impacts student designers' ability to empathize in the design process.

This research used a participant observer method to describe and analyze the digital literacy practices of one grassroots community group that organized around the issue of municipal city council redistricting. The group proposed and advocated for city council district lines that reflected the minority-majority makeup of the city's population. The group effectively crafted different genres, including informational Google Docs, maps, form letters, petitions, social media graphics, press releases, and public speeches to advocate for their position. This research argues for the study of activists' digital literacy practices and the role of digital technology in activist efforts.

Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication , edited by Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge, is a timely collection of essays addressing the ways that humans conceptualize and interact with their environment when attempting to communicate the dangers of crises---such as climate change and COVID-19. Explicitly responding to the work of Jeffrey Grabill and Michelle Simmons (e.g., in their seminal 1998 essay, "Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication"), this collection offers a broad variety of lenses for thinking about humans' relationships to their surroundings, especially while communicating environmental risk. The 14 chapters in this volume apply methodologies including rhetorical and discourse analysis, ethnography, integrated risk communication, and antiracist framing to topics ranging from university communications about the pandemic to groundwater pollution to upcycled art installations, in the process complicating traditional understandings of risk as something that exists "'out there,' independent of our minds and cultures, waiting to be measured" (Slovic, 1999, p. 690). Considered broadly, the collection offers human bodies and ecological impact as more effective barometers for risk than abstract calculations; individual chapters offer heuristics grounded in human experience or environmental considerations, along with discussion questions and assignments for use in classroom settings. The diversity of topics and methodologies represented ensure that the collection offers something of interest to most scholars and practitioners of risk communication, environmental communication, or embodiment in technical communication.

Design systems provide a useful approach for TPC instructors looking to teach students to design and build accessible digital products. This experience report presents a teaching unit on using design systems to introduce accessibility to students. Using the Bootstrap design system, accessibility is threaded throughout the design process and provides a grounded approach for integrating accessible design into the UX classroom. Readers will come away with an outline of the teaching unit, accompanying materials for teaching that unit, and student examples user-tested for accessibility. The author concludes on a reflection on teaching the unit and offers advice for readers looking to implement a similar unit in their own courses.

The FemTech industry, a booming segment of the health technology market, trades in feminist empowerment largely by data tracking and collection. As issues of privacy and surveillance related to users' data collection have grown, scholars in health, design, and communication have explored how health-related technologies complicate the liberatory potential of self-tracking and self-monitoring health, signaling digitally collected, intimate data as concerning and gesturing toward critical digital literacy as a requirement for technology users. By analyzing user comments about pelvic floor training devices, this article reframes intimate data to understand the ways that people create and use it to learn about themselves. This move demonstrates a new kind of literacy: biodigital literacy, which I offer as a concept and framework that highlights the unique competencies of embodied digital life.

This article examines the technological literacies reflected by participants in the transnational "White Paper Movement"/"A4 Revolution" in the Chinese diaspora, against the Chinese government's stringent "dynamic zero-COVID" policy. The analysis reveals how protestors engaged with the technological literacy framework of Hovde and Renguette (2017): functional and conceptual; critical and evaluative, in layered and interconnected ways. But these literacy skills are also extended tactically where they must not only know how to use technologies well, but also understand how a technology works enough in order to use it subversively. Thus, this article proposes a tactical technological literacy to contribute to the theorization of a "post-digital" life-especially in transnational activism contexts-where not only do people have to consider how (not) to use technologies (in the broadest sense) in both online and offline spaces but also how technologies may impose constraints and oppression on their daily life. The article ends with some pedagogical implications on how to foster a tactical technological literacy in TPC classrooms.

Update culture and the afterlife of digital writing represents an ambitious project in which John R. Gallagher explores two primary claims. First, he introduces the idea of "interactive and participatory internet (IPI) templates" (p. 8) as structures that allow for constant rewriting and rereading of digital content. He argues that these templates foster communication by providing a model that encourages users to compose to each other based on certain characteristics, and arguably constraints, unique to digital environments. Second, he explores the idea that digital writers have developed new strategies that impact how they (re)compose, as well as interact, with participatory audiences who are closer to writers than ever before. In order to analyze these claims, Gallagher performs a series of interviews with forty writers who are top performing Redditors, Amazon reviewers, and online journalists/bloggers. Through these interviews, Gallagher connects common writing strategies that are employed by the writers as they work within the framework of specific templates and interact with their different audiences.

Over the course of my friendship with Dr. Halcyon Lawrence, I would often spend weekday evenings completing a mundane chore like washing dishes or feeding the cat. I would then hear my phone's alert for an incoming text message: "I need company. Are you working tonight?" Within 30 minutes or so Halcyon and I were on Zoom, cameras off, and nothing displayed on screen but our login names. Other times I'd receive a text like "I need your advice. Do you have time?" and we convened over the phone. When we talked, answers to our mutual question "How was your day?" prompted stories, and those stories led to musings and reflections. When I became befuddled when an assignment would flop or disappointed by a flat discussion, Halcyon gently queried, "So what were you trying to do?" or "Why do you think that activity didn't go well?" Her responses always reoriented me. When venting was no longer productive, we teased apart the problem, speculating what skill or knowledge students needed but had not sufficiently developed. These conversations often gave me enthusiasm for a new pedagogical approach or revealed insights about the gaps in our teaching and our students' learning. In the months since Halcyon's passing, I miss most acutely these nightly conversations about what was happening in our classrooms. My goal in this essay is to underscore the fact that part of Halcyon's legacy as a social justice-oriented technical communication scholar is her ethos as a teacher and collaborator who cared capaciously about student learning and the development of teaching practices and assignments.

Digital life for older women seeking employment includes several hurdles. Their stories and experiences illuminate the range of pressures they're experiencing (e.g., societal, economic) and the negative emotions that accompany those. Their challenges illustrate why some of their digital tools are hard to work with and how they can have a negative impact on them. Two women also named internal dialogues that may also influence their experience with digital tools and may prevent them from having the confidence or desire to develop their digital literacies further.

This article is the introduction to the Communication Design Quarterly special issue on digital life. It explains the exigency for this issue and details how digital literacies in technical and professional communication are complicated by emerging technologies. It also demonstrates the potential for moving toward a model of digital life as a flexible way of foregrounding and talking about the work we are all already doing to understand and improve our post-human lives.

In the Fall of 2023, my professor, a fellow graduate student, and I dedicated months of intensive work to a project that held great significance for us because of its relevance to human values and the broader conversation on social justice. We applied to a conference and were eager to disseminate our methodology and findings. This conference promised to be a landmark experience for me; it was going to be my first time attending this conference and an opportunity to present our work to a like-minded audience. We were accepted and the schedule listed our presentation last on the panel. I anticipated our presentation with a mix of excitement and responsibility.